Decolonizing scholarship has made significant progress in raising numerous challenges to the way knowledge has been constructed and is taught in universities, not just in the West but globally. Recent political changes in the United States, including mandated “political incorrectness” policies for universities imposed by presidential order, have raised alarm bells regarding the continued progress of anti-colonial critiques in liberating university education. These fears are somewhat overstated because, overall, universities were not doing nearly enough to foster meaningful change. Instead, many institutions have been appropriating the vocabulary of decolonizing the academy in ways that result in very little actual change—certainly not on the scale necessary to influence broader, society-wide social transformation in the United States.

Kimberly Morales Johnson (Gabrieleno/Tongva San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians, University of California, Davis), delivering her opening keynote address on the almost complete erasure of native peoples from the land, their presence, their maps, their memories in what is now California, USA, the 9th international conference on genocide, the International Network of Genocide Scholars, the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 23 June 2024 (photo by Zarni)

Trump’s re-election, despite numerous reasons he demonstrated he should never hold elected office again, highlighted the enduring appeal of white settler rhetoric. This rhetoric can be traced to speeches in the American West during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the pro-segregationist discourse in the American South in the 1960s, and John Wayne’s Hollywood until the 1970s, when a more liberal filmmaking establishment emerged. The values espoused by a significant contingent of White Americans can also be found among White South Africans, White Canadians, White Australians, White New Zealanders, and in any place that emerged as a white settler colony rather than a franchise colony. For these populations, and for audiences in Europe inspired by the American West, white settlers, driven by a desperate need for survival, picked up stakes, loaded wagons, crossed frontiers, turned prairies into ploughed land, and stood heroically against ambushes by so-called “savages” intent on harming pioneers. Just as bravely, the all-white (in fact, they were not) U.S. cavalry would ride to the rescue, save the settlers, and confine the Indigenous populations to reservations for the supposed peace and well-being of all.

American tourists doing selfies in “the John Wayne Country,” otherwise known as The Monument Valley, Utah, the setting of hundreds of Hollywood’s globally popular westerns, where white settlerism was glamorized and glorified vis-à-vis the “wild savagery” of “red Indians”, August 2018 (photo by Zarni)

A Palestinian historian in Yafa (Jeffa), now a small neighbour in Tel Avi, Israel, juxtaposed a well-known Jewish artist’s counter-factual depiction of the most vibrant pre-Israel city of Yafa (or Jeffa) as nothing but beautiful sand dunes on the Mediterranean, to fit the core white settlerist/Zionist propaganda of “land without people for people without land”, in the 1920’s.  In Israel’s “war of liberation”, Yafa was ethnically cleansed.   Of the city’s 83,000 Arab/Palestine natives, only 3,000 remained after the war, and were initially placed in “Arab ghetto” surrounded by barbed wire fences by the victorious Zionist settlers in 1948. Sept. 2024 (Photo by Zarni)

The result was the United States, the “greatest nation” on earth, whose national character was symbolized not by Eastern bankers and Midwestern industrialists—about whom few movies were made—but by the hardy Western pioneer. This was because the latter embodied the simple, clear test of physical, interpersonal violence, while the industrialists and capitalists operated behind the “greenback curtain” of systematic, structural violence, controlling national affairs and bankrolling the politicians who formalized their agendas. Settlers and the cavalry may have pulled the trigger, but it was the same capitalist establishment—running the country under either of the two major parties—that orchestrated the program. This included efforts to eliminate Native Americans, not just economically but physically, wherever possible. As Native Americans were recognized from the beginning as the rightful owners of the land, American expansion required forcibly removing them. This included forced migrations to reservations, such as Oklahoma—the “American Gaza” of the nineteenth century—and numerous other reserved territories that were gradually reduced, in repeated violation of treaties signed by the federal government with Native nations as foreign states. Like Gaza, Oklahoma was eventually opened up for a complete white settler land grab, a story romanticized in a Tom Cruise film.

The white settler structure that governs the United States revealed under Trump yet another core element of white settlerism: territoriality. Scholars of ecological history argue that the key change white settlers introduced into non-Western lands was a new attitude toward land, distinct from Indigenous perspectives. While Indigenous populations viewed land as belonging to nature, meant to benefit everyone sustainably, white settlers introduced notions of individual ownership, including exclusive rights to everything on or in the land—and, until 1865, ownership of the labor used to work it. Non-white populations found in possession of land were treated as exclusive owners only for the convenience of treaty-making and commercial concessions, after which they were often dispossessed or eliminated. The American system of governance was built around this kind of dispossession of non-white populations. It led to the destruction of Filipino Republican forces (remembered in America as insurgents against law and order) during the conquest of the Philippines, American expansion in the Pacific, and helps explain the casual way Trump has proposed removing Palestinians from their homes without the right of return. Presumably, Gaza will not become the “French Riviera on the Eastern Mediterranean,” as Trump claimed, but rather a “Guantanamo of the Suez Canal zone” or a “Fort Apache in the desert” alongside China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Greenland and the Panama Canal were immediately identified by Trump as strategic interests, driven by fears of Chinese expansion; a clear case can be made that China, not Hamas, is at the core of his concerns.

Evening light falls across homes and neighborhoods devastated by the Palisades Fire in areas near Pacific Palisades, California, Jan. 14, 2025. Wikipedia Commons

However, the reach of American territorialism has spread far beyond its historical origins. The idea that the white settler can do anything with what is found on “their” land has today resulted in enormous climatic consequences for the entire planet. In the face of clear evidence of global warming and the accelerating countdown to existential threats for much of life on Earth, including large segments of the human population, Trump has proclaimed, “Drill, baby, drill.” This represents a white settler genocide on a global scale. The damage caused by Trump’s deregulation of the energy sector will likely render irrelevant any measures taken by other societies, even collectively, to slow the planet’s ecological destruction. Today, the tragedy of white settlerism is acutely affecting the people of Gaza. There must be a fundamental reevaluation of core American values to dismantle the systematic grip of white settlerism in the United States. Failing that, we are all doomed to become the Gazans of tomorrow.

Mike Charney SOAS

Banner: The Big Trail lobby card (5) – John Wayne – Wikipedia
See also Maung Zarni’s Anadolu News Interview on the same subject:  ‘Classic genocidal white man’s colonialism’: Genocide scholar blasts Trump’s Gaza plan, 10 Feb. 2025

 

Posted by Michael Charney

A native of Flint, Michigan, Michael Charney is a full professor at SOAS, the University of London, in the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy (School of Interdisciplinary Studies) and the School of History, Religions, and Philosophies, where he teaches global security, strategic studies, and Asian military history. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1999 on the subject of the history of the emergence of religious communalism in Rakhine and has published a number of books on military history in Southeast Asia and the political and intellectual history of Myanmar. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the (National University of Singapore) where he researched religion and migration, was a project professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Asia at the University of Tokyo, and has spent most of the last two decades at SOAS, where he was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2016. He is a regular commentator in the media on events in Myanmar.

All Posts