“The white race is the cancer of human history,” feminist writer Susan Sontag wrote in 1966. Though Sontag has since passed away, her ideas have reached a critical mass. Indeed, the idea that white people are the “oppressors” of history and everyone else the “oppressed” is now as much left-wing dogma as Orwell's “four legs are good, two legs are bad” in Animal Farm, Orwell's communist fable. But that's something else, says Newsweek's Dan Perry. It's nonsense.
“None of us are Indigenous”
In fact, “no one is indigenous,” he writes, “and everyone is a colonizer. The rest, even if well-intentioned, is chaos.”
Perry brings up the current issue of the Israel-Hamas conflict to point out that, for the left, the issue is simply one of “white Israeli” invaders persecuting “native people of color” Palestinians (never mind the fact that both groups are anthropologically classified as Caucasian; “white” in our culture has come to refer to Caucasian people of European descent).
But the questions of who belongs where and who is “indigenous” are more complicated than the comic's tale of oppressor and oppressed.
Looking back at this (pre)history, Perry states that “modern” humans emerged from Africa and then drove out “species” like Neanderthals and Denisovans. (Note that this distinction may be a biased one, since these two groups clearly interbred with “us” and could have become the same species.) He then writes:
The Indo-European migrations around 4000-1000 BCE reshaped much of Eurasia, replacing, assimilating, or blending with the technologies and social structures of the local peoples. The expansion of the Bantu peoples across Africa (c. 1000-500 BCE) spread agriculture, ironworking, and language over vast areas….
As for indigenous peoples, as states became empires (Byzantine, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman) and then disintegrated again into their component parts, the logic of governing them became more complex and also strangely simpler: without centuries of centralized rule, who belonged where?
Starting as small city-states, the Roman Empire expanded through a combination of military conquest and alliances, and by the 2nd century AD it controlled vast swaths of territory across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. The Empire conquered many different peoples, including the Jews in what is now Israel (one of whom was very powerful).
Modern Romania was one of the Roman outposts, where today they speak a language very close to Latin. The Romanian culture is quite different from its mostly Slavic neighbors. Is Romania therefore a colony? Or is it not counted as a colony, since everyone there is more or less white?
If being white is an issue, can we ignore the rise of the Mongol Empire led by Genghis Khan in the 13th century?
What about Asian people?
Keeping in mind that the Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous empire in history, won through brutality and the conquest of diverse peoples, Perry then asks: “Looking at a map today, and considering the Mongol events, where can you safely say that Asian peoples were indigenous?” “Certainly not Eastern Europe!” And then he asks: “Is it a question of how far back?” He also quotes:
The “native” American Indians migrated to our continent from Asia thousands of years ago across a now-vanished land bridge. They too fought over territory. The Maoris arrived in New Zealand only in the 1200s, then merged with the natives or migrated away. The indigenous peoples of Australia had a history of migration and territorial conflicts even before the Europeans arrived. The partition of India in the mid-20th century saw the migration of up to 15 million Hindus and Muslims, and millions of Germans after World War II. Are these events ignored by woke pseudo-intellectuals because in the former case neither side is considered white, and in the latter case all sides are considered white? The creation of the State of Israel (1948) often led to the migration of 600,000 Arabs (who did not usually call themselves “Palestinians”) and the forced migration of about 1 million Jews from Arab countries.
Also note that the Islamic conquest of the former Christian world, North Africa and the Middle East after 632 and the persecution that continues to this day led to the migration of Christians from these areas.
Is all colonization bad?
But while forced colonization is not a good thing in itself, what about its effects? I have a Zambian friend who argues that colonialism has had a positive effect on Africa. Similarly, Kenya's Obama agrees: Barack Obama's half-brother, George Obama. He once told social commentator Dinesh D'Souza that he wished whites had “stayed longer” in Kenya because their premature expulsion led to the impoverishment of Kenya.
These people's claims are not delusional, and are backed up by economics professor Thomas Sowell's 1998 book Conquest and Culture: An International History. When “technologically or organizationally advanced peoples conquered peoples who lagged behind in these respects (as in Western colonization),” conquest, like migration, was a way of spreading humanity's existing human capital and facilitating the development of more human capital among a larger number of people, Sowell explains.
This phenomenon also benefited Europe: the ancient Romans learned from their Greek victories, built on them, and brought this knowledge to the lands they conquered, such as England, France, and Spain, only then could these countries go further and become colonial powers themselves, bringing the treasures (and trials) of their civilization to what we call the Third World.
Westerners are being “colonized”
But today, Westerners are “being colonized,” Ambassador Alan Keyes once said. Perry touches on this briefly, noting that recognizing that we have no “natural right” to territory might ease the “anxiety” of migration, and that while border security brings “stability,” it is also a matter of “creating justice through force.” But is this really the case? Or does justice justify force?
A follow-up to Sowell's earlier observation sheds light on the point: “When the conquerors were clearly economically and intellectually inferior to the conquered,” he writes, “conquest, far from facilitating the diffusion of human capital, destroyed much of it.”
There may be no universal “right” to territory, but preserving great civilizations is surely the right thing to do. This means, among other things, acknowledging that not all colonization is created equal, and that national suicide in the name of historical revisionism is as much a sin as brutal conquest.
