In the modern West, it has become commonplace to label any resistance to demographic and cultural change as “racist” or “xenophobic.” Yet when indigenous populations of the past resisted colonization, they were rightly seen as brave defenders of their culture, land, and way of life. This double standard is morally inconsistent and intellectually dishonest. The right to resist colonization should not be a selective principle applied only to non-European peoples. If indigenous peoples in Australia, North America, and South Africa were justified in resisting cultural erasure and displacement—and they were—then native populations in Europe and the Americas today are equally justified in defending their cultures and nations from analogous forms of transformation.
It is essential to distinguish between reasonable immigration and colonization. Migration, when limited in scale and conducted by those willing to assimilate into the host culture, poses no existential threat to a nation. Many societies have enriched themselves through such exchanges. But colonization is something altogether different. It occurs when migration is so large in scale—or so resistant to assimilation—that it disorganizes and displaces the native culture, alters the political order, and marginalizes the native population.
This is not merely theoretical. Historical colonization worked precisely this way: settlers arrived in overwhelming numbers, imposed their culture, institutions, and language, and often relied on collaborators from among the native elite to legitimize their control. We condemn this history when it involves the British in India or Europeans in Africa yet hesitate to apply the same critique when similar dynamics unfold today under the banner of “multiculturalism” or “progress.”
My argument is not about race. Race is a biological concept (and a sketchy one), but nations are cultural and historical entities. A nation is an extended kinship network bound by shared customs, language, memory, and territory. These bonds matter. They create the continuity, shared purpose, and trust that make democratic self-governance possible. Defending these bonds is not racism; it is the defense of a living culture—of a people.
Those who resist mass immigration that threatens to erase their national identity are not animated by hatred of the “other,” but by love for their own. Just as a man loves his family, he loves his nation. He loves his way of life. This is patriotism. This is no different from the motivations of American Indians who resisted European settlers, or Japanese citizens who would rightly object to a hypothetical scenario in which Germany colonized Japan, changed the language, suppressed Japanese culture, and declared it a new society. It would no longer be Japan. The Japanese would be right to resist.
Throughout history, colonization has often been facilitated by members of the native population—political or economic elites who side with the colonizers, either out of self-interest or ideological alignment. These individuals are known in the literature of political economy and history as colonial collaborators. Today, many among the political and cultural elite of Western nations play a similar role, encouraging policies that accelerate demographic transformation while silencing dissent through moral condemnation. They dismiss legitimate concerns about national continuity as mere “racism,” thereby marginalizing those who dare to resist.
This is not a conspiracy theory; it is a pattern observable throughout history. Recognizing it does not imply paranoia—it is to signal understanding of how power works, and how cultures are lost not only through invasion but through slow-motion surrender.
Because the principle is clear, one common objection to this argument is to sidestep that principle and substitute others—most notably the notions of civilizational debt and reparative migration. The modern West, built in significant part on wealth extracted through colonialism, imperial domination, and slavery, carries a moral and historical burden owed to the Global South. This debt is not merely symbolic; it is cultural, material, and ongoing.
Like original sin, the guilt asserted here is not individually chosen but collectively inherited, embedded in borders, economic systems, and institutions that persist long after formal empires have collapsed. The exploitation of land, the drawing of arbitrary borders, the theft of labor and resources—these acts created asymmetries that now manifest in global inequality, migration, and war.
From this perspective, migration is not charity, but restitution owed to the living by the dead. To deny mobility to the descendants of the colonized is to preserve the privileges of empire under a new guise—safeguarding the wealth of settler societies while externalizing the costs of their history. The West’s borders, in this view, become a kind of gated inheritance, protecting ill-gotten gain from the rightful claims of those it once dispossessed. Just as intergenerational wealth is passed down, so too, it is argued, are intergenerational debts. Migration becomes a right—not merely of movement, but something of a right of return, a right to reclaim what was taken by passing through the gates of the Wesst. It is a right to participate in the world violently shaped in one’s name.
This argument, though rhetorically powerful, fails to withstand moral scrutiny. Legally, a person inherits his father’s wealth, not his debts. The counter is that moral debts don’t operate under legal logic: if a country has benefited from centuries of exploitation, and that wealth continues to confer advantage—through infrastructure, institutions, or global leverage—then some responsibility must accompany those advantages. Yet holding the living responsible for the crimes of the dead mistakes legacy for cause, inheritance for intent.
Moreover, colonialism and imperialism were not democratic endeavors—they were elite ventures, orchestrated by aristocracies, merchant classes, and industrial capitalists. The working peoples of empire were not its architects; they were often its cannon fodder, its coerced laborers, and at times, its resisters. British miners, French conscripts, Irish peasants, and Italian tenant farmers did not colonize India or Africa. They were themselves exploited, conscripted, displaced, ruled, and taxed alongside the colonized subjects of the past. When today’s discourse treats “the West” as a guilty monolith, it obscures the class dimension of historical injustice. It absolves the capitalist class and redirects attention away from the actual mechanics of empire: extraction by a few, benefit for the fewest, and manipulation of the many. It turns the global proletariat—North and South—against itself by moralizing historical suffering rather than dismantling current structures of exploitation. It redirects blame toward those who merely existed—who survived history. It turns the global proletariat—North and South—against itself, moralizing historical suffering while ignoring the ongoing dynamics of exploitation.
It also conceals the actual motive behind contemporary mass migration: to drive down wages in the West, facture working-class solidarity, and prepare the world for the integration of the peoples of the various nations into a borderless corporate order. The elite want to make you pay for what your ancestors didn’t do to advance a political economic project. A reparative politics, if it is to be just and effective, even if we accept it on principle, must distinguish between those who rule and those who are ruled. Otherwise, it dissimulates class struggle with ethical symbolism serving the interests of the elite and their functionaries; it collapses reality into moral theater—substituting abstraction for justice and absolving the elite while scapegoating the native working class.
The elite are not really asking ordinary people to pay for what they never did. Rather they are telling the people to accept cultural erasure and social dislocation in service of an economic and ideological project they never chose. They’re asking the masses to give up their way of life for the sake of power and privilege they fear losing as capitalism unwinds in the terminal phase of its existence—and unwinding they hasten with free trade and globalization.
So, the argument that, because Europeans were colonizers, and thus have no moral ground to complain about the colonization of their nations is not only a primitive and regressive notion of justice but a rhetoric to marginalize the majority who seeks to preserve their culture and their nations. Those living are not responsible for the deeds of the ghosts. No one alive today colonized North America or subjugated India. To hold modern individuals morally accountable for ancestral actions is to abandon any serious conception of justice. Moreover, whatever affluence the peoples of Western nations inherited from historical deeds does not explain their culture, customs, and traditions, nor does it negate their right to continue them.
The native peoples of the West are their own people, not avatars of their imperial past. They have as much right to keep their nations as those of the Global South. The West need not be haunted by history, but it can learn from it. And history teaches this: when a people lose control over their land, culture, and institutions, they cease to exist as a distinct people. If that loss is lamentable in the case of Native Americans or Aboriginal Australians, then it is no less lamentable, no less mournful, when it happens to the French, the English, or the Afrikaners. Appeals to civilizational guilt do not override this first principle. They are rhetorical constructions designed to obscure it.
A troubling inversion has taken place. In the name of tolerance and inclusion, many now celebrate the decline or displacement of historically Western populations—so long as it is framed as “progress.” When white South African farmers, facing political and social persecution, seek refuge in countries settled by their ancestors, they are mocked, not welcomed. Meanwhile, millions of black and brown migrants are accepted with open arms, regardless of whether they intend to integrate. If this isn’t racialized thinking, what is? What is being celebrated is not diversity, but the diminishment of a particular people—Western, to be sure often white and often Christian. The resentment this generates is manufactured and manipulated, then dismissed as racism when it emerges. But it is no more racist than Japanese resistance to hypothetical German colonization would be. In such a case, the Japanese would be right to resist. Their cause would be righteous.
If we are to be ethically consistent, we must affirm the right of all peoples to defend their nations—not only those previously colonized. Cultural and demographic and cultural self-defense is not inherently racist; it is a form of national self-determination. History cannot be undone. But the future is still being written. If resisting colonization was justified centuries ago, it is no less justified today—regardless of who the colonizers happen to be. To deny this is not to serve justice. It is to participate in a new injustice—one that shames and silences those who wish only to remain who they are, to preserve their republics, and to pass their traditions forward.
freedom and reason 