Some of us have been warning for quite some time that ‘decolonisation’ is about more than taking umbrage at the sight of certain statues. It can mean murder. While Hamas terrorists were busy massacring Jews—their perceived ‘colonisers’—on the 7th of October, many a post-colonial hack did us all a favour by making it clear that such barbarism is not only consistent with their worldview, but the logical consequence of it.
“The struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless,” exclaimed a jubilant Rivkah Brown, from Novara Media, “and we shouldn’t apologise for it.” She called for a “day of celebration” at the way in which “Hamas fighters [had] cross[ed] into their colonisers’ territory.” This unwise display of candour has since been deleted, but not—unfortunately for Brown—before many of us had pounced on the opportunity to take screenshots. A race-grifting academic by the name of Ameil J. Joseph also had a mask-off moment: “Postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial,” he tweeted, “are not just words you heard in your EDI workshop.”
Such bloodlust is rather curious. In the halls of Western academia, the push for decolonisation usually presents a more subtle, theoretical aspect. The basic idea of post-colonial theory, the self-proclaimed specialist will want to say, is that the age of European empires was enabled by racist attitudes that still plague us even now. While colonial governments may be a thing of the past, so-called ‘coloniality’—the basic concepts and truth claims upon which the lust for imperial conquest apparently relied in order to justify the unjustifiable—persists to this day and continues to inflict harm against non-European peoples living in our societies. Put simply, ‘coloniality’ is believed to infect the West’s very cultural DNA.
Anything deemed to reinforce the notion that there exists a hierarchy of civilisations, or otherwise tainted by some link—however tenuous—with the colonial era, must therefore be abolished through a curative process of ‘decolonisation.’ Until then, ethnic minorities can never be free, for regardless of the de jure set-up, they will remain victimised by a society shaped by the ideas, attitudes, and standards of their oppressors. The only marvel is that so many of them want to come here.
At the level of fact, all of this rests on the assumption that the British Empire in particular was an essentially racist, malicious, exploitative project—a view that has been ably debunked by Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. At the level of logic, it relies on fallacious arguments about ostensibly ignoble origins in the past necessarily entailing falsehood or reduced value in the present. Even if we grant the far-fetched assertion that, say, the rise of the modern scientific method was enabled by, or fed into, a socially constructed culture of unspeakable racism, that alone would not invalidate its claim to yield reliable knowledge of the physical world’s efficient and material causes. Ironically enough, the genetic fallacy is something of a hangover from habits of thinking that rose to prominence in the 19th century, when the European empires were at their height. These activists, in other words, are prisoners of a species of fallacious reasoning that is itself redolent of the colonialism they so despise. In any case, if the facts are wrong and the logic is feeble, the decolonisation movement must fall.
The problem with taking too much satisfaction from these kinds of QED smackdowns, as I have argued elsewhere, is that it assumes our opponents care enough for historical rigour and logical consistency to feel embarrassed at being exposed for their failure on both counts. In fact, many of them are not humble seekers after truth, only too happy to be corrected in the course of a Socratic dialogue, but sophists with a vendetta against European countries and intent on spreading a vindictive blood libel against their ancestral populations. Talk of ‘dismantling coloniality’ or ‘promoting diversity’ is just a polite cover behind which these more sordid interests attempt to advance without notice.
In the more volatile parts of the world, decolonisation movements have felt able to market themselves a little less bashfully. The European-descended Pieds-Noir population of Algeria, particularly after the Oran massacre of 1962 and the notorious “coffin or suitcase” expulsion orders, were left in no doubt about what decolonisation meant for them: a righteous festival of killing and ethnic cleansing, as close to 1 million long-settled Pieds-Noir were forced out of the country in the wake of Algerian independence. This makes the subsequent waves of Algerian migrants into France, to live among the very people their grandparents fought so hard to turf out of their homeland between 1954-62, all the more galling—particularly when so many among these immigrant communities, as we saw most recently in the summer riots across France, then insist on harbouring tribal ethnic grievances against the host population.
Throughout the oft-glorified Mau Mau uprising against British rule in Kenya, too, many of the most atrocious acts of violence were committed by the decolonising side. In the Lari massacre, the Mau Maus murdered not white Brits, but native civilians whose villages did not join the fight against Britain. The victims, including women and children, were burned alive in huts, while anyone trying to escape was hacked down with machetes. As Curtis Yarvin recently wrote about the 7th of October attack on Israel, “there is no difference at all between this movement [Hamas and its Western sympathisers] and the main thrust of 20th-century anticolonialism. The Zionist exception is just unravelling.”
Meanwhile, in first world countries like Britain, the blessing of relative peace means that so-called ‘decolonisation’ movements are forced to play a more subtle, manipulative game. Legal tactics and the weaponization of social taboos take the place of overt threats and brute violence. Nevertheless, self-proclaimed ‘decolonisers’ here at home are still trying to achieve effectively the same ends that groups like Hamas in the Middle East, the FLN in Algeria, and the Mau Maus in Kenya have felt free to pursue with sadistic glee and unapologetic barbarism.
Before elaborating, it should be noted that, unlike Algeria and Kenya, Britain was and is not colonised. All of our outstanding achievements that get attacked as somehow reminiscent of colonialism, whether Newtonian physics one week or the Book of Common Prayer the next, are not alien to these islands; they are the exquisite cultural fruits of the founding, long-established, reasonably homogeneous, ancestral population that has laid down roots in Britain over the course of countless generations. Those who dislike what we have built should do themselves and us a favour by either leaving or not coming here in the first place.
If anything, ethnic minorities seeking to overhaul Britain’s national curriculum or rename our public monuments—with the inevitable help of left-wing whites addicted to racial politics—should themselves be exposed as malevolent colonisers. It takes some cheek for activists openly in favour of ‘reverse colonisation’—which, as Mayor Sadiq Khan’s London posters demonstrate, is an increasingly popular form of tribal gloating—to call their campaign one of ‘decolonisation.’ Still, it would be wrong to argue that these race-baiting agitators, whatever their background, have only cultural phenomena like the national curriculum and public monuments in their cross-hairs. Consciously or otherwise, theirs is also a programme of ethnic cleansing.
This becomes obvious when one considers all possible meanings of their favourite buzzword: ‘diversity.’ Colour-blind interpretations undoubtedly exist. If I were somehow given control over a predominantly Islamic local council—say, that of Tower Hamlets in London—and I chose to swap out half of the Muslim officials for a handful of non-Muslim white Brits, I would by any objective measure be making that council ‘more diverse.’ But, of course, no one favours this kind of diversity, any more than there are routine calls to diversify rap music or increase the share of white athletes in the NBA (black jockeys would stand a better chance). The inescapable conclusion is that, for the people most attached to the rallying cry as emblematic of their social agenda, ‘diversity’ simply means ‘less white.’ Britain’s DEI laws, beefed up by the Conservative Party in 2017 and due to be expanded by Sir Keir Starmer if and when he becomes prime minister, in effect amount to legalised ethnic cleansing.
Christopher Rufo, the successful American culture warrior, misses this point in his otherwise decent essay on the link between Hamas’ attack on Israel and the increasingly shrill calls for ‘decolonisation’ here in the West:
As we have seen this week, the outcome of ‘decolonisation’ is barbarism. For Hamas, it means murdering women, children and the elderly, executing people on the street, and mutilating infants in their own homes. For the radical academics, the process is less brutal but barbaric all the same: it means destroying our best institutions, elevating witchcraft, voodoo, and pseudo-science into positions of prestige … Americans need to understand that the massacre in Gaza is not only a foreign outbreak. The same ethno-radicals who cheer Hamas’s destruction of civilisation abroad also want to commit civilisational suicide here at home.
Of course, this is all true. However, Rufo does too much credit to the so-called ‘decolonisers’ here in the West—again, they are much more like vengeful colonisers—by suggesting that they have their sights only on our institutions, academic standards, and other such “civilisational” phenomena. This would be bad enough. But anyone who treats ‘less white’ as a synonym for ‘progress’ in a country like Britain or the United States should be interpreted as saying that he favours the ethnic cleansing of the majority populations of those countries. Whether he aspires to achieve this through law and mass immigration, as in the West, or through ISIS-style terrorism, as Hamas did (and will no doubt continue to attempt) in Israel, does not alter the fact that he is a fundamentally malicious actor. Once seen in this light, the academic jargon about the ‘systemic undoing of coloniality’ becomes clear for what it is: intellectualised window-dressing for the furtherance of base ethnic power-politics.
One of the reasons why violence is a necessary recourse for virulently antisemitic terrorist groups operating on Israel’s border is that the Israelis are on guard against this stuff. Neither side of the Israeli political divide would ever be manipulated into tolerating, still less celebrating as progress, diversity laws designed to make the country ‘less Jewish’ across every level of society. As such, Hamas has no choice but to pursue its dream of a ‘decolonised’ Palestine, ethnically cleansed of Jews from the river to the sea, with rockets, bullets, machetes.
Britain’s political class, meanwhile, is loftily indifferent to our interests as a native population, whether due to fear of being called ‘racist’ in the case of the Conservatives or active hostility in the case of a Labour Party that long ago ditched solidarity with the working man for the politics of racial grievance. Israel has a political elite that cares for its people. We are still waiting for ours.