Selective Colonizers

There is probably no bigger telltale that you're in a conversation with someone completely subsumed by present-day progressivism than the word "colonizer." It has supplanted "privilege" as the preferred form of dismissal and virtue signaling. If you hear of one side in a dispute (real or imagined) being dubbed the "colonizer," or if you hear "colonial attitude" or its variants, you know who your counterpart deems the bad guy.

You also know the rest of the conversation will be a waste of your time, and likely numb your brain.

None of this is remotely revelatory to most of you, of course, but if you want to have some fun, play along a bit.

Consider this exchange between an oh-so-posh BBC interviewer and Guyana President Irfaan Ali, that I recently discussed here. Put through the standard progressive filter, it's white-splaining at its finest. It is also, as Vijay Jayaraj noted in this Substack piece, "Western Carbon Colonialism."

What does "colonialism" mean here? In their parlance, colonialism is the from-above and from-outside imposition of a particular worldview on people of different skin color and other identity markers. It's picking sides based on nothing more than a reductive "they were here before you" simplification, and ignores any fact that happens to be inconvenient.

In the Guyana case, it is also breathtaking first-world arrogance. By what [redacted] right does the interviewer believe he can demand that Guyana's (or any other developing nation's) poor remain in poverty to satisfy luxury green beliefs?

That said, I did say "have some fun." So, rather than go the righteous outrage route in rebutting whoever lobbed the "colonizer" grenade at you, ask if they oppose colonization in South America, then bring up that bit.

Or, even better, ask if they oppose colonization in Europe, and then ask how they feel about native Europeans (don't say "white," just say native) objecting to their values being rejected and scorned by "colonizers."

That should put them into a bit of a mental doom loop. If you smell smoke or burning oil, back away.

These two examples illustrate how narcissistic (and solipsistic) the "colonizer" trope actually is.

Humans have always moved around, and humans have always fought over patches of land. I've written in the past about "snaphshot geography," a phrase coined by Jonah Goldberg that explains how people select a particular moment in time as their determinant of who is the proper owner of a particular patch. Those who drop the "colonizer" truth-bomb almost invariably base their snapshot on skin color, no matter that doing so may lump bitter enemies into a single group. I've yet to hear the accusers take note of the perpetual state of conflict and flux in the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere, whether it be Apache vs Comanche vs Navajo, or Aztec vs everyone else, or Inca vs Chanca. Nor do they seem inclined to mention the many centuries of conflict in the far East, or the millennia of European conflicts.

See, the “colonizers” in present-day Western Europe, per the progressive playbook, would be the Middle Eastern and African migrants. Do any of the woke reject those “colonizations?”

Kinda blows up the whole "colonizer" trope, doesn't it?

Of course, hypocrisy has never been an impediment to righteous outrage and political narcissism, and synthetic righteousness is the preferred rebuttal to the accusation. Or, put a different way, the perpetually indignant don't really do reason or consistency.

The point, today, is that we must reject the categorical "colonizer" argument. With mockery, whenever possible. It's a fraudulent assertion that relies on the very racism and bigotries that its users claim to be fighting.

As for human migration itself?

I've said it before, countless times. In America, immigration is both a good thing and a necessary thing - with the caveats that the immigrants be producers rather than takers and that they embrace the nation's traditional liberty-based values. Those values produced a better society than the ones many immigrants are fleeing, and they should want to "live American." That we have domestic multiculturalists not only denouncing the principles of liberty that build the nation, but actually supporting the illiberal values that some immigrants grew up with, does no one any good.