Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), painfully progressive in an American context, is quite the ethno-nationalist when it comes to her native Somalia . In Washington, D.C. , she advertises her discomfort with the United States, complaining about “the history of indigenous people, of enslavement, of police brutality.” When former President Donald Trump refused to recognize Nicolas Maduro’s blatantly rigged election in Venezuela , she called it a “U.S.-backed coup.”
But when it comes to Somalia, she is cheerfully irredentist, telling her Somali-origin constituents in their mother tongue that she wanted to bring all Somalis together in a single state.
Progressives approve of certain nationalisms. Somali nationalism, Venezuelan nationalism, Palestinian nationalism — fine and dandy. American nationalism? Racist!
The way in which leftists justify the difference is to distinguish between colonialism (boo!) and anti-colonialism (yay!). They appeal, in other words, to our sense of territoriality, of prior claim, of “we were here first.” This allows them to damn the U.S. for the displacement of an indigenous population, as well as damning Europe for having sent settlers overseas. But the idea that these things make the West unusual does not withstand scrutiny.
Population displacement has happened on every continent since the Stone Age. Europeans have been doing it to each other for as long as anyone can remember. At the end of World War II, for example, some 14 million ethnic Germans were driven out of villages in Eastern Europe that their ancestors had inhabited for centuries. Some of their homes were given to Poles who had themselves been forcibly removed from the parts of their country newly annexed to the USSR.
Yet, in leftist logic, forced population movements don’t count if they are white-on-white. Nor, indeed, brown-on-brown or black-on-black. “Settler colonialism” is held to be a vice peculiar to Europe, the U.S., and now, Israel.
But just look at the rest of the world. Arabs have been settled by the state in Iraqi Kurdistan, Bengalis in the Chittagong Hills, Moroccans in the Western Sahara, Indonesians in West Papua, Han Chinese in Xinjiang, Shona in Matabeleland, Sinhala in eastern Sri Lanka, and Burmese in Arakan. And these are just the recent cases. Go back further, and we all came from somewhere else.
My point is not that population movements are indefensible. Most disputes have two sides, and, in some cases, the “colonizing” state has a good argument. My point, rather, is that the popularization of the phrase “settler colonialism” illustrates what Eric Kaufmann calls “asymmetric multiculturalism,” meaning the celebration of every patriotism except that of white Westerners.
Lenin was the first anti-colonialist. Unlike Karl Marx, who saw empire as a way to spread education, modern medicine, and class consciousness, Lenin believed that capitalism had staved off the inevitable proletarian revolution by plundering the resources of subject peoples. Soviet agents sedulously spread this argument, which was taken up by leftist intellectuals from colonized places, often in racial terms.
“Fortified in aggressive spirit by an arrogant, messianic Christianity, and motivated by the lure of enriching plunder, white hordes have sallied forth from their western European homelands to assault, loot, occupy, rule, and exploit the world,” the Nigerian author Chinweizu wrote.
“The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Blacks, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races,” wrote Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary from Martinique.
For anti-colonialists, the villains must always be white Westerners. Other kinds of conquest do not count. When the black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois visited occupied Manchuria in 1936, he saw not a place where Japanese settlers were oppressing the indigenous Chinese but “a country of colored people run by colored people for colored people.” The Japanese were engineering population displacement, but that did not bother a good anti-colonialist like Du Bois. “It is not that I sympathize with China less,” he wrote, “but that I hate white European and American propaganda, theft, and insult more.”
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And that, in the end, is what all this boils down to: anti-white racism (with Jews, for these purposes, being considered white). Immigration into the U.S. or Europe by nonwhite people is celebrated. Immigration into Gaza by Jews, even when it happened through peaceful land purchases, is condemned.
Omar is not an outlier. Her views have been mainstream on the Left for decades. Everything wrong with the world is held to be the fault of the liberal and democratic states, above all those that speak English. Anything done by other countries is either justified or is the fault of the West. White people are at the root of almost any evil. Odd that such a doctrine should have come to be seen as progressive.
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