“The white race is the cancer of human history,” wrote feminist author Susan Sontag in 1966. While Sontag has passed on, her idea has passed on to critical-mass stage; in fact, the notion that whites are history’s “oppressors” and everyone else is the “oppressed” is now left-wing dogma as much as “four legs good, two legs bad” was in Orwell’s communist allegory Animal Farm. But it’s also something else, states Newsweek’s Dan Perry: nonsense.
“No One Is Indigenous”
In fact, “No one is indigenous,” he writes. “And everyone’s a colonizer. The rest is confusion, even when well-intended.”
Introducing the subject with the topical matter of the Israel/Hamas conflict, Perry points out that to leftists, the issue is largely as simple as “white Israeli” interlopers persecuting “indigenous people of color” Palestinians. (Never mind that both groups are anthropologically classified as Caucasian; “white” in our culture has come to reference Caucasians of European descent.)
Yet the matter of who belongs where and who’s “indigenous” is more complicated than the comic-book oppressor/oppressed narrative holds.
Recounting this (pre)history, Perry states that “modern” humans emerged from Africa and then displaced “species” such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans. (Note that this could be a tendentious distinction, as these two groups could apparently breed with “us” and thus would be the same species.) He then writes:
The Indo-European migrations around 4000-1000 [B.C.] reshaped much of Eurasia, bringing technologies and social structures that supplanted or assimilated or mixed with those of local populations. The Bantu expansion across Africa itself (approximately 1000 [B.C.] to 500 AD) spread agricultural practices, ironworking, and languages across vast regions….
As for indigeneity, the logic that might govern it became more complex — and yet also strangely simple — when nations became empires (the Byzantines, Austria-Hungary, the Ottomans) that then broke up again into their constituent parts. Who belonged where after centuries of a centralized rule, now gone?
The Roman Empire, which began as a small city-state, expanded through a combination of military conquest and alliances, and in the 2nd century controlled vast territories across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. They subjugated quite a number of peoples, including the Jews (one of them quite prominent) in what is now Israel.
One Roman outpost, whose language today is very close to Latin, is modern Romania, whose culture is quite different from those of its mostly Slavic neighbors. Is Romania therefore a colony? Or does that not count because everyone is white, more or less?
If whiteness is the issue, can we ignore the rise of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century under Genghis Khan?
What About Asiatic Peoples?
The Mongols’ realm was history’s largest contiguous empire, do note, won with brutality and the subjugation of multiplicitous peoples. And looking “at the map today and considering the Mongol business, where can it be safe to say that Asiatic peoples are indigenous?” asks Perry. “Surely not eastern Europe!” Then asking, “Is it a question of how far back you go?” he also cites the following:
- The “indigenous” American Indians migrated to our continent millennia ago from Asia across a now gone land bridge; they fought for territory among themselves, too.
- The Maoris only arrived in New Zealand in the 1200s; they then integrated with/displaced earlier inhabitants.
- Australia’s aborigines had a history of migration/territorial conflict prior to Europeans’ arrival.
- Up to 15 million Hindus and Muslims were displaced during India’s mid-20th-century partitioning, while millions of Germans were displaced post-WWII. Are these events ignored by woke pseudo-intellectuals because in the first case, neither side is considered white and, in the second, all sides were?
- Israel’s establishment (1948) led to the displacement of 600,000 Arabs (who generally didn’t call themselves “Palestinians”) and the often-forced migration of approximately one million Jews from Arab countries.
Know, too, that the post-632 A.D. Islamic conquests of the old Christian world, North Africa and the Mideast — and the ongoing persecution to this day — have caused an out-migration of Christians from the regions.
Is All Colonization Bad?
All this said, while coercive colonization is not itself a good act, what of its effects? I had a Zambian friend who argued that colonialism had a positive impact in Africa. Likewise, that Kenyan Obama agrees. That is, Barack Obama’s half-brother, George Obama. He once told social commentator Dinesh D’Souza that it would have been better “if the whites had stayed longer” in Kenya, as their premature expulsion caused his nation’s impoverishment.
Far from delusional, these men’s claims were backed up by economics professor Thomas Sowell in his 1998 book Conquests and Cultures: An International History. Where “a technologically or organizationally more advanced people have conquered a people lagging behind in these respects [as with Western colonization],” he explained, “then conquest — like migration — has been a way of spreading the existing human capital of mankind and promoting the development of more human capital among more peoples.”
This phenomenon benefited Europeans, too. The ancient Romans learned from the Greeks’ triumphs and built upon them, and then brought this knowledge to the lands they conquered, such as England, France, and Spain. It was only then that those nations built further, became colonial powers themselves, and carried the treasures (and trials) of civilization to what we would call the Third World.
Westerners “Being Colonized”
Today, though, Westerners are “being colonized,” as Ambassador Alan Keyes once put it. Perry briefly addresses this, saying that migration “angst” might be mitigated by realizing there’s no “natural right” to a territory and that while border enforcement yields “stability,” it’s also a matter of “might making right.” Is it, though? Or is it right justifying might?
Professor Sowell’s follow-up to his earlier observation sheds light. Where “conquerors are clearly less economically or intellectually developed than those they conquer,” he wrote, “then conquest has not promoted the spread of human capital but instead has destroyed much of it.”
There may be no cosmic “right” to a region, but preserving a great civilization certainly is the right thing to do. This means, among other things, accepting that not all colonizations are created equal and that national suicide in revisionist history’s name is, as much as any brutal conquest, a sin.
