Coloniser. Settler. Imperialist. It's Time to Laugh at these Marxist Labels.

Why do people keep taking these ancient propaganda slurs seriously?

One of the most curious things about progressive globalism and woke ideology is that it is both a very modern phenomenon and an absurd anachronism. Large numbers of people in the western world did not really begin talking and thinking like this until the 1960s, and the capture of all the institutional, educational and corporate power in society (particularly the capture of Big Business) by radical progressive social attitudes was not complete until very recently.

Even just 20 or 30 years ago the idea that every major business in the western world would push hard for a group like BLM or for trans activism and the most extreme forms of LGBTQ+ propaganda was inconceivable, let alone that it would become the case that backing Hamas was more socially acceptable than being disgusted by terrorism.

The social transformation of attitudes has been astonishing, at least in terms of which attitudes have power and official endorsement. Among the powerless majority, far more conservative instincts persist but have no real representation (and it is the eruption of these from the grass roots, demanding representation when mainstream conservatism fails to oppose progressive ideology, that explains most populism).

For Generation X, people such as myself on the cusp of being officially old, it can seem like in the last 20 years particularly the world has gone mad. We remember the brash confidence of the 1980s. We remember a childhood and a teen period where the Old Left was reeling from a Thatcher-Reagan economic boom and what seemed the final triumph of capitalism and liberty as, by the very early 1990s, the Soviet Union collapsed.

The world shaping our early consciousness was one in which the Right seemed to keep winning.

It’s for these reasons that the adoption of very extreme progressivism as the acceptable and respectable mainstream position-the one with the full support of the law, the courts, the institutions, the businesses, the universities, the NGOs, even the military and the churches-can seem to us like a startling and very recent thing.

Of course like most social and cultural transformations, the roots of influence extend back almost as far as you wish to trace. Much of the globalist infrastructure of modern times was built immediately following World War Two-and its this globalist infrastructure (the UN, the EU, virtually every transnational body) that pushes much of the socially radical agenda. But you could just as easily see strong parallels between modern woke ideologues and the agendas and attitudes of the French Revolution. All social radicalism in Europe (and possibly globally) has been both influenced by the French Revolution and impossible to fully understand without reference to it.

It was of course the French Revolution that gave us the old shorthand labels of Left and Right (however inaccurate these become when respective power shifts and the support bases of the socially leftwing and the socially rightwing switch places). But the French Revolution also gives us one of the strongest if not the original manifestation of the idea that a complete cultural and social revolution (scrapping everything built over centuries and putting up in its place something shoddily constructed by the master builders Grievance and Violence) is a desirable and worthwhile thing.

The French Revolution too desired to change everything, and attacked religion, family, the past, tradition, God, morality (particularly sexual and social morals)…just like the hippies of the 1960s or the woke zealots of the 2020s.

So we have this curious double nature to globalist progressivism and woke ideology. Its both very, very modern and very, very old.

There is no place where this is more evident than in its language choices.

Over the last few years or so I’ve seen a lot of commentary on the Middle East and Israel, obviously due to the stark division that has emerged in attitudes towards the October 7th atrocities and increased by the anniversary.My personal response has been consistent on this-I regard those attacks as the most loathsome barbaric savagery imaginable, and any form of sympathy or excuse for the perpetrators as a disgusting moral failing.

There are some moral issues where the call for nuance or balance is itself a moral obscenity, and this is one of them. I’m always intensely suspicious of absolutist thinking, of total certainty in one’s own goodness or in the superiority of your own Party, ideology or group. But I’m even more suspicious of the moral illiteracy of relativism and of having NO absolutes at all, no red lines that cannot be crossed, and no clarity when distinguishing between good and evil.

And I have nothing but contempt for people who are given a choice between innocent families and psychopathic terrorists using rape, torture and kidnapping who still can’t get the choice right.

That aside, one thing that has cropped up from both the supporters of Palestinian terrorism and the supporters of Israel is this archaic Marxist language regarding colonialism and imperialism. Both sides use this language. And both use it as if a language constructed by people like Lenin can be trusted and makes sense in modern times.

It’s not just the moral idiocy of those supporting Hamas that deploys and endorses Marxist language (those people doing it is perfectly explicable, since the Palestinian cause was to a great degree a KGB-Soviet invention). Zionists and strong advocates of Israel do so too.

A typical example is found in a pro-Israeli meme that talks about the number of countries that speak English or Spanish compared to the number of countries that speak Hebrew. The meme proudly asserts that since over 60 countries speak English as a first or official main language and only one recognises Hebrew that means the Israeli cause is just-because this is how you ‘spot the colonizers’.

I can’t think of many examples of a meme where the makers so utterly accept the language choices, assumptions and ideologies of the people who hate them-and I’ve found most Zionists I’ve encountered to be pretty smart people.

Because the meme shows Zionists trying to reject a Marxist label put on them by Marxist enemies by accepting the Marxist premises of the label, by treating it with unthinking acceptance and respect. Yes, says the meme, there can’t be anything worse than being a ‘coloniser’ or an ‘imperialist’ or a ‘settler’. But I’m not one of those!

Now of course in one sense that is correct-you cannot be a settler in your own land, you cannot be a coloniser in the land of your people and your religion with your blood and faith connection to that place being older than anyone else’s (certainly far older than any Muslim claim). Unless Palestinians genetically prove they are Canaanites and Jebusites and perhaps drop Islam and go back to worshipping whatever gods Jebusites favored there is no way any Palestinian claim can be older than the Jewish one.

But the whole use of that language of settler and coloniser, using that language in that serious way accepts the premises of those who would destroy you.

In reality, and especially in a modern context, all these terms should be laughed at. They should be mocked. A person who has this thrown at them should probably embrace it. If you are English or Spanish or French or Israeli. If you are Christian or Jewish. It doesn’t matter.

These are pathetic, ancient, archaic, laughably misapplied Marxist propaganda labels. Their use testifies to a mind stuck in 1917, or earlier. Why should anyone take any of these accusations seriously? Why give them the dignity of accepting their premises, which is what you do when you beg that the term doesn’t apply to you.

When someone tells me there are over 60 nations that speak English and that makes me a colonizer I say “Thank you. Thank you so much for appreciating that my ancestors were stronger, smarter and more successful than yours. I’m loving this label. I might get it on a T shirt.”

Colonies aren’t markers of evil. They are markers of success. The people that built colonies did so because they were more successful than other places. That’s it. That’s all it is. Everyone through human history did it. Everyone who spread anywhere, won almost any conflict with another people or another nation, everyone who was ever technologically advanced enough to do it, or energetic enough to do it, or strong enough to do it, did it. Through all human history.

And through 99% of human history everyone understood that. From paleolithic tribes to Egypt, Greece and Rome and right up into the 20th century everyone understood this. For much of human history the insults of Marxist rhetoric were the boasts of the greatest kings.

Settler. Coloniser. Conqueror.

For much of human history people would be utterly bewildered to see these words being used as insults. These are the words of success. They are the words of achievement. They are the words of legacy. They are the words you had to claim to be remembered and respected. It is hardly surprising that Marxism always leads to failure-it is the creed of failures built on the hatred of success. And hypocritically built too, since the embittered will always show themselves, ultimately, in achieving and especially after achieving power, as more murderous, more violent, more vicious than the kings and systems they replace.

The insults of Marxist rhetoric are meaningless in multiple ways:

1. They are anachronistic, pertaining to a world that no longer exists.

2. They are universal-for if they denote actual crimes, these are crimes done by everyone.

3. They are hypocritical-for the people who deploy them will themselves support any level of brutality to achieve their ends.

4. They as much mark things a people, a nation or an individual can be proud of, as they mark things for which we should be ashamed.

Whenever they are expressed then it is better, for one’s own pride, dignity and worth, to embrace them than reject them. It is better to laugh at them as meaningless slurs cribbed from the scribblings of worthless human beings (abject moral and societal failures) like Marx and from the now irrelevant propaganda of psychopaths like Lenin and Stalin.

What is the relevance or point of the word imperialism in a world without Emperors? There is one Emperor left on the planet, and Japan has rather learnt its lesson. What is this talk of colonies, when the people being overrun by invaders are the ones you denounce?

It’s not past strength we should be ashamed of. Its present weakness.

So let us forego the weakness of accepting Marxist language and Marxist assumptions. Let us reclaim our pride all the more fiercely if it becomes a crime to do so. Let us speak this way to our enemies:

“MY colonisers, settlers and conquerors built this world, worm! they gave you your language, your leisure and your comfort by being better and stronger than you could ever be. They increased average life expectancy. They increased literacy. They built roads and schools and hospitals and ports and railways and cities. They made the deserts flower. They saved the splendors that came before them. They invented the medicine and technology you still need and rely on. They wrote poems to make angels weep, and music to make the poets jealous. They gave their blood and toil for every inch of ground they claimed. They won battles you would piss yourself just witnessing.

You, today, who can barely master yourself, chide THEM for mastering the globe? You whose triumphs are completing a computer game or perfecting a sneer? You, dwarf, pygmie, malcontent wretch, wicked posturing fool, with not an ounce of courage in your shrivelled frame and not a ghost of sense in your addled pate, you, weakling mewling thing spitting nothing but the old dust of grievances that were never yours to begin with….YOU sneer at THEM?

Does the insect mock the stars? Does the cripple outrace the stallion? Does fool’s gold mock real wealth? What and who are YOU to question them? What have you built? What have you made? What exists solely by your efforts? What in this wide world have you grasped and held, who barely knows a woman’s touch or a man’s embrace or how the two must differ? What have you done with the days of your life, save stumble from one false idea to the next, all inherited, all cant and hypocrisy slithering from your drooling lips, whining all the way, spitting out words you do not comprehend with an ever shrinking vocabulary?

What does the master of the wanking chariot have to say to the men who built whole nations? You have the order of things about face. It is your ancestors who are ashamed of you, you creeping maggot.”

That, if one must respond with anything but laughter, is how you respond to the charge of coloniser.