Colonisation 2.0

Two statements struck me this week. 

One came from a Hamas leader, who said that 7 October was “just a rehearsal”.  Which kind of makes Israel’s strategy of wiping out Hamas look pretty sensible.  Proportional, blah, blah, blah.

The second comes from the classical historian Victor Davis Hanson:

The pro-Hamas crowd has little appreciation that colonizing Arab Muslims have one of history’s longest records of “settling” other countries far from their historic birthland.

Like Rotherham, United Kingdom, where the local teenage girls received undue attention from the incomers, just to take a random example.  Or Paris.  Or Lakemba.

Hanson continues:

They “settled” and “colonized” the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Middle East, Berber North Africa, and southern Spain. Millions of Middle Easterners migrated to—“settled?”—supposedly infidel European cities, where they often self-segregate and do not assimilate fully with their magnanimous hosts.

So, the Palestinians are both serial terrorists AND colonisers.  But why pick on them?   We are all colonisers.  Every damned one of us, since Adam was a boy.  We know that the British were.  Post 1788 bleaters, typically located in settler colonial studies programs housed in our more prestigious universities, never, ever shut up about it.

Hanson also states:

Before Israel even retaliated, the mass murdering of Jews earned praise from the Middle East, the international hard Left, and especially the faculty and students of elite Western campuses.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/12/01/the-unhinged-among-us/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=ODI0LU1IVC0zMDQAAAGPyTrjI30x6NUViGMCFZyOrMYUqsRh-9BlCyLRncdTIxi0EJGOjFqJCd94bmvrD6ccHLOCDskFVAViAlDe7cX4ttAAh2XjM30u5gGFp25CQYclHG5_

Note the third cohort of Jew-haters mentioned here.  The faculty and students of elite campuses.  Three things have simultaneously occurred over half a century in the academy to turn it into a seed-bed of social revolution.  First, there was the takeover of the humanities by post-modernist Marxism-Freudianism.  Second, we massively increased the numbers going on to higher education.  And third, we corporatised what were formerly communities of scholars, turning academics into employees and colonising – I use this word deliberately – the activity of teaching and learning with mini human resources dictatorships.  The universities have become the fulcrums of the push to change society.

Well, if VDH is correct, it is true that Aborigines and Palestinians do have much in common.  They are engaged in more or less aggressive re-colonisation (or de-colonisation) projects.  Tent embassy founder Gary Foley recently said:

Aboriginal people have a deep understanding of what Palestinians are going through because we are going through the same.  We stand with you to the end.

Intifada dreaming, as Timothy Cootes calls it.  Cootes says:

Decolonisation, as activists and professors like to remind each other, is not a metaphor.: it must involve taking back of land and the reclamation of sovereignty, and one might have to be armed when doing so.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/12/intifada-dreaming/

Here is a riddle.  When is an immigrant not a colonising settler?  Answer … never!  Especially when there are big numbers involved, when the settler isn’t like us, values wise, not in a state of preparedness to integrate, and when importing new people to change the mix is all quite deliberate.  Big numbers?  Airbus Albo’s current play is unprecedented.  Not even Howard and Costello could match what is underway now.  As a result, the NSW Government run by Albo’s mate Chris Minns says it needs to build 377,000 new houses in Sydney by 2029.  Whoa!  Sydney is already a slum city.

https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/new-rules-to-fast-track-low-rise-and-mid-rise-housing

Stateside, I think the authorities have simply given up counting the numbers, such is their Mexican problem

In relation to Britain, Richard Tice of Reform UK says, “It is not a surge.  It is a torrent”. 

Isabelle Oakeshott (Matt Hancock’s leaker) calls the British event “the systematic importing of hundreds of thousands of people every year”.  It is, she says, “a catastrophe” for the country.

Surely not, I hear the retort.  Immigration isn’t colonialism.  That would be very uncomfortable.  Well, the American writer N S Lyons is onto it:

“Colonization” and “decolonization” are hot topics these days. You can hardly set foot in an Anglo-American or European classroom, book store, or museum anymore without some leftie lecturing you about the need to “decolonize” everything in sight. Well, I always like to give people a fair hearing, so I figured it was worth taking a deeper dive into the topic of colonialism in order to broaden my understanding. And it turns out that those folx may be onto something! I am now woke to colonial injustice, and even won over on the urgent need for decolonization. Though maybe not in quite the way they’d assumed. So please glue yourself to the floor and join me for an educational lecture on the enduring relevance of the colonial menace.

Following a deconstruction of the various (mostly leftist) elements of colonialism, Lyons concludes:

That then is roughly what colonialism has looked like wherever and whenever it has reared its ugly head over the centuries. But, maybe all this history sounds a bit, well… uncomfortably familiar to you, dear Western reader? Perhaps, reviewing its characteristic deprivations, you even suspect that this ravenous beast could actually be the very same one that seems to be devouring you piece-by-piece this very moment?

The West’s Anti-Colonial Struggle is Real

Devouring us, piece by piece.  Let us explore a little further.

The web site Quora and its contributors delve into the distinctions between colonalisation and immigration.  For one contributor, colonialism can be defined as follows:

… the act or process of settling in and establishing governing power and dominance over a separate land and people.

https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-immigration-and-colonization-What-happens-to-immigration-after-it-becomes-colonization-the-process-Why-doesnt-this-happen-anymore-nowadays-at-least-in-Europe

Settling.  Power.  Dominance.  Another term often used is “subjugation”. 

Hence the key feature of colonialism and a difference with immigration is that, with the former, one country takes over the government of the other country.  When the coloniser is a democratic country, this materially affects the degree of “subjugation”.  It might well be that individual and group rights – an admittedly Western philosophical idea – are actually advanced during the colonising process.  Add to this new economic opportunities and material progress – as Jacinta Price recently acknowledged, much to the discomfort of her audience at the National Press Club – and you might think the Brits were a pretty attractive proposition.  New Zealand Maori certainly saw great opportunities for trade under the “burden” of British Crown rule.

While mass immigration is said by some to help the local economy, this is contested and almost always exaggerated.  Moreover, there is certainly social decline with the loss of national identity and an increase in friction between migrant groups who typically reside in enclaves and create echo chambers.  No prizes for guessing the most recent examples of same.  Multiculturalism is largely a dangerous myth.  What we actually have is multi-monoculturalism.  Hence the benefits of colonialism are routinely denied or downplayed, while the downsides of mass immigration are swept under the carpet, when comparisons between the two are made. 

What of governance, though?  Well, over time the State gets taken over by new migrant groups and their influence on public policy only ever grows.  The pro-Palestinian stances of government and related entities is clear, as is the allowance by governments of Palestinian supporters to take over the streets of our cities.  Longer term, the creation of multiculturalism – in a formal sense, by Malcolm Fraser – was both an outcome of the end of the White Australia Policy – by Harold Holt in 1967 – and a cause of the embedding of a philosophy which was only ever going to advance the influence of migrants on governance and society.  Multiculturalism as policy has meant the elimination over time of integration and assimilation as national objectives.  This has been both irrevocable and harmful.  Just look at some of the Islamist signs at the protests.  “Behead those who insult Islam”.  The fruits of mass immigration.  To reverse Paul Keating’s maxim, change the country and you change the government.  Subjugation comes in many forms.

The British demographer, Paul Morland, has spoken about “demographic engineering”.  He wrote a book of that title, in 2014.

Demography has always mattered in conflict, but with conflict increasingly of an inter-ethnic nature, with sharper demographic differences between ethnic groups and with the spread of democracy, numbers count in conflict now more than ever. This book argues for and develops a framework for demographic engineering which provides a fresh perspective for looking at political events in countries where ethnicity matters. It asks how policies have been framed and implemented to change the demography of ethnic groups on the ground in their own interests. It also examines how successful these policies have been, focusing on the cases of Sri Lanka, Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland and the USA. Often these policies are hidden but author Paul Morland teases them out with skill both from the statistics and documentary records and through conversations with participants. Offering a new way of thinking about demographic engineering (‘hard demography’ versus ‘soft demography’) and how ethnic groups in conflict deploy demographic strategies, this book will have a broad appeal to demographers, geographers and political scientists.

https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Demographic_Engineering_Population_Strat/VznjBAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

A striking phrase and an interesting idea.  It turns out that demographic engineering is a thing.  While Morland talks about strategies in countries with ethnic conflicts, it also seems to apply to broader questions of immigration and colonialism.  The West is now facing the twin prospects of its own rapidly declining birth rates and “occupation” by, as Konstantin Kisin believes, people who hate us even before they arrive. 

And, as Peter Whittle of the New Culture Forum says, “we were never asked”.  A little like the Aborigines in 1788, you might say.

With mass immigration, we have Quora’s trifecta – settlement, power, domination.  Look at contemporary Australia.  Or Europe.  Sadiq Khan’s modern London, which John Cleese hardly recognises.  France.  Germany.  Sweden.  Sweden?  According to the writer and journalist Lars Åberg:

What happened to our country? Sweden has been transformed by multiculturalism.

“Transformed”.  Sweden has grown by 2 million people over two decades.  They are pretty well all immigrants.  Immigration was formally ditched in the 1970s for multiculturalism.  No demands are made now on newcomers.  Now the country is defined by welfarism, crime, gangs, unemployment and anti-social behaviour.  All from the “moral hubris” of a new philosophy of “tolerance” and the rejection of solidarity, the principle that used to define Swedish exceptionalism.  Is Sweden a happier place?  A better place?  The point here is that it is simply a different place.  Those who were there half a century ago no longer “own” the place in the same way.

Mass immigration is reverse colonisation by another name.  Multicultural London drove the Remain vote in 2017.  But Remain lost, you say.  No, it didn’t.  It lost the battle but has won the war.  A war in which relentless, unstoppable immigration is the winner.  Roger Scruton once said (in his book, Where We Are, published in 2017) that it all changed for Britain when foreigners were permitted to purchase British real estate.  This was a critical marker in the march towards control by David Goodhart’s “anywheres’.  In effect, the colonisation of the earlier coloniser nations has involved both haters and the temporary beneficiaries of globalisation’s economic profit AND the advantages offered by the new residences.  No need to become “citizens” with obligations.  The worst of both worlds, and both sets of incomers do nothing to advance the position of the existing population, and much to diminish it.  As Scruton observes of the “networked”, globally connected, non-embedded, obligation free non-citizen:

There location is not a place, but a set of instructions for ignoring it.

Scruton wrote another book called England: An Elegy.  An elegy is:

 … a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead.

The German Catholic Cardinal Gerhard Müller says mass migration is being used to destroy national identities.

In an exclusive interview with LifeSiteNews, Müller talked about the ideologies behind globalism and their dire consequences. 

“Mass immigration is not about helping people but about destroying national identity,” Müller said. “They say that national identity is nationalism, which has caused all the wars, so they say they are against nationalism, but they are really against the nation.” 

“If nationalism is the reason for wars, we must ask who is financing the wars and what interests are behind it.” 

“They want everyone to be completely isolated and not connected by language, culture, family ties, or a native land where you feel at home,” Müller continued. 

“They want to destroy all that. They want everyone to be atomized, without cultural and religious roots and identity,” he concluded. 

Müller also believes the elites are committing a “genocide” by promoting abortion and euthanasia. 

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/exclusive-cardinal-muller-says-mass-migration-is-being-used-to-destroy-national-identities/?utm_source=digest-catholic-2023-12-05&utm_medium=email

According to Wikipedia, source of all definitions woke and progressive:

Settler colonialism occurs when colonizers invade and occupy territory to permanently replace the existing society with the society of the colonizers. Settler colonialism is a form of exogenous domination typically organized or supported by an imperial authority. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settler_colonialism

Let us use this definition.

Moving to another country and settling there, for good, in huge numbers, legally or illegally, and insisting, with the host country’s apparent delight, that they keep all of their old customs and beliefs, moves us on from a world of nation states to a world of decidedly wobbly real estate.  Where anyone lives anywhere.  Where the Chinese Communist party owns much of our real estate, infrastructure and farmland, following a carefully planned and meticulously executed decades long project of economic colonialism. 

Feels like exogenous domination to me.  Replace the existing society?  Getting very warm, methinks.  Invasion?  Occupation?  Sounds pretty accurate as a description of our current population mix and the geographic patterns of migrant settlement.  There is little English ever spoken in many parts of Sydney and Melbourne.  Try and find a sign in English in suburban, middle class Eastwood (Sydney), for example.  I am not at all sure that this isn’t colonialism, simply practised and achieved by different means.  I cannot recall a single election campaign when mass immigration was even raised.  No mandate there.

It is now common practice to be greeted just about anywhere in the public square with a welcome to a country I foolishly thought was already mine to begin with.  Whitey is caught between our Indigenous predecessors actively engaged in re-colonisation and now endless waves of immigrants that came after us.  And changed us.  What with the Aborigines owning and controlling well over half the country (and growing), and now half the population having at least one parent born overseas, our current national development has all the feel of colonialism by “settlers”, lacking only the approbrium.

And progressives think that replacement theory is an awful, evil conspiracy theory.  Change the population and you change the country.

Owning and controlling?  Well, yes.  During Covid, we were locked in.  Now, we are locked out.  From great swathes of our country.  Try going for a bush walk on Mt Warning now.  Uluru is already off limits.

An engineering geologist with over twenty years specialising in landslide risk assessment says he has a strong belief that our national parks and the natural wonders they hold should be available to all Australians.

Mark Hendrickx says he finds it sad that access to the natural world in Australia has been turned into a political football by bureaucrats and Aboriginal groups more interested in exercising power than respecting traditional views, and the cultural beliefs of others who enjoy bushwalking and climbing mountains.

https://www.echo.net.au/2021/02/geologist-says-mt-warning-is-safe-to-climb/

Try it and potentially cop a 40,00 dollar fine.  A lockout by any other name.  There will be more and more Mt Warnings in the future.  In 1970, the Five Man Electrical Band penned the lyrics:

And the sign said
"Anybody caught trespassin'
Will be shot on sight"
So I jumped on the fence and I yelled at the house
"Hey! What gives you the right
To put up a fence to keep me out
But to keep Mother Nature in?
If God was here, he'd tell you to your face
'Man, you're some kind of sinner'"

Keeping us locked out of our own country is on par with the equally racist laws which stopped Aborigines from having a drink in the pub back in the day.  It is called apartheid.  It was, and is.

And we are now afraid to walk down the streets of our cities, certainly on days – and there are lots of them – when the streets are taken over by un-harassed, pro-Hamas protesters, or whatever you want to call them.

VDH isn’t under any illusions about the nature of those that our own resident or imported pro-Palestinian supporters are defending.

Hamas shot any of its own supporters who refused to shield Hamas gunmen.

It continued launching rockets at Israeli civilian centers. It serially lied about its casualties, expropriating intended relief food and fuel for its underground tunnel city of killers.

Abroad, Hamas supporters also emulated the methods of the pro-Nazi demonstrators in Western cities of the 1930s. Unlike their pro-Israel critics, the pro-Hamas demonstrators in the U.S. and Europe turned violent.

They took over and defaced private and public property. They chanted genocidal antisemitic slogans calling for erasure of the nation of Israel.

They interrupted shoppers, blocked highways, attacked businesses, and swarmed bridges. They assaulted police.

The majority wore masks to hide their identities in the fashion of antisemitic Klansmen.

If you are going to be settled by anyone, I personally would choose Arthur Phillip’s cohort – including the convicts – who were basically bringing the Enlightenment and the benefits of the industrial revolution, over many of our recent arrivals, visa holders and “guests” with neither a visa or citizenship.

Among the progressive class’s many, many cases of cognitive dissonance, this one surely takes the cake.  Endlessly castigating colonial powers and their “settlers”, surely the meaningless buzz word of the year, while simultaneously accepting mass immigration as a foundational principle in one’s ideology is quite the feat.

We inhabit a world where the “anywheres” rule in an era of open borders, where there are no rules controlling what real estate is mine and what is yours, where nations as we understood them no longer mean much, where raw power is the lingua franca, where re-colonisation is a thing.  We are left with colonialism 2.0.  New rules.

Just so we know.  Bulldust detectors should be up and about.  Colonialism ain’t new.  Everyone does it.  The trick is to label the other side the colonisers, and hope against hope that no one notices what you are up to.

Paul Collits

6 December 2023