Where the Woke Are Right

'Some pretty foetid things have come about thanks to white, Euro-American action. But there are solutions.' Mr Coulombe is spot on! The West produced our civilisation or, at least, what remains of it.

From The European Conservative

By Charles Coulombe, KC*SS, STM

Some pretty foetid things have come about thanks to white, Euro-American action. But there are solutions.

This writer, in these pages; on other websites; and in publications, podcasts, and lectures, has time and again thundered on about the greatness of Europe’s faith, monarchies, and cultures. He has praised the empires that brought these across the oceans to the four quarters of the earth. Correspondingly, he has attacked with all his might in these venues those who denigrate them—most recently those strange folk called the Woke, with their attendant Antifa and BLM minions. He does not retract nor regret one single word. But the time has come to admit that Wokery is not entirely wrong: some pretty foetid things have come about thanks to white, Euro-American action, and it is time to come clean about it all. These evils generally fall into three camps: the export of Western technology without the religion that had made that technology possible; the global spread of corrosive ideologies such as Marxism and secular liberalism; and, finally, decolonisation, often carried out through haphazard and indifferent policies.

To be sure, when the Woke assert that all evils that afflict the world are the doings of White Euro-American males, they primarily mean the expansion of Christianity across the globe, and the various wars of conquest that accompanied that expansion. This is nonsense, not least because they ignore the innumerable bloodbaths that have occurred entirely without white European or American male participation. In fact, the first of our evils was the export of Western technology across the planet, divorced from the religion that made that technology possible. The reason why the West outstripped the ancient cultures of India, the Far East, Meso-America, Peru, and latterly Islam was precisely because of its Christianity. Gandhi observed that the one thing Britain did not bring to India was Christianity, which, devout Hindu though he was, the Mahatma thought unconscionable.

What this did was to create in colonial countries—as well as to some degree in nations like China and Japan—a class of technocrats and bureaucrats, who, while divorced from the traditions and mores of their native cultures by their educations, were nevertheless rather uninfluenced by Christian morals. Thus, from postman to premier, such folk were motivated purely by self-interest; this did not bode well for future independence.

The second and worse crime was the importation of ideologies which Europe and its children overseas had invented to replace Christianity. Of them all, Marxism on the one hand and secular liberalism on the other were the worst, because these apparent rivals became pervasive across the globe. Even China, which did not fall entirely to Christian colonialism, subjected itself completely to Marxism. India—itself an artificial creation of the British—is animated by a nationalism which, ironically, was similarly a British product. It is no wonder that Englishwoman Annie Besant, who was co-founder of the Indian National Congress, was also second president of the Theosophical Society, which offered a sort of Westernised Hinduism to Europeans and intellectual Indians on the basis of equality. Islam too, in many places, has been repackaged as a sort of Western ideology—and the result of these two forces meeting were the millions murdered during the 1947 partition of India.

That partition also brings to mind the third great crime inflicted on the Third World by Europe—decolonisation. Bereft of European supervision, and equipped with the ethical and aforementioned ideological backgrounds, most post-colonial countries became several kinds of nightmare. During the ’60s and ’70s, while the European and American media constantly dwelt upon the evils of apartheid, they blithely ignored the black-on-black and brown-on-brown genocides which were taking place. To be fair, this was for the American contingent simply the foreign equivalent of ignoring the endemic violence in non-white, inner-city neighbourhoods—and both were brought about by the unspoken, racist conviction that non-whites are incapable of decent behaviour, and hence must not be judged by its standards. But the horrors chronicled in the 1966 film, Africa Addio, were real. 

With that said, however, decolonisation was not solely the fault of the decolonisers, for all that they could now economically exploit their former possessions without investing much in return. After World War II, any attempt to resist the local “freedom fighters”—who were motivated by Western ideology—did not merely mean engaging those folk, but also their inevitable Soviet and American backers. This would have been a lot for all of Western Europe to fight, let alone a few of its constituent nations. Sir James Robertson, Nigeria’s last colonial governor-general, in his Transition in Africa: From Direct Rule to Independence, wrote, “Americans have asked me: ‘Why did you leave so soon, before the colonial territories were ready to rule themselves?’ And when I have answered, ‘Partly, I am sure, because of your pressure on us to go,’ [they] have answered that they did not know then what they know now, and that we should have resisted their pressure.” Instead, Nigeria endured the horrors of the Biafran civil war.

But if withdrawal from the colonial world meant being able to exploit without the expense of administering, it created another problem: colonial immigration. From Algeria’s Pieds Noirs to the Rhodesians, Western media have ignored the plight of European settlers forced to leave their newly ‘liberated’ homelands. As an American, I am happy that no power was able to intervene and force us to return to Europe. But in the wake of the returnees came waves of native locals, as abused by the new regimes as were the Europeans who would have spent the rest of their lives in those places. Inevitably, focus was placed on the poor reception that they received in their former metropoles, and the discrimination (and worse) they faced in their new surroundings. What was conveniently ignored were the horrible cultural, economic, and political conditions that forced them out—perpetrated, as they were and often are, by the same people whom the Euromerican media praised as liberators. Because so many of the migrants—no matter their misadventures in their new homes—represented the brightest and the best of their countries, the net result of this was a ‘brain drain’ in their native lands. This problem, too, is rarely addressed.

Added to these three outrages, of course, is a fourth—Wokery itself. Aspiring to give a voice to the allegedly voiceless, Wokery’s affluent white inventors far more often unconsciously act to keep locked down and immobile those whom they claim they wish to help. One remembers that, during the burning summer of 2020, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture offered the online guide “Talking about Race.” The guide included a chart cataloguing the “aspects and assumptions” of “white culture” that “have been normalized over time and are now considered standard practices in the United States.” These horrible aspects and assumptions include “hard work,” “self-reliance,” “be[ing] polite,” timeliness, and even “objective, rational linear thinking.” All were presented as mere products of “white dominant culture.” In a word, anything which might contribute to an individual’s success is to be rejected at any cost. In a word, the Woke would chain the peoples of colour, both at home and away, in dungeons of their own devising.

There are ways that we might undo this series of outrages: (1) we must reject Woke and all its works and pomps; (2) we must insist on colour-blind standards of behaviour, equally high for everyone; (3) we must struggle to recover, or else abandon, any of our organisations that turn Woke. Let the words ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ be taken as an invitation to leave immediately. 

The brain drain in the Third World (to say nothing of massive immigration, in the developed world, by the least skilled from those countries) cannot be stemmed until we accept the fact that this immigration is caused, not by evil individuals seeking to subvert the cultures amongst which they settle (though there are some few of those), but by those who must accept that their native lands are failed states. The immigration issue would ease considerably or vanish entirely if these conditions ceased—but they will not do so on their own. In a word, the nations of the West, which continue to profit from Third World products, need once more to take responsibility for those from whom they profit—in other words, ‘Recolonisation.’

In 2017, Bruce Gilley published an article in Third World Quarterly entitled “The Case of Colonialism.” The article’s subsequent adventures and those of its author are worth noting, as recounted by its current home at the National Association of Scholars (NAS): 

NAS member Bruce Gilley’s article, ‘The Case for Colonialism,’ went through double-blind peer review and was published in Third World Quarterly in 2017. It provoked enormous controversy and generated two separate petitions signed by thousands of academics demanding that it be retracted, that TWQ apologize, and that the editor or editors responsible for its publication be dismissed. Fifteen members of the journal’s thirty-four-member editorial board also resigned in protest. Publisher Taylor and Francis issued a detailed explanation of the peer review process that the article had undergone, countering accusations of “poorly executed pseudo-‘scholarship,’” in the words of one of the petitions. But serious threats of violence against the editor led the journal to withdraw the article, both in print and online. Gilley was also personally and professionally attacked and received death threats. On the good side, many rallied to his defense, including Noam Chomsky, and many supported the general argument of the article.

Though the idiotic prattle and the foolish threaten, the Truth remains. Something along the lines of Gilley’s suggestion must become the end of European, British, and American policy if the pressing flow of migrants is to be relieved. The vast majority would rather have a decent life in their own homelands than a marginal one in ours. It is mad to believe that incompetent regimes of recent manufacture, which routinely abuse or neglect their subjects, require the same respect as those which do not. Thusly, our governments must reorient their treatment of such regimes.

Unfortunately, the current rulership of the West—thanks to our outrages upon the colonial world—are not able to pass moral judgement upon such regimes. A government that pushes infanticide, perversion, and euthanasia upon its hapless subjects—and which has spent decades in concert with the media and educational industries to corrupt its populations in accepting it—is hardly capable of guiding foreign despots into more mundane economic and political virtue. Their false new religion of wokery, which they ceaselessly try to impose on every institution, ultimately offers only one means of Salvation—the destruction of everything the West has built. If its effects are corrosive in the countries whence it has originated, it would strangle all hope of anything better in the rest of the world.

So it falls to the parties of the Right, who wish to supplant the current masters, to begin to formulate their own ‘colonial policy.’ It is not enough simply to want to close borders; Conservatives must be willing—despite the puerile harassment meted out to people like Dr. Gilley—to come up with answers that will alleviate the suffering that spawns migration, and which will keep local people of talent at home, benefiting their countries and their fellow citizens.

But such policies, if they are not to repeat the late 19th and early 20th century mistakes, must be more than merely economic and cultural. If most of the horrors that have haunted the Third World in our time have come from the failure to implant Christianity sufficiently deep in those local soils, we must try again. The irony, of course, is that a lack of vocations in the developed world and a large number of them in the former colonies has meant that there is an odd reversal of roles in Catholic circles, with priests from India and Africa staffing centuries-old Catholic churches in Europe. Amongst the larger Protestant bodies, this is mirrored in the refusal of Third World ecclesial bodies to accept the doctrinal and moral deviations that their European and North American co-religionists attempt to foist on them. Pace Gandhi, in some ways and places, Christianity is now more deeply rooted in certain heathen locales than in the Mother Continent.

Despite the history of the past three centuries, if Europe really wishes to right the wrongs that they have committed, then Europeans must regain the Faith that made Europe great. Then, and only then, can Europe be what she has been and do what she must, at home and away.