The riots that kicked off in Los Angeles last weekend aren’t just about illegal immigration — they’re part of a revolutionary movement.
“Anti-colonialism” is a term often heard in America’s college classrooms, but off campus virtually no one takes it seriously.
It’s just another harebrained radical academic theory, right?
Yes, the theory is mostly silly — but the practice is deadly serious.
Most Americans and Europeans today feel ashamed of imperialism and racism, and they’re glad to be rid of colonies and slavery.
All that injustice is a thing of the past, however much its legacy haunts our present.
But the ideology of anti-colonialism says otherwise: Imperialism and thoroughgoing racial exploitation never ended and never can end, not until “settler” and “colonizer” power is overthrown everywhere.
Israel is the focus of the most vitriolic and violent anti-colonial rage, but the United States is just as guilty of being a “settler-colonial state.”
Mexico, and indeed all of Latin America, is America’s Palestine, and when illegal immigrants cross the border, when they resist deportation, when they and their allies riot, this is justified resistance to colonialism.
In Palestinian terms, it’s an intifada, or at least the beginnings of one.
Palestinians launched two intifadas against Israel, from 1989 to ’93 and from 2000 to ’05.
These “uprisings” involved rioting, throwing stones at police and soldiers, hurling Molotov cocktails, and violence up to and including suicide bombings, as well as boycotts, strikes and other forms of economic coercion and nonviolent protest.
An American might recognize many of these tactics — though not suicide bombing, thank God — not only as scenes from Los Angeles in recent days but as familiar features from other left-wing protest movements, including those inspired by Black Lives Matter and the killing of George Floyd five years ago.
There isn’t some grand anti-colonialist conspiracy directing all of this, although there are links between one outburst and another: Usually the thugs who call themselves “antifa,” for example, are in the vanguard of the provocations.
But a conspiracy isn’t necessary — the ideology is a franchise, teaching anyone who believes in it to immediately identify enemy groups and what slogans to chant when harassing or hurting them.
No radical has to wait for orders to know what to say and do to police or Jews.
On social media, conservatives have joked about the Mexican flags some LA rioters have been waving: After all, if you’re proud of Mexico and its flag, why would you object to being sent back there?
But those flags aren’t being waved to make a point about Mexican territory — they’re making a point about American territory, Los Angeles itself, which in anti-colonialist eyes belongs to illegal aliens at least as much as to any American.
Never mind that Mexico was a product of settler colonization (by Spain) and practiced settler colonization itself in places occupied by indigenous peoples.
Anti-colonialism is not about history or consistent philosophical principles; it’s about power and acquiring it for those who are willing to take to the streets.
That’s one reason the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol four years ago was so shocking, when right-wing supporters of Donald Trump were willing to use a little of the force that left-wing protest movements routinely employ.
The Jan. 6 rioters saw themselves as decolonizing the Capitol, viewing their enemies as a privileged elite who had somehow stolen the election and therefore the country.
That riot didn’t involve arson to the degree seen in Los Angeles these past few days, but it was frightening to the left, the political middle and most conservatives because it showed radicalism could expand into the right.
Too many Americans who would never dream of rioting themselves have for too long simply accepted that left-wing protests are allowed, even expected, to be violent.
They were unprepared for the activist right — not Nazi extremists, but a small subset of otherwise unremarkable Republican voters — to learn from what the anti-colonialist left was allowed to get away with.
The lesson all Americans have to learn now, before it’s too late, is this kind of violence will keep expanding as long as it’s tolerated in the name of anti-colonialism and other progressive causes.
There will be more riots, and then there will be more than riots: The premises of anti-colonialism call for intifada, not just in Palestine but right here in America.
Law, and law enforcement, has to prevail in Los Angeles, but this is a battle that has to be won in the classroom, and the conscience, as well as in the streets.
There will always be some violent extremists, but what sets fire to our cities again and again is the complacency of ordinary Americans who fail to recognize a radical premise when its consequences are broadcast on the nightly news — and world news, too.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.