Recently I’ve come across the same politically tendentious topic – colonization – raised in two different and interesting ways, and both involved pushing back against the dominant, mostly leftist narrative on the subject.
Everyone knows that narrative: Colonizers are bad. They’re powerful. They’re aggressive. They’re outsiders and bullies who come into someone else’s land and wreak havoc, victimizing the locals and taking over, and then exploiting the natives and their resources for their own benefit.
Of course there is a lot of truth in that narrative. Much of history is taken up by stories of more powerful and technologically advanced peoples – sometimes just more violent ones – expanding into foreign territories and colonizing them. Some empires are less brutal than others, and some cultural exchanges are more one-sided than others, but there seems to be a central template for the practice.
Today there is a general sympathy for the colonized and hostility toward colonizers, in ways that often transcend politics and cross political lines. Especially in a culture with a Judeo-Christian DNA and heritage – even though that heritage has been receding for the last century or more – our Ur-texts demonstrate empathy for and see virtue in the downtrodden. (Blessed are the meek; the last shall be first, and the first shall be last, etc.) We tend to naturally sympathize with the little guy, and the underdog. (We are on Team David, vs Team Goliath.)
But that has not always been the case. Warrior cultures by definition valorized combat and conquest. Self-confident cultures often saw aggressive expansion as bringing the benefits of their superior culture to their neighbors; that was always self-serving and arrogant, and in some cases it was complete BS. (I’m looking at you, jihadist Islam.)
But not always. The Greeks and the Romans brought many benefits to the peoples controlled by their empires, as did the British, and some of the other European powers. Along with the coercion and subjugation, colonies got more functional political systems, and more advanced scientific and medical innovations. Trade often benefited both sides, even if not equally so.
But while colonization was often seen as a complicated or nuanced process, today it has been totally subsumed in leftist politics, and thus turned into a Manichaean, caricatured moral soap opera of black-and-white categories. Marxist economics casts the rich as evil oppressors and the poor as the noble oppressed. Leftist identity politics sees gender and race through a lense of good and evil: females are enlightened and cooperative, males are toxic and competitive; “people of color” are innocent victims, whites are guilty victimizers.
So it follows that colonizers are always and everywhere the rich, white, male exploiters (i.e. the worst bad guys) and the indigenous/colonized are the poor, non-white, female-coded exploited (i.e. the best good guys).
Of course that conception is so over-simplified as to be ridiculous to all but the wokest of the lefty wokesters, and I know I’m not telling you anything that you didn’t already know. But an article in American Greatness – I highly recommend that site – by Spyridon (Don) Andrews called, “Indigenous Nonsense: History Doesn’t Care Who Got Here First” really lays the case out perfectly.
A month ago I wrote about “clock setting,” which is the idea that you can win an argument if you are able to decide where to start the story. In the context of colonizing, clock setting arises when one side claims to have “gotten here first,” which Andrews rightly takes apart.
Mexicans partial to arguments of groups like La Raza say that much of the southwestern US is rightly Mexican, because they were here first, before American colonizers pushed them out by winning the Mexican-American War in 1848. But Spaniards would say that they were in modern Mexico first, before Mexicans defeated them in the Mexican War of Independence in 1821. But Aztecs would say that before the Spanish showed up around 1500, they’d run the place for two centuries.
And many small tribes would say that THEY were indigenous to that area before the Aztecs showed up around 1300 and started cutting thousands of beating hearts out of chests every other Tuesday.
So everybody is a clock setter. Or a sun-dial setter, or whatever.
Andrews points out that there is nothing necessarily morally elevated about being an indigenous group, or morally debased about being a colonist, and that “I was here first” might carry weight on a playground, but not in a serious, historical or political argument. (I’m paraphrasing him.)
Andrews criticizes the kind of leftist multiculturalism that claims no culture is superior to another, while at the same time assigning an inherent moral superiority to “indigenous” cultures. Which, you may notice, is self-contradictory, and stupid.
He cites the examples of various African countries. Inconveniently for a modern lefty, all of those countries’ histories were characterized by one tribe after another colonizing the place, and then being colonized in turn, long before the first European whitey ever showed up.
Though he doesn’t put it this way, would you rather live in Rhodesia under the colonizing Brits, or newly re-christened Zimbabwe under incompetent, indigenous thug Mugabe? Would you rather live in Uganda under the colonizing Brits, or when it was run by indigenous monster (and cannibal!) Idi Amin?
Annndddd…AOC and the Squad got both answers wrong.
Andrews ends his article eloquently: “In the end, legitimacy is not inherited. It is earned. It does not arise from ancestry, mythology, chronology, or blood. It arises from competence, justice, liberty, opportunity, and the rule of law. The question is not who was here first. The question has always been, and will always be, who governs well.”
Coincidentally, not long before I came across Andrews’ article, I heard The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh discussing the murder of Englishman Henry Nowak by Sikh British citizen Vickrum Digwa, and Walsh’s word choices startled me.
He referred to Nowak as “an indigenous Briton” and Digwa as a “colonizing foreigner.”
It’s a provocative reversal of our usual expectations, of course, and at first blush it came across as a sarcastic jibe. But upon reflection, I think Walsh is right to point out that leftist-driven anti-white racism has completely inverted power politics in today’s England, and it got Henry Nowak killed.
In the culturally dominant (lefty) narrative, Digwa would be the put-upon victim. A non-white minority in a white-majority nation, he practices a foreign, minority religion in a nominally Christian nation.
If his encounter with Nowak had been a racial parable told in a leftist cocktail party or faculty lounge instead of a real-life story, we’d expect it to go about like a black man’s confrontation with a white man in the South when it was run by Democrats and their Jim Crow laws. A black guy has a confrontation with a white guy and stabs him to death. The (white) police are called and yada, yada, yada…the black guy ends up in the electric chair or lynched.
But in real life, the story unfolded in exactly the opposite way. Digwa is actually a colonizer – a foreigner with cultural power that gives him the arrogant confidence to impose his will on the indigenous population. The indigenous Britons cannot carry weapons in public, but Sikhs have special privileges to carry ceremonial knives, because the native justice system submissively gives their foreign religion special accommodations.
Digwa is the aggressor, and he stabs Nowak several times, including in the back of his legs when he tries to flee for his life. Far from being worried about the police, the privileged Digwa knows that they will take his side against the indigenous nobody he has just stabbed. So he calls them and lies that Nowak was racist toward him, and attacked him. The cops show up, and just like good ol’ boy southern sheriffs, they accept his version, despite its variance from the facts right in front of them.
Digwa is unharmed, while Henry is curled up on the ground, bleeding and gasping for breath. So the cops ask Digwa if he’s been hurt, and then treat the dying Henry like a criminal, mocking him when he claims to have been stabbed (“I don’t think you have, mate,”) and then dragging him on the concrete and handcuffing him, despite the fact that he is obviously no threat to anyone.
When Henry dies without prompt medical care, the indigenous government kowtows to the powerful colonizer, treating him with kid gloves (he was reportedly not even handcuffed when he was arrested), and starting a PR campaign to cast the indigenous white victim as the racist aggressor, until overwhelming video and forensic evidence force them to reluctantly charge Digwa.
And even THEN, the government’s main official response has focused on warning the powerless racial minority of the indigenous public (white Britons now make up less than 37% of London residents, according to the UK Office for National Statistics) against saying anything negative about or responding angrily to the culturally dominant, colonizing foreigners of color who are politically favored in their country.
Like most white folks, I don’t enjoy talking about race. But the left’s anti-white racism – here and around the world – has gotten so common and so hateful that it can’t help but provoke some harsh reactions. In the UK, the murder of Nowak, the attempted beheading by a Sudanese colonizer in Ireland, and the systematic, mass rape of a quarter million indigenous British white girls by Muslim colonizers have produced outrage.
Until now, the Left has cowed most Europeans into submitting to waves of non-assimilating migrants from the Third World. They’ve also managed to get many Americans to passively tolerate millions of entitled foreigners illegally pouring into his country.
But that momentum seems to have been reversed. Americans elected a president to shut the border and deport illegals. The Irish and the British have been protesting in the streets at the cruel government that has ignored their pleas and forced a kind of secular, abusive dhimmitude on them.
Even the European Parliament, within the last 48 hours, passed a vote on the Return Directive, “the first measure to seriously restrict immigration at the European level.” After the vote, loud chants of “Send them back!” broke out. In the formerly castrati-ridden EU!
So I’ll end where I began. We’ve heard the elite left’s message about colonizers. They’re bad, and powerful and aggressive. They’re outsiders and bullies who come into someone else’s land and wreak havoc, victimizing the locals and taking over, and then exploiting the natives and their resources for their own benefit.
We’ve seen that a lot lately, in Somali Learing Centers and fraud rings in MN, and Mexican flag-waving riots in LA, and attacks on ICE and law enforcement in blue cities from coast to coast.
The citizens of Europe and America have heard the leftists’ rants, and their chants, and their righteous anger, and they’ve convinced us: Foreign invasions and colonizing are bad, and the indigenous population should resist them.
But something tells me that the left is not going to like it when they are on the receiving end of the argument they’ve been aiming at us.
Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!
0-0-0
If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.
Martin Simpson 