On April 22, Islamic terrorists stormed across a tourist spot in Jammu and Kashmir and killed 26 people, often confirming the victims were Hindu before executing them in front of their families.
The reaction from a range of anti-Semitic influencers and campus groups was instantaneous: They took a brief holiday from Jew-baiting to justify the Muslim slaughter of Hindus under the blood-soaked catchall of decolonization. Some blamed Israel directly, in classic Protocols of the Elders of Zion fashion, others reveled in the fact that both Jews and Indians have shed blood at the hands of Islamists. A chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, one of the more extreme and violent campus groups, attacked Indian students for objecting to the massacre of Hindus.
In general, as some commentators noticed, the pattern followed Oct. 7 step-for-step, as left-leaning activists celebrated the mass murder of innocents and then immediately began protesting against the victims.
Welcome to the world made and sustained in no small part by Western academia.
Oct. 7 exposed the broad support for Hamas’s genocidal mission among university administrations, students and faculty. The intellectual scaffolding for this bloodlust was the barbaric pseudo-discipline of decolonization/anticolonialism, an extremely violent blood-and-soil nationalism cobbled together into a circus freakshow of discredited grifters.
Decolonization or settler-colonial “studies” is the political arm of a global death cult, with universities providing some connective tissue to otherwise disparate terrorist gangs.
“For the field called settler colonial studies,” Adam Kirsch notes in On Settler Colonialism, “the goal of learning about settlement in America and elsewhere is not to understand it, as a historian would, but to combat it.” In this view of the world, there is no such thing as an immigrant, strictly speaking: “Because settlement is not a past event but a present structure, every inhabitant of a settler colonial society who is not descended from the original indigenous population is, and always will be, a settler.” Therefore, “Settler, in this view, is not a description of the actions of an individual but a heritable identity.”
The result is a firm belief that lots and lots and lots of people must be murdered. That’s how you get the shocking results of a poll conducted after Oct. 7, which found that of those aged 18-24, 66 percent said Hamas’s slaughter could be characterized as “genocidal in nature” but 60 percent said it “can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians.” As Kirsch notes, this means “more than half of college-age Americans seem to believe that it would be justified for Palestinians to commit a genocide of Israeli Jews.”
That gives us an idea of the extent of the violence at the heart of this ideology. The intellectual foundations of this murder cult, meanwhile, are a range of false assumptions about the world. Among the most significant of those assumptions are that the violent and immiserating excesses of colonialism and empire—chiefly among them the slave trade—were a) unique to Europe and b) responsible for the West’s material advantages over “the global south.”
Both are nonsense.
As Exeter Professor Doug Stokes writes in Against Decolonisation: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West, “not only has slavery been ubiquitous throughout human history, but so have non-European empires, colonialism, and great power competition.”
Chinese imperialism in Asia and Africa, Ottoman imperialism in the Middle East, Russian imperialism in Europe, the Arab keeping and trading of African slaves across continents—all of these make clear that plenty of the societies now championed by anti-colonialists would come in for the same claims of fundamental illegitimacy without a selective reading of history. And if the evils of British imperialism aren’t unique, industrialization could have happened anywhere. Thus other factors are clearly responsible for Britain’s national wealth.
There is no doubt that the British colonialist slave trade was barbaric. But imagine if non-Western societies were to be judged on their historical record regarding slavery, imperialism, and other crimes of power projection. Nations are not singularly evil or worthy of destruction because of their participation in these practices, nor are their economic accomplishments illegitimate.
Which brings us to the larger point: Decolonization and settler-colonial ideologies are degradingly simplistic—and I mean that literally, in that these disciplines are degrading Western students’ ability to analyze anything containing moral complexity. They are a Get Out of Thinking Free card.
They are also a clear danger to global security, justifying identity-based mass murder from Jewish kibbutzniks near Gaza to picnicking Hindu families in serene Himalayan meadows.
