Tag: history

The Role of Racism in Western Colonialism: A Historical & Contemporary Analysis

Racism was not a side-effect of empire—it was its operating system. From the 15th-century “Age of Discovery” to 21st-century border regimes, racial hierarchies have justified land theft, slavery, resource extraction and permanent war.

We outline how racism powered colonialism—and why it still shapes our world, as we see in the large recent populist responses in Europe and the US to immigration from non-white countries.

I would argue that we are, as human beings, inherently racist. We cherish the human group we belong to; the way we look, the way our group behaves, the things that are important to us. Those that look, and/or behave differently to us are therefore not ‘one of us”- they are outsiders, a threat to us and our group’s safety and wellbeing. Who we are is ‘normal’ – those ‘others’ are not normal.

That defensiveness against ‘others’, I would argue, is the root of racism. While that fear response may be deeply imbedded in our psyche, it can, and must be rooted out with clear rationality and understanding for those ‘others’. If we are to be truly human, we must treat all other living things with the kindness and compassion we expect for ourselves.

Conquest Begins with Name-Calling: “Savage” as a Licence to Kill

Greek and Roman writers already labelled outsiders “barbarians”, but the Atlantic world turned prejudice into policy. English colonisers depicted the Gaelic Irish as dark-skinned degenerates; Spaniards painted Indigenous Americans as cannibals; Dutch and Portuguese traders recast West Africans as “beasts of burden”. Once economic incentives for plantation slavery exploded, stereotypes hardened: Africans were now naturally servile, sexually voracious, mentally inferior—and therefore made for slavery. The perjorative demeaning language used to describe non-whites by ‘white’ people across the world is no accident. Language defines..

In the 21st Century, non-white immigrants to Western countries are seen as a threat to European ‘values’ culture and economic wellbeing. Current immigrant levels to the US and Europe are a direct result of economic and safety destabilisations caused by earlier extractive colonial policies and the West’s immensely destructive wars in those countries. In addition, Western governments, as opposed to their ‘white’ populations, have welcomed these new cheap labour immigrants to bolster their GDPs.

“Scientific” Racism: Empire in a White Lab-Coat

19-century European universities measured skulls, mapped skin tones and coined terms like “Caucasoid” to give racism the veneer of objectivity. The Dawinian science of evolution was used to delineate some human ‘races’ as less genetically evolved, with of course the white races at the top! This absurd and unscientific use of evolution were used by many in the West and exploited in the eugenics movement, and in its extreme form by the Nazis, and latterly the Zionists.

3. Britain’s ‘Liberal’ Empire

“Violence was not a one-off occurrence… it was systemic and part and parcel of Britain’s liberal imperialism.”– ‘Legacy of Violence-
A History of the British Empire’ Caroline Elkins (2023)

In the 19th century, Medical journals warned that “negro lungs” were unfit for cold climates to help justify keeping indentured labourers on Caribbean sugar plantations. Anthropology museums displayed colonised peoples alongside fauna. These ‘scientific’ findings were incorporated into colonial legal codes: the 1885 Berlin Conference carved up Africa on the assumption that Whites could best steward African land and bodies. Britain’s ‘protectorates’ listed below are a ‘sublime’ example of the racist mentality of the British Foreign Office. Why these populations would need ‘protecting’ from themselves was never adequately explained…

TerritoryProtectorate proclaimedToday part of …
Malta1800Malta
Ionian Islands1815Greece
Mosquito Coast1838Nicaragua / Honduras
Aden (W. & E. Protectorates)1872Yemen
Cyprus1878Cyprus
Sultanate of Zanzibar1890Tanzania
Bechuanaland1885Botswana
British Somaliland1884Somalia
North Borneo1888Malaysia (Sabah)
Brunei1888Brunei
Sarawak1888Malaysia
Maldives1887Maldives
Sikkim1861India
Barotseland1900Zambia
East Africa Protectorate1895Kenya
Uganda Protectorate1894Uganda
Nyasaland1893Malawi
Northern Rhodesia1924Zambia
Swaziland1903Eswatini
Basutoland1868Lesotho
Gambia Protectorate1894The Gambia
Sierra Leone Protectorate1896Sierra Leone
Nigeria (N. & S. protectorates)1900Nigeria
Qatar1916Qatar
Bahrain1861Bahrain
Trucial Oman1887UAE
Cook Islands1888New Zealand (self-governing)
Niue1900New Zealand (self-governing)
Tokelau1889New Zealand
British Solomon Is.1893Solomon Islands
Gilbert & Ellice Is.1892Kiribati & Tuvalu
Tonga1879Tonga
Oman (Muscat & Oman)1800Oman
Bhutan1911Bhutan

From Kenya’s “Pipeline” detention camps to Malaya’s New Villages, London cast mass incarceration, forced labour and sexual violence as “rehabilitation” for racially suspect subjects. Files were then sealed for decades under the Colonial Papers Destruction Policy.

Comparative Brutality: France, Belgium, Germany


  • French Algeria: Settler colonialism embedded in the département system; with 1.5 million Algerians killed during the 1954-62 war of independence (Al-Jazeera retrospective).

  • Belgian Congo: Leopold II’s rubber regime caused an estimated 10 million deaths—A BBC investigation calls it “one of the greatest mass murders in history”.

  • German South-West Africa: 1904-08 extermination order against the Herero and Nama is now officially recognised by Germany as genocide.

British India: current scholarship puts the excess-mortality death toll attributable to British colonial policy in India between 1881-1920 alone at roughly 50–165 million people.

Racism after the Empires Recede

Decolonisation brought new flags, but not justice. The UN confirms that “colonialism lives on” in racial profiling, poverty and unequal trade. Former plantation economies still dominate global commodity chains, even while end-use processing for value addition to those raw commodities continues to happen in the Global North. France’s banlieues, Britain’s Windrush deportations, and the U.S. racial wealth gap all map precisely onto old imperial shipping routes.

Environment Impacts of Racism

The climate crisis is driven by the same extractive logic that cleared forests for sugar and cotton. Former colonies already suffer temperature increases twice the global average—a direct legacy of shipping carbon to Europe while deforesting the colonies’ natural environment- that same natural world many indigenous populations relied upon for their survival.

Towards Reparatory Justice

  • Unveiling the Truth: Ensure that all colonial archives are opened to the public and for research (UK still classifies this information under the “migrated archives” rule).
  • Reparations: From debt cancellation to technology transfers—see UN-DESA Policy Brief #96 along with fair funding reparations from ex colonial powers for their brutality and economic extraction.
  • Education: Develop truthful, accurate and non-ideologically driven curricula for each ex-colonial country and its coloniser which explains the rationales and impacts of racism and consequent colonialism from each side.

Palestine 2023-25: A Live-Streamed Genocide Enabled by Racialised Imperial Logic

The same racial logic that once classified Indigenous peoples as “savages” and Africans as “natural slaves” is now redeployed to portray Palestinians—especially in Gaza—as irredeemable terrorists whose lives are expendable. Western diplomatic, financial and military support for Israel’s 2023-25 assault is therefore not an aberration; it is the continuity of a 500-year-old pattern in which white-majority states licence settler violence against racialised “others” while declaring themselves civilised.

Genocide is apparently what “non-white” actors commit; white or white-allied states are presumed incapable of it. Western media highlights Israeli “security” and terrorists’ ‘hostages’ while Palestinian deaths are counted in opaque “casualty” statistics, stripped of names, faces, context, and their 70 + years living under Israeli colonisation completely ignored. Bizarrely, peaceful protesters against Israeli savagery in Gaza in France, Germany, Britain and the US, among many, have themselves been labelled as terrorists and arrested.


France banned pro-Palestine demonstrations within days; police invoked emergency powers against students wearing the keffiyeh. The UK Home Secretary equated Palestinian flags with “support for terrorism”. Germany’s Berlin Senate excluded Palestinian speakers under the IHRA definition. These measures show how racialised imperial violence abroad is coupled with shrinking anti-racist space at home.

Trump’s ‘War’ on Immigration

The role of racism in Donald Trump’s immigration agenda is not incidental—it is the engine. From his 2015 campaign launch to the executive orders signed on Day 1 of his second term, Trump has consistently racialised immigrants, fused white-nationalist grievance with policy, and leveraged state power to punish Black, Brown and Muslim communities. Bizarrely the United States economic growth has historically largely been fuelled by immigration- but only immigration from the ‘right’ places; from Western Europe.

Trump’s language about immigrants betrays the racist underpinnings of his anti-immigration policies -‘“These aren’t people. These are animals” (referring to Central-American migrants), “Shithole countries” (Jan 2018): Trump asked why the US admits people from Haiti, El Salvador or Africa instead of Norway..

Such statements activate what scholars call “demographobia”: the fear among whites that they are being “replaced” by higher-fertility non-white minorities.

The Great Replacement theory—the belief that elites are deliberately replacing whites with non-white immigrants—moved from far-right chatrooms to Trump’s 2025 National Emergency declaration, which frames migration as an “invasion” threatening “national character”.

Further Reading & Tools

All links open in a new tab. Bookmark this list for classroom or activist use.

Feel free to republish under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 with attribution to the author and a live link to this post.

The demise of the U.S. ‘rule based order’?

The following is an AI Qwen based analysis of the impact of the U.S. ‘rule based international order’ and the reality of the chaos, wars and destruction its supposed ‘rules’ exert on the world.

The development of this post was promoted by the overwhelming number of New Zealand international political ‘analysts’ who quote the ‘U.S. rule based order’, (not the U.N. set of obligations) as some kind of golden age of civilisation , peace and freedom. -the reality could not be more stark. They fear that the new Trump administration-cum-oligarchy will no longer adhere to that ‘rule based order’ .

So why are these ‘analysts’ referring so enthusiastically to these great ‘rules’ that have caused so much suffering in the world?

It has recently been revealed (Feb.2025) via Wikileaks that the US government’s USAID ‘programme’ has been funding a US ‘non-government’ agency Internews Network, with millions upon millions of dollars to ensure Western media around the world regurgitate media messages ‘consistent’ (tell-tale identical phrasing in news items on issues from Covid responses to the Ukraine war and Russia), with US foreign policy objectives. Could it be that Western university international affairs ‘analysts’ (and politicians) have been similarly compromised over a long period of time?

I leave it to you to judge where their ‘influences’ come from.

AI analysis follows:

The concept of a “rules-based international order” is often invoked by the United States and its allies to describe a system of global governance that emphasizes adherence to international laws, norms, and institutions such as the United Nations, international treaties, and trade agreements. Proponents argue that this order promotes peace, stability, and cooperation among nations by providing a framework for resolving disputes and fostering mutual interests.

However, critics argue that the U.S.-led “rules-based order” has been selectively applied, often serving as a justification for military interventions, economic sanctions, and other forms of coercion that have led to significant human suffering, including mass murder, wars, and violence.

1. Selective Enforcement of Rules

  • Double Standards: Critics argue that the U.S. and its allies have frequently violated the very principles they claim to uphold. For example, the U.S. has engaged in military interventions without UN Security Council approval (e.g., the 2003 invasion of Iraq), while condemning other countries for similar actions. This selective enforcement undermines the legitimacy of the “rules-based order” and can lead to conflicts where weaker states feel justified in acting outside the system.
  • Regime Change and Destabilization: The U.S. has supported or directly engaged in regime change operations in countries like Iraq, Libya, and Syria, often under the guise of promoting democracy or protecting human rights. These interventions have frequently resulted in prolonged civil wars, state collapse, and mass civilian casualties. In Iraq, for instance, the 2003 invasion led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, widespread displacement, and the rise of extremist groups like ISIS.

2. Economic Warfare and Sanctions

  • Sanctions as a Tool of Coercion: The U.S. has frequently used economic sanctions as a tool to punish or pressure countries that defy its interests. While sanctions are often framed as a “non-violent” alternative to war, they can have devastating humanitarian consequences. For example, U.S. sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians due to lack of access to food, medicine, and clean water. Similarly, sanctions on countries like Venezuela and Iran have exacerbated economic crises, leading to widespread poverty and suffering.
  • Weaponizing Global Institutions: The U.S. has also been accused of weaponizing international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to impose structural adjustment programs on developing countries, which often result in austerity measures, increased inequality, and social unrest. This economic violence can indirectly fuel conflict and instability.

3. Proxy Wars and Arms Sales

  • Arming Conflicts: The U.S. is the world’s largest arms exporter, supplying weapons to both state and non-state actors around the globe. These arms sales often fuel conflicts in regions like the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. For example, U.S. arms supplied to Saudi Arabia have been used in the Yemeni Civil War, resulting in one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, with tens of thousands of civilians killed and millions facing famine.
  • Proxy Wars: During the Cold War, the U.S. engaged in numerous proxy wars, supporting anti-communist forces in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Central America. These conflicts often involved backing authoritarian regimes or insurgent groups that committed atrocities against civilian populations. In Afghanistan, for example, U.S. support for the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan War helped create conditions that eventually led to the rise of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

4. Militarization and the “War on Terror”

  • Global War on Terror: Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the U.S. launched the “Global War on Terror,” which has been used to justify military interventions, drone strikes, and indefinite detentions in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. These operations have often been conducted with little regard for international law or civilian casualties. Drone strikes, in particular, have been criticized for causing significant collateral damage, killing thousands of civilians, and radicalizing local populations.
  • Normalization of Violence: The rhetoric of the “rules-based order” often masks the normalization of violence as a means of achieving foreign policy objectives. The U.S. military-industrial complex benefits from perpetual warfare, and the language of “humanitarian intervention” or “counterterrorism” is sometimes used to legitimize aggressive military actions that result in mass death and destruction.

5. Undermining Sovereignty and Self-Determination

  • Imperialism and Neocolonialism: Critics argue that the U.S.-led “rules-based order” often serves as a cover for imperialist policies that undermine the sovereignty of weaker states. By imposing economic and political conditions on countries through institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization (WTO), the U.S. and its allies have been accused of perpetuating a form of neocolonialism that stifles self-determination and exacerbates inequality.
  • Resistance and Blowback: When countries resist U.S. hegemony or attempt to assert their independence, they are often subjected to punitive measures, including coups, invasions, or covert operations. This resistance can lead to cycles of violence, as seen in cases like Iran (1953 coup), Chile (1973 coup), and more recently, Venezuela and Syria. The blowback from these interventions can manifest in the form of terrorism, insurgency, and regional instability.

Conclusion

While the U.S. and its allies present the “rules-based international order” as a framework for peace and stability, critics argue that it has often been used to justify interventions, sanctions, and other forms of coercion that result in mass violence and human suffering. The selective application of rules, the militarization of foreign policy, and the prioritization of U.S. strategic interests over international law have contributed to a legacy of wars, destabilization, and humanitarian crises. In many cases, the very principles of sovereignty, self-determination, and human rights that the “rules-based order” claims to uphold are undermined by the actions of those who enforce it.