In 2019, I wrote about the concept of “State Conquest,” in which the cultural basis of a state is not just subverted but reversed. The religion becomes the opposite of what it was. The ethnic core changes, replaced by the traditional enemy. Heroes become villains, and even basic symbols such as flags and names change.

I did not think this would happen in the United States for a few years, but it lurched in that direction in 2020. Greg Johnson was not far off when he called 2020 “The Year America Died.” There are many signs of impending death. Statues to new heroes such as George Floyd go up as George Washington comes down. You can burn the American flag but desecrating a gay rights flag is a hate crime. Most Americans now even believe that the First Amendment goes “too far” in protecting free speech. “Lawfare” by non-white progressives, especially black women such as Letitia James, can be devastating. Conservative whites claim they “don’t see race;” everyone else does.

Some say there is a point at which “wokeness” becomes so destructive and insane that there must be a reaction. This may not be true. Those in power — media, academia, government — decide what is insane. The new Democrat Party claim that Donald Trump and JD Vance are “weird” is effective, not because the party of “trans kids” is a bastion of normalcy, but because the media decide what is normal. It actually is weird to show independence of thought, and whites are unique in that regard.

There is little reason to believe that societal collapse “wakes up” many people. No one with power publicly regrets the destruction of Rhodesia, even though modern Zimbabwe is an undeniable disaster. South Africa continues to decline, and apartheid’s defenders have been entirely redeemed by history. Most of the world still pays tribute to Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, uses apartheid as a slur, and incites hatred against Afrikaner holdouts in Orania. High crime rates in black-run cities do not discredit black rule; they seem to strengthen it, and there is little evidence blacks want change. The pendulum does not inevitably swing back. White civilization — higher civilization — is the exception. Egalitarianism means continuous decline. Barring a sudden rise to power of white identity politics, “State Conquest” will continue.

Credit Image: © Keystone Press Agency/ZUMA Press Wire

After the Second World War, authorities in former Allied and Axis nations decided that “racism,” nationalism, tradition, and hierarchy cause war and must be rooted out. R.R. Reno analyzed the problem superbly in Return of the Strong Gods. So-called anti-fascism — described by Paul Gottfried in Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade — is our civic religion. This means every Western nation is moving toward the policies of defeated and denatured Germany, where patriotism is almost illegal, where the state regulates speech, bans parties, spies on dissidents, and requires self-loathing for native whites. The Washington Post ran a column in June 2021 that praised Germany as a model for what should be done with America — it should be treated like a conquered province.

However, a state cannot survive without some sense of social solidarity, national identity, respect for law, and a willingness to fight in wars. Western nations still have majority-white populations, so traditional symbols can’t all be jettisoned — yet. This leads to a schizophrenic political culture. In the United States, native whites are the most eager people to fly the national flag, praise the military, and be patriotic, even as the regime discriminates against, replaces, and punishes them. Non-whites are less patriotic, even though the government gives them special privileges. Without white identity, we can expect eradication of all traditional symbols in the name of decolonization.

Decolonization now applies not only to the civilizing presence of Europeans in the Third World, but to European institutions, especially the universities. Europeans are not allowed to be indigenous to anywhere (Salon called the reindeer-herding Sami people of Finland “Mainland Europe’s Only Indigenous People”)

When white lands and institutions are colonized it is therefore called decolonization. Whatever the theory behind it, it means removing white identity. It does not matter if Western nations fought for or against the Axis, had a colonial empire, or — like the nations in Eastern Europe — were ruled and oppressed by the Ottomans.

Richard Hanania argues in The Origins of Woke that pro-diversity ideology did not precede civil rights but was a later rationalization to justify concessions and set-asides. Similarly, left-wing identity politics departments in universities were not set up because they study important subjects, but because radicals and minorities rioted to get them. The lack of academic rigor in something like “Black Studies” is irrelevant. The point is to motivate and employ activists, not to advance knowledge.

Decolonization, DEI, and the countless NGOs that get taxpayer money have no interest in solving race problems. That is why they are always moving the goalposts for what they consider racism, privilege, or bigotry, and are always inventing new grievances. It is futile to argue. No activist with a cozy gig will ever admit he is a parasite.

Whites, especially white conservatives, seem to believe that non-whites are just whites with more melanin and will “assimilate” into white traditions and culture. But what does a black American or a recent arrival such as Kamala Harris have in common with the Founding Fathers or the traditions they were defending? It is in her nature to say that America is the “scene of a crime” and to promote non-white immigration.

Unearthed video shows Kamala Harris speaking Spanish, saying “An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal” to a group waving non-American flags

This is dystopian pic.twitter.com/YalYfDsDpP

— johnny maga (@_johnnymaga) July 31, 2024

The mere presence of a significant number of non-whites in any white country or institution will change it. Standards must be lowered to achieve equal representation. Symbols that evoked a shared past must be changed — because non-whites don’t share that past. Many of the symbols commemorating past victories or accomplishments are triumphs over non-whites and are therefore especially offensive.

Prosperous whites may feel virtuous by giving away things their ancestors won for them, and they may even benefit politically in the short-term. This must explain the few remaining heterosexual white progressives. And yet, even conservatives still expect gratitude from non-whites, even though none is forthcoming, even for defeating the Nazis.

“Decolonization” may even replace the Allied victory in the Second World War as the foundation of the modern world.

In May, an article in Foreign Policy argued:

By emphasizing D-Day and figures such as U.S. Gen. George Patton and U.K. Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery, popular depictions of this conflict commonly promote an inflated impression of the contributions of the United States and Britain in defeating Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Dating back to the time of that conflict, serious scholars have always known that the Soviet Union—itself totalitarian—carried the brunt of the battle against Nazi Germany.

The point here is not to denigrate the courage or sacrifices of the Westerners who fought in that war, and even less to question the imperative of defeating the Nazis. Rather, it is to challenge how Westerners have celebrated their history in ways that have wrongly overshadowed or crowded out of the picture another 20th-century story of freedom. Although this may seem jarring to a Western public, this story was at least as significant, and arguably greater, than the Allied triumph in World War II.

This other story of freedom, badly neglected when not outright scorned nowadays, was the triumph of “a movement of moral justice and political solidarity against imperialism,” in the words of the eminent Duke University historian Prasenjit Duara, that belongs under the heading of decolonization.

It is not enough, Foreign Policy says, merely to describe this “triumph.” Instead, Westerners must be inculcated with guilt.

What might we learn if we opened our minds to the actual record of the colonial past in what became the nonaligned world? We would come to see how European nations led by Britain and France enlisted colonial subjects from Asia and Africa to labor, fight, and die in large numbers for the cause of European freedom in the 20th century. We would see how Europe’s old powers partially financed their recovery from the devastation of World War II on the backs of Asian and African miners and farmers, whose exports of tin, manganese, cocoa, rubber, and many other commodities replenished European treasuries.

We would learn that even in the postwar years, some European countries briefly sustained a regime of forced labor on Africans that was not far removed from enslavement. We would come to see how a tiny minority of British settlers in Kenya employed violence on a massive scale and confined native populations to tightly policed camps in the 1950s so that they could control the country’s richest farmlands. We would learn of the attempt to get into the colonial game by imperial latecomers such as Italy, which killed as much as one-eighth of the population of Ethiopia through aerial bombing and poison mustard gas in the 1930s. We would see how Portugal, still unsated after centuries of colonial rule, fought to sustain its control over colonies in present-day Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau into the 1970s, aligning itself with apartheid-ruled South Africa in the process.

We would understand how little Europeans invested in education, health care, and basic infrastructure in the African colonies that they ruled, making the continent’s relative poverty and instability today a lot less mysterious.

These are the main things I learned in college and graduate school. Rebelling against them made me a white advocate. Certain unexamined assumptions are smuggled into this passage, especially that colonialism was bad for the Third World. Most of what those countries now have was built by the West, either through colonialism or charity. The West suffered more because of colonialism, not least because Western healthcare and infrastructure caused a non-white population boom. The idea that Western universities do not spend enough time berating white students about racism is bizarre.

This is not limited to higher education. In Britain, a curriculum called “The Key” that guides 100,000 school teachers tells them to “present the British Empire as you would other global powers that committed atrocities, eg Nazi Germany.” A University of Sussex professor dismissed critics of “The Key” as snowflakes and called for the United Kingdom to have a “reckoning” with its past. Presumably, this would mean redefining British identity in purely negative terms, like German identity in Germany.

In Canada, the Red Ensign — the traditional Canadian flag — may soon be a “hate symbol.” A taxpayer-funded guidebook called Confronting and Preventing Hate in Canadian Schools said the banner, which flew when Canada fought the Axis, “denotes a desire to return to Canada’s demographics before 1967 when it was predominantly white.” It also accused the Conservatives — heavily favored to win the next election — of letting racists “infiltrate” their ranks.

The Canadian Red Ensign, the national flag of Canada from 1957 to 1965.

The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, partially funded by taxpayers and essentially a partner group of the Canadian government, is calling for new hate speech laws: “We would rather see a small amount of posts that are not-quite hate speech be a casualty of any legislation rather than have hate speech continue to attack and silence women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+ , First Nations, Metis, and Intuit peoples and others.”

In the United States, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered a review of Medals of Honor awarded at Wounded Knee in 1890, when the Lakota resisted US Cavalry efforts to disarm them. In 1990, Congress apologized for the “massacre,” and in 2021, several senators, including fake-Indian Elizabeth Warren, introduced legislation to rescind the awards. A USA Today article praised the military for efforts to “reckon with vestiges of racism,” and for erasing “the names of treasonous Confederate officers from some of its most iconic bases.” Of course, it was Union Generals such as Custer, Sherman, and Sheridan who completed the conquest of the West after they had put down the South.

Abraham Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution in American history: 38 Indians who had murdered or raped white settlers. Many more American officers, icons, and symbols will be slurred to salve the hurt feelings of non-whites.

A nation is a group of people with a common ethnic heritage, or at least one that has common interests and history. Western nations are trying to forge unity among groups that have almost nothing in common but conflict. “Decolonization” — promoted by media and government — heightens tensions, invents new grievances, and ensures that wounds never heal.

Telling the swelling numbers of non-whites entering Britain that they were victims of an empire equivalent to the Nazis will not make them patriots. It is absurd to think that unity was ever the intent. Instead, multiracialism means every white nation must be at war against its own past.

Of course, “the woke are more correct than the mainstream.” Western institutions and symbols are inseparable from white people. Western Civilization is white civilization. It is not a series of abstractions and “values” that can be transferred to everyone.

White people have a choice: keep their symbols, institutions, traditions, and liberties by reasserting white identity, or try to be the one group in the world that has no racial identity — and lose everything.