Humanities & Cultures

Obviously, there have been forcible conquering and replacement of people all throughout history. There are echoes of this in the Nomadic Cycle even, which stretches back thousands of years.

That's said, the SetCol of the modern era was very much birthed in Western Europe by the imperial powers there, and is tied into a mindset of racial supremacy, where the conquered population is dehumanized in the media to create indifference and support among the imperialist populace, while claiming to wish for equality between the groups (often by using ridiculous and one-sided demands as prerequisites for peace and equality, so that the settler populace can say, "oh, well we're trying to work with them, it's they who aren't being reasonable!").

That tactic has been exported to Russia (vis a vis Ukrainians), China (Tibetans and Uyghurs), and obviously Israel, along with the countries the article lists like Indonesia and Morocco, and I have seen plenty of acknowledgement by Western Leftists of those first 3. I would venture to say that part of the issue with Indonesia and Morocco is one of media penetration; big countries tend to not really spend much time talking about 'small' ones.

Settler colonialism in the Global South is not usually accompanied by these explicitly racist qualities. Indeed, what is characteristic about settler colonialism in the Global South is that it is generally accompanied by a perverse rhetoric of racial equality.

This is the author drinking the Settlers' rhetorical kool-aid wholesale.

countries like China, Indonesia and India were united by ‘a common detestation of racialism’. The violent displacement of minorities by dominant ethnic groups in settings like Xinjiang or West Papua seems paradoxical.

How do we explain the ongoing practice of settler colonialism in countries rhetorically committed to the abolition of colonialism?

None of the modern Settler-Colonialist powers create an explicit racial hierarchy in their external rhetoric anymore. Everyone claims to be anti-racist, usually literally while they Do The Racism.

The US doesn't say that it considers Black and Indigenous people to be lesser than White people either, but it still treats them as such. Is this just some inscrutable paradox? No, it's just the modern mask of SetCol.

It's also interesting, because this is well-discussed in Leftist circles, even in the West, because this is an important aspect of the so-called Settler's-Move-to-Innocence , where the settler populace acknowledges that "maybe things their ancestors or government did weren't always great, but that's not the fault of the ones who didn't directly do the 'replacement', and they shouldn't be held responsible!" and points to the rhetoric of racial equality to deny it's continued place in those systems (along with many other tactics of denying culpability). Anyone else remember people unironically claiming that "racism is dead" after Obama's election? Because I sure do.

This is how the now-entrenched Settler population justifies excluding discussion of de-col, by trying to frame de-col as "reverse SetCol!" (i.e. doing SetCol to the 'innocent' settler populace).