What Did You Think Decolonisation Meant?

Of course, if you call for a crackdown on "decolonisation", you're a threat to academic freedom. Because to left wingers, killing their enemies is the number 1 priority

What Did You Think Decolonisation Meant?

I vividly recall a meeting of our philosophy department a few years ago when a student representative—or perhaps a young PhD—broached the topic of “decolonising” the philosophy curriculum. It was bound to happen sooner or later: I had already caught murmurs and whispers about this decolonisation movement in academia. Like other manifestations of “wokeness,” it had emerged across the Atlantic and only later trickled down to Europe. I must have rolled my eyes at the meeting. I vaguely remember speaking out against the idea, though in truth I did not take it very seriously.

Part of me was even inclined to sit back, mildly amused, and see how it would unfold. You see, unlike many philosophers, I do not spend much time studying the illustrious Dead White Males of the canon. Not because I am especially woke, but because I am what philosophers call a “naturalist”: someone primarily concerned with real-world problems of today, in my case science and technology. For some of my colleagues, however, poring over the great works of Kant, Hegel, and Aristotle—seeking ever new interpretations and insights—is a lifelong vocation. Moreover, most philosophers lean left and desire to “stick with the program.” So how, I wondered, would they square the circle of dedicating their lives to Dead White Males—who were often very racist and sexist—while still staying in the good graces of contemporary activists? You can’t exactly rewrite the history of philosophy. It struck me as somebody else’s knot to untangle.

I was terribly wrong to be so insouciant, as I discovered when 7 October happened. I’m not Jewish and don’t have a personal connection to Israel, so initially I didn’t follow the news very closely. I had relegated the attack to the—regrettably vast—mental category of jihadist terrorist attacks across the globe, failing to grasp that this was, in fact, a full-blown invasion. In my naivety, I assumed that after the massacres in Paris, Brussels, Nice, Berlin, and countless other Western cities, everyone had finally woken up to the true nature of jihadism. When a bunch of Allahu Akbar-chanting fanatics slaughtered innocent young people at a music festival, just as they had done at the Bataclan in Paris, it seemed inconceivable to me that any of my colleagues and friends would condone, rationalise, or even celebrate such acts. And yet that is precisely what happened.

To my horror, within days—even hours—of the attack, when the Israeli army was still fighting off the invaders, I started seeing reactions of excitement and gleeful jubilation on social media. Not from the usual religious maniacs praising Allah, but from left-wing activists at prestigious universities. Academics started breathlessly applying the same framework of decolonisation that I had foolishly brushed aside as amusing but harmless virtue signalling. As the writer Najma Sharif famously posted on X that day, racking up tens of thousands of likes and reposts: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”

It was as though she was talking about me. I was one of those “losers” who had been foolish enough to think that decolonisation amounted to little more than papers and essays, along with some harmless but well-intentioned proposals to diversify the philosophy curriculum. If only. What I came to see in the wake of 7 October was something far less benign. Decolonisation operates as a rigid, almost Manichaean ideology that neatly divides the world into evil perpetrators (Western colonisers) and innocent victims (the colonised, indigenous peoples). In this worldview, there is no room for moral ambiguity. Those on the wrong side of the divide are irredeemably rotten and deserve everything that’s coming to them, while those on the side of the angels are completely absolved of any wrongdoing. If they appear to commit atrocities, these are reframed as understandable—perhaps even inevitable—responses to prior injustice. In fact, the more extreme the violence, the greater the wrongs they must have endured.

At one point, many on the Left considered Israel an admirable success story of decolonisation—of an indigenous people driving out the Western colonisers and achieving self-determination in their historical homeland. For a variety of complex historical reasons, however, the Jewish state is now firmly relegated to the side of the oppressors. In fact, Israel is regarded as the settler-colonialist enterprise par excellence, and Palestinians as paragons of victimhood. And that is all the latter-day activists need to know to reach their moral verdicts—which explains why those verdicts came rushing in mere hours into the unfolding event.

That mindset was on full display in a joint open letter at my own Ghent University, published just three days after 7 October. It pointedly refused to condemn Hamas, shifted all blame for the massacre onto “Zionists,” and praised Palestinians for their “tenacity and fierce resistance to racism and settler colonialism,” which the signatories found immensely “inspiring.” The ideological rationale is right there in the letter: “Decolonization is not a metaphor, nor is it only a theory to be used for intellectual clout. It is about supporting the right for self-determination of Palestinians to live freely and with dignity.” It was signed by two thousand academics and students.

An even more revolting open letter at the University of Amsterdam, again with hundreds of signatories, rejoiced that 2023 “will no doubt be the year admired, recorded and studied for the way in which Palestinians steadfastly resisted colonialism, occupation and survived genocide.” The text echoes the same jargon and turns of phrase, as if its authors’ minds had been hijacked by the same zombie virus: “We must stress that decolonisation is not an abstract theory, it is an action, it is a way of being. [...] Decolonisation is not a metaphor. [...] It is the UvA’s ethical duty to support decolonial endeavors that aim to end colonialism.”

Every one of these academics would describe themselves as “progressive” or “left-wing.” And yet here they were, rallying to the defence of a reactionary death cult that had just committed the largest antisemitic pogrom since the Holocaust, livestreaming their atrocities with GoPro cameras, sadistically calling family members on the victims’ cellphones, ecstatically calling home in triumph to boast of how many Jews they had killed with their bare hands.

My heart sank further when I scrolled through the list of signatories and discovered some familiar names—cordial colleagues, even friends. Most were young students, exactly the sort of people who might have been at a rave like Nova, enjoying life and dancing like there’s no tomorrow.

Most of my progressive friends, thankfully, did not go so far as to glorify the 7 October attack. Far more numerous were those who dutifully condemned what Hamas did, only to shift the blame for the massacre almost entirely onto Israel. How did you expect those poor Palestinians to react after being forced to live in an “open-air prison” and “concentration camp” for sixteen years? (The same “concentration camp” would soon be mentally transfigured into an idyllic place of peace and prosperity once the war had laid waste to large parts of it.)

It is important to dwell on those early responses to 7 October because they allow us to isolate the influence of the decolonisation ideology and to disentangle it from the horrific war that ensued. It is often said that the hatred toward Israel over the past two years is just an understandable reaction to the devastation in Gaza. But while the hostility certainly intensified as the death toll rose, many thousands of academics were already condemning Israel before any large-scale military response had begun. The most radical among them were celebrating a spree of mass killing and hostage-taking that they knew would inevitably invite an overwhelming military response from Israel. Even if they couldn’t care less about the lives of the Israeli “occupiers”—which many of them didn’t—their sense of jubilation was monstrous.

In an earlier essay, I dissected the absurd accusation that Israel has committed “genocide” in Gaza. But even apart from the mountain of logical and empirical arguments against this charge, the fact that it was already being floated a mere days or weeks after 7 October is further evidence of the accusers’ bad faith. By 13 October, people like Raz Segal were already calling it a “textbook genocide.” Indeed, in the framework of settler colonialism that many swear by, the very existence of Israel is by definition “genocidal.”

My world changed not so much on 7 October as on 8 October, when I was jolted out of my complacency and became aware of the poisonous ideology of “decolonisation” that had quietly taken over large swaths of academia in the course of the preceding decades. My worldview was shaken so profoundly that I have since embarked on a quest to understand how self-proclaimed progressives, of all people, could have arrived at this point. In my upcoming book The Betrayal of Enlightenment, I will reconstruct the intellectual history of this ideology, from postmodern authors like Michel Foucault to postcolonial theorists like Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. If the Left wants to recover from this moral catastrophe, it must begin a serious reckoning.