Anyone who is even remotely familiar with the contemporary academic culture in the West will know that, until very recently, the departments of social sciences and humanities in the most prestigious universities in Europe and North America had been filled with people who seemed to be obsessed with studying the discomforting reality of colonialism. In fact, the obsession was bordering on a peculiar type of intellectual fixation when nominally serious scholars began talking extensively about “decolonizing” pretty much everything you could think of, so much so that, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang pointed out in their seminal paper, the term “decolonization” became a mere metaphor, devoid of any meaningful content.
Throwing the term around in this manner has had significant repercussions, of course. In the eyes of the reactionaries, it has become a subject of mockery, as when the right-wing populists utilized its overuse and abuse to agitate for politicians who harbor genuinely colonial ambitions. And it is really hard to blame them when a slogan like “Decolonize everything!” can be circulated among audiences who, apart from building their careers on it, could or would do absolutely nothing to stop any actual attempt of colonization by the states to which they owe their official credentials as “intellectuals.” It is perhaps precisely for this reason that those states saw no problem promoting the anti-colonial discourse in their national curricula.
Indeed, it would not be entirely unreasonable to take a somewhat cynical stance and speculate that the purpose of promoting anti-colonialism as a so-called “woke” ideology in state-corporate institutions in the West has always been to pave the way for the revival of colonialism in the guise of “anti-wokery.” It is no surprise, then, that the upcoming leader of the ultimate settler colony, Donald Trump, would not hesitate to pronounce his unabashed intentions, as he did recently, to colonize Panama once again so that the empire would have full control over the Panama Canal. That this was simply a joke, or at most a sort of a negotiation tactic, has been presented as a convenient excuse, of course; though the fact that the world’s wealthiest oligarch welcomed the possibility of such a development should be sufficient reason for the Panamanians to start worrying about the future of their country which, ironically, was created as a result of the empire’s demand to build that very canal.
Trump’s expansionist agenda is not limited to the conquest of Panama, however. His desire to annex Canada as the 51st state of the U.S., coupled with his repeated business offers to “buy” Greenland from Denmark, shows that contrary to the wishful statements put out by the likes of the former president of Panama, Martin Torrijos, “the era of colonialism” is not long gone. And for the conservative intelligentsia in the West, it really should not, for the benefits of colonialism for the colonized supposedly outweigh its disadvantages, as Bruce Gilley argued in a controversial paper just a few years ago, “The notion that colonialism is always and everywhere a bad thing needs to be rethought in light of the grave human toll of a century of anti-colonial regimes and policies.”
That kind of rethinking could perhaps lead Canada, originally a settler colony itself, to a prosperous colonized future where the benefits for the colonized population, as Trump promises, would include a reduction of taxes by more than 60%, the doubling in size of businesses and military protection “like no country anywhere in the world” enjoys. Even if the Canadian people themselves do not wish their country to become an integral part of the empire, the proposed integration would nonetheless be in the best interests of the world at large. In his defense of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Andrew Jackson stated that there was nothing in that provision which “upon a comprehensive view of the general interests of the human race, is to be regretted.” Why would Justin Trudeau not prioritize “the general interests of the human race” and take up Trump’s offer, then?
In this connection, it is instructive to pay attention to Jackson’s rationale to better understand the colonial logic, “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute … and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?” Panamanians, Canadians and Greenlanders may not be exactly the “savages” of Jackson’s America, but they may be equally helpless in the event of a colonial venture of an American emperor.