Gene Swanstrom

So why does "indigenous vs. colonizer" almost always mean Europeans, and almost never Bantu, Turks, Arabs, Slavs, or Han Chinese? A few reasons, in descending order of how much they actually explain: 1. Recency and documentation. European expansion happened in the era of the printing press, photography, census records, and treaties. The Bantu expansion left no paperwork. The Arab conquests are 1,300 years old and mythologized as religious destiny rather than conquest. When the receipts exist, the case is easier to make, and Europeans left receipts. 2. The winners wrote the framework. Modern human-rights language, postcolonial theory, and the very category of "indigenous peoples" were built in Western universities after WWII, primarily to process European guilt over European empires. The tool was designed for one job. Asking it to evaluate the Arab conquest of Egypt or the Turkic conquest of Anatolia is like asking a tax form to diagnose a disease. It wasn't built for that. 3. Christendom is critique-able; other civilizations aren't. You can write a bestseller attacking Western Christian civilization from inside a Western university and win awards for it. Try writing the equivalent book about Arab-Islamic conquest from inside Cairo or Istanbul. The asymmetry isn't about history. It's about which societies tolerate self-criticism and which punish it. So the critical literature piles up on one side and barely exists on the other. 4. The Soviet inheritance. Cold War-era anti-colonial framing was deliberately shaped by Moscow to delegitimize the West while giving its own empire and its allies' conquests, a pass. That framework outlived the USSR and still structures a lot of academic and activist vocabulary today. 5. Race makes it legible. European colonizers usually looked different from the colonized. Turkic conquerors of Anatolia, Arab conquerors of the Levant, and Bantu expansionists in Africa generally didn't look dramatically different from the populations they absorbed. The visual contrast made European empire easier to narrate as racial, and once a story has a clean visual, it travels. 6. And finally, Jews. The framework's selective application reaches its most absurd point when a people indigenous to a specific land, with continuous presence, language, religion, and archaeological record tying them to it for three thousand years, get labeled "colonial settlers", while the actual seventh-century conquerors who Arabized the region get labeled "indigenous." At that point the framework isn't describing reality. It's laundering a conclusion. The label isn't tracking who got there first. It's tracking who it's currently fashionable to blame.

"Indigenous" is a real concept applied with a fake standard. The word means "the population already there when someone else arrived." Fine. The problem isn't the definition. It's that the people who deploy it loudest apply it to exactly one set of migrations and pretend the others never happened. The Bantu expansion swept across half of Africa, absorbing or displacing the peoples who lived there first. No one calls Bantu-speakers settlers. The Turks arrived in Anatolia in the 11th century and replaced Greeks and Armenians whose roots there ran thousands of years deeper. No one demands they go back to Central Asia. Slavs pushed into lands held by earlier Europeans. Arabs spread from a single peninsula across North Africa and the Levant, Arabizing populations that had been there since antiquity. Anglo-Saxons displaced Britons. Han Chinese absorbed countless earlier peoples across what is now southern and western China. None of these get the colonizer label. Each one is treated as just "history." The label only activates for a narrow, politically chosen set. Almost always Europeans, and almost always Jews returning to the one place on earth where their indigeneity is older than the word itself. That's not a definition. That's a filter. And the filter exists to produce a predetermined answer. Hate the messenger if you like. The history isn't an opinion.

Over 100k Islamists just protested in the UK demanding Sharia Law. Time to deport the Islamists and ban Islamic immigration before it’s too late and civil war erupts? A. Yes B. No.