Recent days have seen a number of so-called “social justice” activists and academics defend, justify, minimize and in some cases even cheer Hamas’ brutal attack on Israeli civilians. The argument, if you can call it one, is that such brutality is either a necessary or inevitable part of decolonization. Activists claim Israel is an oppressive and evil colonizer state whose actions create the conditions for the sort of attacks Hamas engaged on Oct. 7.
Decolonization is a well defined term-of-art that comes out of an academic discipline called “postcolonial theory.” Post-colonial theory is one of the domains of critical social justice (AKA: “woke”) scholarship, alongside such disciplines as critical race theory, disability studies, fat studies and queer theory. As such, postcolonial theory can be thought of as the branch of critical social justice theory that is concerned with thinking up woke ideas about “colonialism.”
Decolonization seeks to dismantle the hegemony of the West and western ideals such as liberalism, capitalism, western-style democracy, the western rationalistic tradition in philosophy and the western conception of science. The practical result of this is that activists and academics who identify with decolonization also side politically with any group that opposes the West.
And this includes Hamas.
Please keep this in mind when you see the term “decolonize.” The people who developed this term want to destroy Western Civilization in the name of woke ideology. It is not just a word from sensitivity training; it is, as we have seen, a name for a process of destroying our society.
Postcolonial theory, like all woke theories, is built on a fusion of postmodernism and neo-Marxist “critical theory.” Its goal is to create theories that can be employed in the service of disrupting, dismantling, and deconstructing liberal capitalist democracies and replacing them with something else. In other words, the goal of postcolonial theory is a political revolution.
In 1961 the father of post-colonial theory, Frantz Fanon, wrote a book called “The Wretched of the Earth,” in which he defended the right of “colonized” people to use violence to gain their freedom from colonizers. Pulling from an Algerian leaflet, he wrote, “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”
According to Fanon, “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. At whatever level we study it — relationships between individuals, new names for sports clubs, the human admixture at cocktail parties, in the police, on the directing boards of national or private banks — decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men.”
In the 1970s and 80s, influential postmodernist thinkers increasingly focused on the influence of colonialism and took postcolonial theory in a new direction. Theorist Edward Said argued that “the West” had constructed a way of talking about “the East,” such that it elevated a western way of thinking about the world and denigrated “the East,” making the East look inferior by comparison. Western thinkers, he suggested, used the East as a foil against which they could show the superiority of the West.
Said, following Michael Foucault, conducted a postmodern discourse analysis that sought to do a close reading of western texts about the East. By looking for all the subtle ways in which the West had glorified itself at the expense of the East, Said aimed to expose and problematize the ways in which the West had set itself above the East. Said’s goal in doing this was to open the door to a rewrite of history that was more favorable to the East. “My argument is that history is made by men and women,” he wrote, “just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that ‘our’ East, ‘our’ Orient becomes ‘ours’ to possess and direct.”
In her article “Can the Subaltern speak?” celebrated Indian postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak uses postmodern reasoning to argue that “subaltern” (colonized) peoples have no voice. In fact, she says, they can’t even speak at all! Spivak said that colonizers impose a way of talking about things that embeds into the culture a way of thinking and communicating which simply leaves no room for the ideas, thoughts, arguments, political positions and beliefs of the “subaltern.”
Spivak argues that knowledge always carries with it the assumptions, values, norms, and interests of its producers, so when all the “knowledge” that is legitimized and accepted in society is created by the West, then western interests are always advanced within society. This means that it is almost impossible for the colonized person to express their own interests on their own terms using their own forms of knowledge. In response to this, Spivak advocated for “strategic essentialism,” which encouraged oppressed people to adopt colonized identities in a self-aware way in order to use identity politics to flip the power imbalances in their favor.
Decolonization, for Fanon, meant replacing all the colonizers with colonized people, using violence (or threats of violence) in order to free colonized people from the shackles of western influence. Said and Spivak’s development of decolonization sought to deconstruct the ideas, norms, values, knowledge and culture of the West and then use identity politics to subvert the current political order to gain freedom.
When postcolonial theory is followed to its logical endpoint it concludes that the violence committed by Hamas is just “blowback” for years of oppression. As such, any condemnation of Hamas from postcolonial theorists is done on the understanding that Hamas is directionally correct about the illegitimacy of Israel, but have chosen the wrong tactics. The view here is that the larger problem is not Hamas, but rather the colonizer government of Israel, which is occupying Palestinian land. To put it in blunt terms, the view is, “First we destroy America and Israel, and then maybe we’ll talk about all those rapes and murders.”
When leftists talk about decolonization, then, they are talking about the systematic destruction of any and all western influence in colonized areas by any means necessary. Anyone who tries to rescue any western norms, morals, developments, ideologies, frameworks, ideas or anything else is guilty of being complicit in colonialism. Postcolonial theory sees Western Civilization as a corrupt, racist, sexist and imperial. Accordingly, postcolonial theorists want to socially and politically annihilate Western Civilization along with all the ideas, concepts, arguments, philosophies, values and culture that produce and maintain it.
Michael Young is a visiting fellow at the Center for Renewing America. His writing, research, and tweeting as @Wokal_Distance focus on culture, political philosophy, and the rise of postmodernism.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.