The terror of being colonized

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/02/2025 (244 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Is resistance to colonization terrorism, or is colonization itself a form of terrorism? Might Canada become the 51st state of America?

According to British intellectual Peter Ustinov, “terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.” War is terrorism with a bigger budget. And as the saying goes, “freedom fighters” to some are “terrorists” to others.

For example, the Taliban who fought Soviet presence in Afghanistan in 1985 were lauded as the former, but when they battled American presence in 2015, they were labelled the latter.

So, when is rebellious, repressive, or nationalist physical force justified? According to whom?

What would be more terrifying than having your land, livelihood, language, and lineage taken from you by a foreign people? Clearly, having your own very life and the lives of your relatives taken via the protracted terror of colonization. For example, when white European settlers began arriving on the east coast of Turtle Island (North America) in 1600, the Mi’kmaq Nation of what is now Nova Scotia was 200,000 strong. However, 150 years later, only 1,500 remained.

Gradual cultural genocide is only slightly less violent than the sudden physical genocide of the 1932-33 Holodomor in Ukraine and the 1941-45 Holocaust in German-occupied Europe.

For another example, take Africa, as Europeans did, literally. In 1885, European powers convened at a conference in Berlin to divide up the continent of Africa, and by 1910, they controlled 90 per cent of the land. Poet Rudyard Kipling explicated that it was “the white man’s burden” to rule peoples who were “half devil and half child.”

At the peak of apartheid in South Africa in 1978, blacks were 81 per cent of the population, had 18 per cent of the national income, and occupied 13 per cent of the land. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it so pithily, “When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.”

Other examples include the confinement of Palestinians to 13 per cent of their original land in Israel prior to the current conflict, the “stolen generations” of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and of course our own Canadian cultural genocide of Indigenous people via residential schools (to “kill the Indian in the child”), native reserves, the ’60s Scoop, the Indian Act, and more.

At its pre-First World War peak, the British Empire controlled 23 per cent of the world’s population, and 24 per cent of the earth’s total land area. However, with the post-Second World War creation of the United Nations and its condemnation of colonial foreign rule as a violation of human rights, the decolonization of nations, already in process, accelerated. As with the break-up of other empires, India and many African nations regained their independence in the second half of the twentieth century.

Hopefully, even ideological conservatives, those who want to conserve traditional social hierarchies, would acknowledge that decolonization is a progressive good, given the psychopathology of colonization elucidated by Franz Fanon. Postcolonialism is surely a healthier, safer place to be. Nevertheless, the challenge of internal colonialism remains, wherein Indigenous Peoples living under settler colonialism long for self-determination.

Uncomfortably, but unavoidably, the hard truths of history are not amoral. They cannot be detached from their moral culpability, and as much as we may prefer, we ought not simply look away from truth that requires reconciliation. We ought not settle for mere conflict resolution in which disputing parties find some way to accommodate one another’s conflicting interests.

We are morally obligated to pursue authentic reconciliation, which includes a changed psychological orientation toward the other group that satisfies each group’s different socio-emotional identity needs.

In truth, colonization is in practice a form of terrorism with a bigger budget, though merely acknowledging it as such is not yet social justice activism. It is simple, factual, academic history that should be taught in our schools. To refuse to do so is to co-conspire with colonialism and grant it acquitted closure by whitewashing history.

We should be able to say to our graduates, as slave abolitionist William Wilberforce said to the British Empire, “You may choose to look the other way, but you can never again say you did not know.”

Dennis Hiebert teaches in the department of sociology and criminology at the University of Manitoba.