The monster of post-colonialism

A movement on behalf of the wretched of the earth has sold its soul to the devil.

In death’s dream kingdom

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

—T.S. Eliot

There often comes a time when political movements ostensibly committed to the highest moral ideals sell their souls to the devil. In a messianic frenzy, they set out to remake the world with the best of intentions, but end up committing the most horrendous crimes.

This goes back at least to the French Revolution, during which the noble principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity slowly collapsed into justification for oppression and slaughter. It reached a peak in Stalin and Mao’s communist regimes. Unlike Hitler’s Germany, these regimes were at least based on worthy principles. But over time, they systematically destroyed anything resembling those principles. To a great extent, such destruction became an end in and of itself. It transformed into the essence of these movements and the regimes they constructed and controlled.

There have been a great many attempts to understand why this happens and whether it is inevitable—Albert Camus’s The Rebel probably being the best. There is no question, however, that it happens quite often. Indeed, it is not irrational to see it as the most likely outcome of any messianic political movement.

Today, one of the most popular such movements, at least in the intellectual world, is “post-colonialism.” Billing itself as an attempt to analyze and critique imperialism and its depredations, post-colonialism has become something of an institutional raison d’être of many Third World movements and their supporters. It is hugely popular on the Western political left—particularly in academia—which sometimes appears to seek the “decolonization” of more or less everything. It is not a coincidence that Columbia University hosts a “Center for Palestine Studies” that is essentially an idolatrous shrine to the post-colonialist intellectual Edward Said.

Post-colonialism as we know it today largely emerged out of the post-World War II collapse of the great European empires and the violent rebellions against what remained of them—such as in Algeria and many African countries. Intellectually, the best candidate for its founding father or at least seminal figure is likely the Martinique-born thinker Franz Fanon, whose 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth set out a blistering critique of European imperialism and colonialism. Fanon also became famous for unapologetically endorsing the use of violence against imperialist and colonialist powers.

It is only fair to say that Fanon had a point. Imperialism is, in many ways, a form of tyranny, and most people would agree that violence is justified in the fight against tyranny.

Post-war Americans and Europeans, who had just employed immense violence to dismantle the tyrannical Nazi regime, were acutely aware of this. For example, members of the various anti-Nazi resistance movements could not help but draw parallels between themselves and the resistance fighters of what would later become the Third World. In the same way, the US could not deny that it had resorted to the ultimate weapon to vanquish Japan and believed itself justified in doing so.

Thus, to many Westerners, supporting violence perpetrated by the West while condemning it when used by others felt like blatant hypocrisy. They believed that liberty, equality, and fraternity must apply to all human beings if they were to mean anything at all. This belief was not unfounded.

As the last colonies achieved independence, the anti-imperialist cause morphed into post-colonialism. The theories of men like Fanon were used to construct an overarching critique of Western civilization and an ongoing exploration of the aftereffects of the imperialist and colonialist experience on native populations.

But among its adherents, this ideology—particularly its critique of the West as a whole—became something more than political. It was elevated to the status of something like a religious creed and this, perhaps, is where it began to go wrong.

II.

Post-colonialism was, in many ways, an important and entirely legitimate means of analyzing its subject. The effects of empire and colonialism on native populations were unquestionably detrimental and traumatizing. It is important to understand why this is so and, perhaps, seek means of ameliorating this suffering and compensating for it.

Moreover, there is nothing inherently wrong with confronting any society with the darker aspects of its conduct. Self-criticism, especially in democratic societies, is essential if those societies are to survive and indeed thrive. If a society cannot criticize itself, it eventually falls victim to ossification and decadence. It is only when this critique hardens into hatred and self-hatred that it becomes dangerous.

It is also impossible to deny that a great deal of the post-colonialist critique of the West is accurate. There is no doubt that imperialism and colonialism committed terrible atrocities like the decimation of the Native Americans, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, periodic mass slaughters of native Africans, brutal economic exploitation of native populations in general, the adoption of racist and exclusionary policies, and so on.

For the West, many aspects of post-colonialism are fundamental to the West’s understanding of the world. Fanon’s phrase “the wretched of the earth” is drawn from the socialist anthem “The International,” but the sentiment it expresses goes deeper than that. For all intents and purposes, it is a modern version of the ancient Christian principle of “the last shall be first and the first last.” This ethos of radical altruism is essential to the Christian worldview.

Thus, despite its increasing secularization, it was historically inevitable that the fundamentally Christian West would eventually accept the post-colonial worldview. No one who genuinely adhered to Christian ethics—knowingly or not—could indefinitely resist it.

However, this Christian ethos of sympathy for the wretched of the earth and the last who must be first highlights one of post-colonialism’s most glaring flaws: The Christian worldview may result in sympathy for post-colonialism, but post-colonialism does not reciprocate.

Putting aside, for the moment, the heavy influence of Islamic imperialism on post-colonialism, even the movement’s evocation of Christian ethics is not one that Christians today would recognize. If post-colonialism has indeed become a religion, it is a religion that is remarkably close to heretical Gnosticism, both Christian and non-Christian.

The ancient Gnostics believed that there were two gods—one good and one evil. The evil god (often called the demiurge) created the material world in his image and, as a result, that world is evil. Since the material world is evil, the goal is to transcend it through secret knowledge (gnosis) that leads the initiate to true communion with the good god. This results in spiritual and moral perfection.

At first glance, this is empty mysticism. Nonetheless, many scholars have noted that the basic idea of a corrupted material world that must be transcended through secret knowledge has been echoed—albeit not via direct inheritance—by numerous movements both religious and secular throughout the Middle Ages and into modern times.

For example, it is not difficult to see the parallel with Marxism. Like the Gnostics, Marxists believe that once one has acquired the secret knowledge that economics and the class struggle are the sole determining forces in existence, the material world reveals itself as irredeemably corrupted by capitalist exploitation. Only through their secret knowledge can human beings reconnect with goodness and virtue in a socialist or communist society.

Post-colonialism is not much different. In this case, the world is seen as wholly corrupt because it was constructed—and is still constructed—upon imperialist and colonialist exploitation. However, the secret knowledge proffered by the post-colonialists can reveal the true nature of the corrupted world and allow the believer to transcend it through a kind of political sainthood.

As is often the case, post-colonialism’s theology has taken on a distinctly violent tone. Indeed, post-colonialism today most closely resembles Manicheanism, an ancient Persian sect that perceived the world as a battleground between a benevolent deity and a malevolent deity.

Among most post-colonialists, this dualistic worldview culminates in a complete demonization of their chosen demiurge. That is, it becomes an absolute and irrational hatred not only of imperialism and colonialism but also of what is perceived as their creator: the West and the entirety of Western civilization. Everything the West was, is, or ever will be is seen as a machine designed to create a monstrous universe. The world, then, is a battleground upon which the saints of post-colonialism engage in an apocalyptic battle against the demon gods of imperialism and colonialism.

It is not a coincidence that at the end of this demonizing logic lies a demonic ideology. Since most ancient Gnostics saw the God of the Hebrew Bible as their monstrous demiurge, it is not surprising that Gnosticism tended to be violently anti-Jewish. In the same way, it has long been evident—but never more evident than it is now—that post-colonialism is genocidally antisemitic.

Over the past two decades, innumerable post-colonialist scholars and activists have taken up the cause of destroying the Jewish state. Recently, they have explicitly endorsed Hamas and Hezbollah and worship these groups’ genocidal war against Israel and Jews around the world.

This is not an exaggeration in the least. We know it is true because the post-colonialists say so. And they say it as loud and as often as they can. Nor can we ignore their practical implementation of this hatred, which they have used to justify acts of antisemitic violence against Jews in numerous countries, including the United States.

Nothing could constitute more compelling proof that post-colonialism has sold its soul to the devil.

III.

The truth is that post-colonialism always had a dark side. This is particularly true in the case of its caste of saints: The groups that fought or claimed to fight against imperialism and colonialism. While these movements often seem unquestionably righteous, they just as often committed horrendous atrocities. Among those atrocities were precisely the crimes for which post-colonialism condemns the West: ethnic cleansing and genocide.

There was, for example, the genocide of the white population of Haiti that followed the successful Haitian slave revolt and establishment of a republic in 1804. Certainly, slavery in Haiti and the Caribbean in general was utterly horrific in nature. The former slaves’ hatred of their oppressors and desire for revenge was perfectly understandable. Nonetheless, if we are to take the post-colonialists at their word—and we should—genocide is genocide and must be universally condemned.

The post-colonialists hold, for example, that the establishment of the American republic with its high-minded principles of liberty and equality cannot excuse the genocide of the Native Americans—and they are right. One wonders, however, whether they will ever admit that the Haitian revolutionaries’ righteous fight to destroy slavery and found a nation upon the principle of liberation cannot justify genocide either.

There is also the more recent example of Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN), which aimed to liberate Algeria from French rule and establish an independent Muslim Arab republic. It is undeniable that French imperialism was frequently brutal and exploitative. Nor were the crimes committed by the French army and French Algerians during the 1954-1962 war against the FLN justifiable. The question is whether these facts justify two things: a) The FLN’s indiscriminate and often monstrously sadistic terrorism, and b) the ultimate ethnic cleansing of the Algerian French population, along with other minorities like the Algerian Jewish community whose presence long predated that of the Algerian Arabs.

Most if not all post-colonialists would almost certainly answer “yes” on both counts. To them, French rule over Algeria was inherently illegitimate and, in the classic left-wing slogan, “any means necessary” were justified to end it. The French Algerians were only there as a result of this rule and, therefore, they had to go. As for the Jews and others, eggs must be broken to make omelets. Moreover, post-colonialists likely view the FLN’s terrorism and ethnic cleansing as, in the words of another popular and rather more ludicrous slogan, “the chickens coming home to roost.” In other words, the violence of French rule was bound to come back around sooner or later, and thus the French had no right to complain.

The problem with this is that it blatantly violates the ostensible principles of post-colonialism itself: If the atrocities committed during the European conquest of the Americas cannot be justified by the positive things that resulted from that conquest—and they can’t—then the same must go for the FLN’s conduct in Algeria. If genocide is genocide, then ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing, and the FLN was self-evidently guilty of it. If post-colonialists will not or cannot admit this, then their ideology and its slogans are at best meaningless and at worst rank hypocrisy.

Sadly, this often goes for some of the best among the post-colonialists. South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC), for example, is often cited as a national liberation movement that managed to achieve its goals without committing the atrocities of many of its predecessors. To a great extent, this is true. Certainly, there was no mass slaughter or ethnic cleansing of South African whites or other minorities and, at least under Nelson Mandela, the ANC did attempt to fulfill its pledge to create a multi-racial democracy in place of the racist apartheid regime. As a result, post-colonialists largely view Mandela as a saint and the ANC as a sacred object.

Of course, such pretensions are inherently unrealistic, and the ANC too had its ugly side. For example, the movement maintained a long-standing alliance with the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. This alliance was deep and of long-standing, and many among the ANC genuinely admired the tyrant. Indeed, in 1997, Mandela met with Qaddafi in Tripoli, embraced him, and declared, “Those who say I should not be here are without morals. I am not going to join them in their lack of morality.” Mandela apparently failed to consult the Libyan people on the subject, given that they eventually rose up against Qaddafi, toppled his regime, dragged him from a drainage pipe, and beat him to death.

One cannot expect any political movement to be composed of genuine saints and it is possible to justify the ANC’s relationship with Qaddafi on pragmatic grounds. The ANC was a beleaguered and persecuted movement at the time, Mandela was a political prisoner, and in such situations, you take your friends where you can get them. Given this, gratitude after the fact is natural and understandable.

The problem, however, again lies with hypocrisy. For example, post-colonialists the world over cannot shut up about Israel’s (much exaggerated) relationship with South Africa’s apartheid regime during the 1980s. They invoke it endlessly in order to claim that Israel and Zionism are irredeemably racist and evil.

Yet Israel’s conduct can be justified on precisely the same grounds as the ANC’s alliance with Qaddafi. At the time, Israel was beleaguered by terrorism, persecuted by racist international bodies like the UN, and diplomatically isolated. Israel took pragmatic measures to ameliorate its plight, just as the ANC did. One cannot justify one without conceding justification for the other.

Sadly, the ANC’s weakness for hypocrisy has worsened since Mandela left office. Today, the ANC government of South Africa unequivocally supports Hamas and leads the persecution of Israel in international bodies. South African president Cyril Ramaphosa has publicly shrieked the Palestinians’ genocidal “from the river to the sea” slogan. Post-colonialists almost unanimously applaud such actions. This is the tragedy inherent in the devil’s bargain: It transforms saints into monsters.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in post-colonialism’s idolatry of Palestinian nationalism. This bizarre intellectual theocracy is maintained even though it is, in many ways, destroying post-colonialism from within.

It is doing so because Palestinian nationalism—with its roots struck deep in Nazi ideology and Islamic supremacism—constitutes an absolute contradiction and indeed negation of post-colonialism’s founding principles. Palestinian nationalism is decidedly not a movement of liberation on the part of an indigenous people against foreign conquerors. It is a movement of the descendants of foreign conquerors who are now seeking to reconquer territory possessed by a people whose presence in the land is millennia older than theirs. Palestinian nationalism is not post-colonialism but ultra-colonialism. By transforming it into a holy cause, post-colonialism reduces itself to farce.

Indeed, to a great extent, the Oct. 7 massacre was the last nail in post-colonialism’s coffin, though its adherents have yet to realize it. Literally on the day of the massacre, post-colonialists the world over expressed not just sympathy but joy in the face of Hamas’s act of attempted genocide. I personally know people who were told: “What do you think decolonization looks like?” This revealed a dark secret: The ultimate goal of post-colonialism is not liberation. It is to utterly annihilate anyone of whom it disapproves.

The irony of this is terrible: A movement that claimed to champion the “wretched of the earth” has become an enemy of mankind.

IV.

The extent to which post-colonialism has become ultra-colonialism and, in doing so, demolished itself is most evident in its attitude toward Islam. Almost universally, post-colonialists view Islam and especially Islamic supremacism as what Christopher Hitchens once derided as “some kind of fucking liberation theology.” That is, Islam is seen as the means by which the wretched of the earth will redeem themselves from the bondage of empire. By extension, Islamic supremacism and the terrorist atrocities it commits are seen as holy acts of “resistance.”

The problem with this is fairly obvious: Islam is an empire. That is, it only exists because of imperial conquest and settler-colonialism on a world-historical scale. They are the sole reason that the realm of Islam now encompasses all of the Middle East and North Africa, along with Anatolia and territories stretching to the Indian subcontinent. For a time, this imperium even included large parts of southern Europe. Indeed, Islam’s attempts to conquer what remained of the Christian West continued into the 17th century, when it was finally turned back at the gates of Vienna.

Post-colonial intellectuals, generally speaking, attempt to portray this imperial legacy as something fairly benign and even beneficial, which is at best naive and at worst disingenuous. In fact, for the conquered, the rise of Islam was a civilizational catastrophe. Age-old traditions, religions, and languages disappeared. Millions were killed, raped, and subjected to horrific atrocities like castration. An African slave trade was founded upon which Europeans would later seize with terrible results. Non-Muslims who were not killed or converted were subjected to a system of religious apartheid. Some may have benefited, but there were also innumerable victims.

None of this, of course, was unique. All empires, to one degree are another, establish and maintain themselves in precisely the same way. Alexander the Great and his successors, the Roman Empire, and numerous others were hardly slouches in the atrocity department. Behind every great fortune lies a crime. Islam was neither the best nor the worst of empires, but it was an empire.

The issue, however, is not whether Islam is uniquely bad. It is that post-colonialism absolutely refuses to acknowledge that Islam has ever been bad. Post-colonialism insists, again and again, that the West must acknowledge its historical sins and atone for them, but refuses to demand the same of Islam—the sins of which are at least as great. In effect, post-colonialism privileges Islam. It declares that Islam alone is pure and sinless, has committed no crimes, and has no victims. It and it alone is the beautiful empire.

At this point, post-colonialism descends into absurdity. It requires little imagination to illustrate the point: Post-colonialists often demand that the West compensate formerly colonized countries in some way, but they would no doubt find the idea of Muslim countries compensating Spain or France—sections of which were once under Islamic domination—absurd. Post-colonialism celebrates the return of Algeria to the Arabs but cannot even begin to conceive of returning Turkey to the Anatolian Greeks, even though the Greeks have just as good a case as the Algerians. Post-colonialists can bestow blessings upon the Oct. 7 massacre while simultaneously declaring Israel’s military response to it an unspeakable crime. The hypocrisy is so redolent that it ought to be intolerable even to the hypocrite. Sadly, it is not.

Indeed, in its privileging of Islam, post-colonialism ultimately destroys itself. Because privileging Islam does not oppose colonialism but seeks to complete it. It is an attempt to sacralize empire by declaring that the imperialists and colonizers are the true indigenous peoples of the lands they conquered and colonized. It is post-colonialism negating itself.

For example, I remember reading an article that declared with a straight face that Islam “became” the indigenous religion of the lands it ruled. It was a telling statement, and not only because it made a mockery of the very term “indigenous.”

It was obvious that the author would never have said anything of the kind about any other empire. For example, the argument that European settlers “became” indigenous by displacing the Native Americans would no doubt have horrified and enraged him. It was quite clear that, to him, some empires, some settlers, and some colonialists are more equal than others.

Thus, the avowed purpose of the author and his ideology was clear: To complete Islam’s conquest. He wanted to make Islam something that had somehow always been there; to permanently legitimize settler-colonialism so long as it was committed by the right people; and not just to deny the crimes of empire but to completely erase its victims. The author was doing, in other words, everything that post-colonialism accuses the West of doing. Worst of all, he was doing it in the name of the wretched of the earth.

All this culminates in what may be post-colonialism’s most cherished belief: That Muslims are an oppressed people. This is an article of faith for the post-colonialists, who effectively divide the world between Muslims and non-Muslims. The latter are generally deemed the evil oppressors of the former. The problem with this is that it is not only untrue; it is also insane. Certain groups of Muslims can be oppressed, but Muslims as a whole, as a collective, cannot be oppressed. It is impossible.

The reason is obvious: No group composed of more than a billion people with dozens of states under their control and enormous economic, military, and political power can be oppressed. Such a group can certainly oppress others. It can engage in all manner of intellectual, stochastic, economic, and kinetic imperialism. But by definition, it cannot be oppressed, and those who claim otherwise do not believe it themselves. The post-colonialists, whatever their protestations, do not believe it either. But they demand that the rest of us believe it. If we do not, they are more than happy to attempt to intimidate us into silence.

This silence has gone on long enough. It is time we asked the post-colonialists some uncomfortable questions: How many Egyptian Copts are there now? How many Anatolian Greeks? How many Hijazi Jews? Where are the Byzantines? Where are the Buddhists of Afghanistan?

The post-colonialists will not answer these questions because they cannot answer them without destroying themselves. Thankfully, the answers are a matter of historical record. It is time to demand some kind of reckoning with that history.

V.

Confronting post-colonialism with its hypocrisy is a difficult thing because, to a certain extent, the hypocrisy is the point. Although it once had and may still have some value in assessing the nature and history of imperialism and its after-effects, post-colonialism today is not really a scholarly endeavor or a school of thought. It is a political movement and a religious creed. Post-colonialism is fighting a holy war.

As such, it has no interest whatsoever in resolving the contradictions inherent in its creed. It requires hypocrisy and the accusation of hypocrisy only confirms its faith. It believes it because it is absurd. Resolving the contradictions is not just unthinkable but a deplorable blasphemy, and no one is more violent and irrational than when they are defending a god.

Moreover, to live out the true meaning of its creed, post-colonialism would have to give up some of its most treasured catechisms. Post-colonialists would have to admit that sometimes the last should not be first; that the victim can be as monstrous as the victimizer; that the wretched of the earth are not by definition morally admirable; that one crime does not justify another, and so on. Ironically, the post-colonialists make precisely these assertions regarding Israel and the Jews. As always, however, the post-colonialists exempt themselves from any such exacting self-examination.

On a certain level, however, the post-colonialists ought to be a bit worried. Following Oct. 7, they detonated whatever moral high ground they had left. They allied themselves with genocidal terrorists and antisemites. They helped demolish the centuries-old reputations of many institutions of higher learning, fostering a backlash that threatens to either overturn or completely destroy the ruling class of those institutions. They successfully alienated potential supporters across the West, particularly in the United States but increasingly in Europe.

Worst of all, the post-colonialists have opened the door to the possibility that people may actually take them at their word. They may conclude that perhaps it is time for the post-colonialists’ chickens to come home—not by any means necessary, but certainly to roost.

The beginning of this liberation of the soul may be as simple as the mantra I have recommended many times: We do not have to listen to these people. We are under no obligation to pay any attention whatsoever to bloviating hypocrites and plaster saints, especially when they ally themselves with genocidal racists, religious supremacists, and demented terrorists. We certainly do not have to allow ourselves to be browbeaten and silenced by them.

Today’s post-colonialists almost certainly want to destroy the West. If they truly believe in their admonition “by any means necessary,” they may well want to destroy the world. There have always been such people and there is only one way to deal with them: We must tell them that we have no intention of indulging them in their perfervid little fantasies and, if they try to make them a reality, they will face some very tough going indeed.