I’ve heard a lot about “settler colonialism” lately. It’s usually applied to Jews who, for the past 150 years have been migrating back to the ancestral homeland of Judaism, which in 1948 was carved out of the remains of the old Ottoman Empire to form the tiny country of Israel. Do Jews have less of a moral right to migrate to Israel than Mexicans or Guatemalans to the United States, or Turks and Algerians to Europe? Since the population of the land that now largely composes the state of Israel had been majority Jewish since the beginning of recorded history until the Romans expelled and sold into slavery much of the Jewish population in 136 AD, you’d think that the Jews of Israel would be the ultimate “indigenous” people for the area. But that doesn’t account for modern leftist hypocrisy.
If you go back far enough, most people are members of some “settler colonialist” group. And that includes “people of color.” Marxists, and much of the political Left, would have one believe that colonialism, racism, and slavery, are all the invention of 15th or 16th century white Europeans, when, in fact, these have been realities of human existence from the beginning of time across just about all cultures. Liberals of a past generation who told us that people of all races have more in common than not, were more on the mark than current day race-sorting “progressives.”
[W]e are now lectured on “morality” and “justice” by those embracing various forms of Marxism.
What is the moral difference, for instance, between the Aztec Empire and the Spanish Empire that replaced it? Both were based on military conquest and the exploitation of conquered peoples, including slavery. Cortez’s small band of conquistadors could not have overthrown the powerful Aztecs without the help of local tribes who hated and feared the Aztecs and who supplied the bulk of the warriors in Cortez’s army. Yes, the Spanish also imposed an alien religion, but that did supplant the practice of human sacrifice, so one could argue whether that was really such a bad thing. The only real difference is one without meaning — the Aztecs were “indigenous” to Mesoamerica whereas the Spanish came from across the Atlantic. (READ MORE from Brandon Crocker: The Siren Song of ‘Equity’)
But what counts as “indigenous”? The Navajo migrated from what is now Canada to the American Southwest in the late 14th century, displacing Ancestral Puebloans. The Apache did the same a few generations earlier. So are the Navajo and Apache “indigenous” to the American Southwest or are they “settler colonialists”? The Spanish arrived only 125 years or so after the Navajo. So, if the Navajo are “indigenous” and not “settler colonialists,” what about the Spanish? Where does one draw the line? Of course, where the Left draws the line is on race. It only cares about advancing a narrative of racial grievance — a narrative we’ve heard time and again throughout history, and yet so many have failed to learn the glaring lesson.
History is more complex than ideology. This is one theme I explore in fiction in my action/adventure novel Burma Road. Instead of recognizing this reality, however, today’s youth provides the spectacle of a generation that has achieved little but which casts moral aspersions on past generations who fought through great adversities while making enormous strides in improving the human condition. Of course, a lot of the blame for this falls on older generations that have allowed universities (and now, increasingly, high schools) to be overrun by Leftist ideologues, spouting the toxic neo-Marxist teachings of Critical Race Theory, that attempt to convince our youth that the country their elders are leaving them is not the land of freedom and opportunity that it is, but rather a rancid cesspool of oppression. As a result, we are now lectured on “morality” and “justice” by those embracing various forms of Marxism — the ideology responsible for the greatest human suffering in the history of the world (a history of which its young advocates routinely display stunning ignorance).
In 1978, while under house arrest, and shortly before being sent to a Czechoslovak prison for “subversion,” Vaclav Havel wrote of the allure (and ultimate danger) of communist ideology that had taken control of eastern Europe after the cataclysm of WWII: “In an era when metaphysical and existential certainties are in a state of crisis, when people are being uprooted and alienated and are losing their sense of what this world means, this ideology inevitably has a certain hypnotic charm … [T]he price is abdication of one’s own reason, conscience, and responsibility, for an essential aspect of this ideology is the consignment of reason and conscience to a higher authority.” Leftist ideologues understand this and that is why they have pushed so hard and consistently for the replacement of history with ideology, the tearing down of social norms, and the demonization of people and values once held dear. (READ MORE: The Dangerous Cult of Income Equality)
Will this surge in barbarism in the disguise of “morality” and “social justice” ultimately destroy the freedoms and prosperity that past generations in the Western world have worked so hard to create and preserve? It will if we let it.
Brandon Crocker is a retired commercial real estate executive and the author of the novel Burma Road (Moonshine Cove, February 2024).
