Blowing the Whistle on the Rhodesian Dog Whistle: Part IX – Epilogue: What is the Colonised Mind?
Originally published on A Plague on Both Houses substack.
The picture I chose for this piece reminds me that Zimbabweans – Black and White – are just getting on with it. They are probably not aware of, and nor would they have any time for, the rubbish being peddled by ex-Rhodies who left a long time ago and yet find it difficult to move on. The reason I devoted time to it is that, unlike the publisher I am rebutting, I actually do hate lies. This epilogue is an explanation for why we should all oppose this particular brand of lie.
Should lies go unchallenged?
Someone emailed me after Part VI with a terse complaint that this series of essays was an excessive “investment in grievance archaeology.” Really? My response was polite but not well thought out. This is my equally polite, but more considered response. Incidentally, this final essay was always on the cards from the beginning, and I intended for it to be in Part VIII. But I decided that this one needed to be separated out, and shorter, if it was to have any chance of being read by people who are uninterested in Rhodesia but might be interested in the implications for the freedom movement of letting a BIG lie about colonialism stand unchallenged.
Obviously, I don’t have a problem with the above-mentioned whinge about the essays, but I wasn’t being challenged on errors of fact or logic. The complaint was essentially that I was wasting my time writing about this topic. Well, sorry, but I’m a voluntaryist, which means I don’t tell people what to read… and I prefer not to be told what to write. That does not mean I don’t enjoy and value the interaction with readers. I do. But I have to write what is genuinely bothering or interesting me, because if I wrote with the aim of pandering to what I thought the punters want, my writing would be a lot worse than it already is!
So! I am of the view that all historical analysis is “grievance archaeology”, and it should be, because someone did something to someone else, and now we’re trying to understand how and why. We’re trying to understand how we really got to where we are today. When it’s done well, we get powerful work like Two World Wars and Hitler. Everyone in the freedom movement loves that sort of grievance archaeology, because we discover just how evil ‘they’ are. How exciting!
The opposite of “grievance archaeology” is grievance lying – distorting history for propaganda purposes. Worse, the grievance lie that I rebutted is being peddled by a group of people in alt-media promoting themselves as excavators of truth, and supposedly endowed with the wherewithal to educate others about living freely. And these people are celebrating colonial exploitation. I find that pretty sick. Should those lies be left to stand? Was I going too far, or investing too much in correcting lies about colonial Rhodesia in a so-called freedom movement? If so, why? Is there a squeamishness or lack of interest in this particular area of history? If so, why? If I’m prepared to do the heavy lifting to challenge a lie, why is challenging this particular lie too big an investment?
Obviously, I happen to think there is something to be gained from understanding both the grievance lie about colonial Rhodesia and the actual truth about colonial Rhodesia. One example of that is the epilogue to the land section in Part V. The UK has a land problem too, and colonialism helps us to understand it, and to draw parallels. It might dawn on us that we are all in the same boat, and that solidarity would be a Fine Thing.
In Part II, I pointed out something obvious. The giant vampire squid of Globalisation is the monster threatening to engulf our individual autonomy, our souls, and what it means to be human. That monster grew out of the horrors of the global colonial conquests that began in the Americas in the 16th century and peaked with the scramble for Africa in the late 19th century. In that sense, colonialism is still relevant, and we can learn from it. It is perplexing that this self-evident truth seems lost on opponents of globalisation, some of whom nevertheless have a penchant for fetishising colonialism. This is a contradiction, but contradiction has been a theme of these essays.
Defining terms
Contradictions are signposts for confusion at best, and malice at worst. Assuming the former, we might try to untangle that confusion by being as clear as possible about the concepts and terms that have, in one way or another, formed the core of these essays about colonial Rhodesia.
With this in mind, the definitions I am going to present will be deliberately simple. They will also be infused with a value judgement, signed and sealed with a working definition of exploitation. Accusations of being either didactic or overly pious will hold no weight, for the simple reason that there some out there who claim to value freedom, but are more than relaxed about colonial exploitation. Freedom is a value whose antithesis is exploitation. You can’t have both! Clearly, again, there is some confusion, and a contradiction, to resolve.
Regardless of — or even perhaps because of — the political orientation of the freedom movement’s constituents, we should try to come to a sensible understanding of these terms, and how to situate them in today’s battle. The definitions will show that most of the concepts which were the subject of the Rhodesia essays are still relevant, and I hope it will be obvious why.
The colonising force is a global financial ruling elite embodied in the term Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital (OCGFC). As the global ruling class, they are not just an empire: they are the Empire to which empires with geographical borders are subordinate. Thus, the US/NATO empire is subordinate to the colonising force of the OCGFC, as was the British Empire.
Globalism is the imperialism of financial capital, imperialism being territorial power projection. Globalism is the expansion of the exploitation of humanity by the colonising force from the local level in the West, whence that force originated, to traditional societies elsewhere that had not yet been subjected to the horrors of modern industrialisation.
The overlap between imperialism, globalism and the colonising force becomes more evident when we define them in these terms. They are almost conceptually interchangeable, but thinking about them individually is clarifying.
No-one should make wild extrapolations of anti-globalism to imply that we should all stop travelling and remain in our little villages. Far from it; if you have the resources to travel, do it! It is one of the most important ways to open your mind. Clichéd, but nevertheless true.
Colonialism was a raw exploitative component of British imperialism involving direct administration and force projection from the imperial metropole to colonies outside it. It expanded imperial territory outside the metropole by formally establishing colonies to exploit resources, expand markets, and therefore advance wealth concentration and power of the colonising force. In the process of doing this, colonists uprooted and exploited traditional societies whose lands and resources were coveted by the colonising force. The approach to ‘Native’ exploitation was not uniform, but in Southern Africa it involved elaborate policies enforced through Native Departments and Native Laws. This in turn led to an interdependent economic relationship in which indigenous societies were incorporated into the modern industrialised economic system, initially as a ready-made proletarian base at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid.
The uprooting of traditional societies is mournfully and eloquently expressed by Paul Cudenec:
“We see here a direct assault on the natural cyclical time enjoyed in the ‘static and self-sufficient world’ of our ancestors. People had to be uprooted from their pleasant traditional existences and put to work as human capital on the lucrative treadmill of modern ‘progress’.”
It is important to understand that the colonist, acting under the protection of the imperial power, did what they did because they were able to, and that they were motivated by pure material self-interest, as I have shown in the previous essays. The racist attitudes that existed at the inception of the project, or that ensued on arrival of émigrés, served the motive of self-interest.
Neo-colonialism, through financial subjugation with monetary systems and debt, represents a fuller incorporation of those societies into the colonising force’s global financial system by imposing on them societal and economic structures mirroring those in the West. It reinforces wealth extraction at the expense of national and people’s sovereignty.
Structural racism within colonised societies like Rhodesia was an inevitable consequence of colonial exploitation where immigration and settlement by colonists was a fundamental strategy of colonisation. It was inevitable that European colonists who settled in the colonised territories would seek to prioritise their material interests by placing themselves at the top of the colonial capitalist pyramid, and defending the ‘citadel of power’ ruthlessly. Structuring economies and societies along racial lines served the self-interest of the coloniser. The greater the emphasis on settling a colony, the more entrenched was the racism. In some colonies, that racism resulted in genocidal removal of the indigenes, and in places like Southern Africa, it resulted in an exclusionary but economically interdependent relationship, as explained in Part VI.
Exploitation is the unfair treatment of an individual or group for one’s own advantage. Its tactics can range from psychological manipulation through to coercion and violence. When you exploit another, you interact with them in a way that prioritises your needs over the other’s. Exploitation takes the form of any one or a combination of the breaches of Natural Law. Exploitation at its core is the definition of evil – the abuse of someone else for personal advancement.
In a freedom movement dominated by right-leaning conservatives, the word “exploitation” may be associated with Marxist analysis, and therefore possibly viewed with suspicion. The definition above should remove the political connotations associated with exploitation, thus exposing it for what it is, regardless of the political or personal context. Exploitation is actually not a political concept: it is a moral one, which overlaps with politics. This being the case, we must accept that colonialism was exploitation on an industrial scale.
If we can agree that these definitions, though greatly simplified, have some validity, then there ought to be some more facts we can all agree on. We can see that colonialism, as raw exploitation, was a force multiplier for globalism. We cannot know for sure if globalism would have happened without the violent uprooting of traditional societies that occurred under colonialism, but with the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to see how globalism could have succeeded in the absence of colonialism. The least we can say about the causative relationship between colonialism and globalism is that colonialism greatly accelerated globalism.
The Left, if it continues to identify as Left, must accept that the colonising force is a totalising force and is coming home to the West to accelerate and complete its intrinsic objective of the total exploitation of humanity. Its primary tool today is technology, specifically digital technology. But, as we know, it always has brute force to fall back on when compliance is waning. While I have defined the colonising force, and therefore today’s global ruling class, as the OCGFC class, they are in fact, as Chris Rea correctly described them, “the legacy representative body of a ruling class that has held power for thousands of years”. They are the eternal ruling class.
They are constantly evolving, as are their systems of economic exploitation. The enemy is not simply ‘capitalism’ because that too is rapidly evolving, and the Left are being left behind in their failure to see this. That is why they got Covid so wrong. That is why they sided with the oppressor, the exploiter, during Covid. They cheered for Disaster Capitalism, and they garlanded billionaires. And that is why they are failing to see the colonising force’s relentless commitment to programmable digital currencies and surveillance technologies as the existential threats to humanity that they are. Putting aside the people behind the eternal ruling class, the enemy is the totalising momentum of the colonising force.
I have left the most important definition – that of the colonised mind – to the next section. The existence of Rhodesiaphilia is proof of the colonised mind.
What does Rhodesiaphilia in the Freedom Movement mean?
The Right, if it continues to identify as Right, must accept that colonialism was vitally instrumental in delivering globalism, and bringing us to the precipice at which we now stand. I believe that the Right, being more pragmatically cynical than the legacy Left, looks at the uncontrolled immigration that was a central plank of yesterday’s colonialism and wrongly concludes that the West is being colonised. Which is perhaps why they find it difficult to discuss colonialism – historically they were more supportive of it than the Left. The paradox is that they now harbour a paranoid awareness of its blowback effect. The mental bind for them is: “We were the colonial Jingoes, but now we are being ‘colonised’.”
But immigrants coming into the West are not here to exploit. The West is not being colonised by immigrants; immigrants are not colonisers. The vast majority of immigrants are trying to escape the consequences of exploitation in one form or another, whether it’s war or the economic policies of the colonising force. They are not the enemy. They are being used as pawns in a divide-and-rule strategy. People who see immigrants as a threat and support US ICE fascism or the UK state’s intelligence tools like Tommy Robinson are not only projecting their own violent racist fantasies of the colonial past onto immigrants, they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction by endorsing the very methods of coercion that will be turned on them in the blink of an eye.
It remains to be seen whether the Right can grasp that a people’s revolution against globalism and the global colonising force requires global solidarity. I struggle to see how global solidarity can be forged if the citizens of former colonies trawling the internet looking for ‘truth’ encounter a ‘freedom’ movement in the West that celebrates the historical exploitation of their societies. This is clearly destructive to solidarity both within the West and globally. One has to wonder if the people peddling ostensibly vacuous nonsense about colonial Rhodesia are in fact assets like Tommy Robinson. The content certainly looks AI generated. To the extent that there is any evidence of human thought, it appears to have been done by an angry teenager watching his old Rhodesian grandad growing more bitter and twisted by the day.
On the subject of solidarity, I am reminded of John Spritzler’s recounting of how a Mexican village of 20,000 people overthrew and ejected the venal police and local politicians who were terrorising them. There was no Left or Right in that solidarity. Just a recognition by 20,000 people of who the oppressor was. 20,000 people could not have overthrown the police and the local politicians if there were two camps having a debate about whether the cause of police corruption was capitalist greed or Marxist mismanagement.
Two things have to happen for a people’s revolution in the West. First, the Left need to stop criminalising the Right’s use of the word freedom. It’s an important value because it is the antithesis of exploitation, a word about which the Left needs no education. If you are entirely against exploitation, then you have no choice but to be entirely for freedom. Any other stance is a contradiction. Second, and for the same reason, the Right needs to admit the words exploitation and solidarity into their vocabulary if they are to become a real freedom movement. When these two things happen, there will be no Left and there will be no Right. At which point the ruling class might, at long last, start to tremble.
Perhaps the very existence of Left and Right camps comes down to the willingness of each to entertain a contradiction. The sensible Left decided to be anti-exploitation and the sensible Right decided to be pro-freedom. Each then looks at the core value of the other and tries to distance themselves from it as a matter of principle, rather than embracing it as the natural corollary of their own position. When you embrace anti-exploitation and freedom simultaneously, you get voluntaryism.
This recognition prepares us to tackle the most important definition that all of these essays have been leading to – the colonised mind. The colonised mind is the mind that accepts as valid, to varying degrees, the colonising force’s exploitative methods, power and authority. This acceptance can occur in the role of either victim or perpetrator. A country or culture is not destroyed only by those who invade and colonise it, but also by those who internalise humiliation and learn to perform it on their own people. The British policeman in London arresting an elderly blind man for protesting against genocide – that’s the colonised mind in action, accepting coercion and authority as valid, internalising humiliation, and performing it on his own people. The colonised mind is ultimately the mind that moves away from self- and collective freedom to side with the oppressor and the exploiter.
I said “to varying degrees”, in the previous paragraph, because we need to examine how much choice an individual has in the relationship with the colonising force, and what we do with the degree of choice that we have. In 2026, the entire planet is living under a colonising force. But how conscious we are of it, and what decisions we make on a daily basis to resist that force, will determine how colonised our minds are, and indeed whether the colonising force will prevail.
We all have to navigate an inherently coercive system in order to survive, but if all you are concerned with is placing yourself on the right side of coercive power, then you will tend to align in thought and deed with power narratives. You will tell yourself that’s just the way the world is. But we collectively invent and shape the world we live in. If the world is this way, it’s because our minds are collectively colonised, and the colonised mind is a mind that consistently sides with the oppressor, the exploiter.
This then is the battle to decolonise the West – to stop siding with the oppressor and the exploiter at all times and in all situations. It isn’t simply about ending Israeli terror and bringing the criminals, both there and here, to justice, although that is vital. To borrow from Olive Schreiner’s indictment of Rhodes, it’s about demolishing the force in our society that has formed the matrix which has fed, nourished and built up the colonising force. Siding with colonial Rhodesia is a rejection of freedom in order to side with the exploiter.
Like Mashonaland in 1890, it is becoming increasingly clear that we are under occupation by the colonising force. People are being arrested for protesting against its violence. An all-encompassing digital surveillance system is on the verge of being rolled out to squash dissent in real time.
David Lammy, Britain’s Black ‘social justice warrior’, is a trusted high-ranking servant of the coloniser’s police force. Having completed a vital supporting role as Foreign Secretary in oppressing, and trying to exterminate, the indigenous population of Gaza, he is now advocating the removal of trial-by-jury in the metropole, a re-enactment of the abolition of trial-by-jury by the British South Africa Company in colonial Rhodesia in 1911. The colonised mind does not have a fixed colour.
If we are waging a liberation struggle, those celebrating the colonising force’s historical exploitation in colonial Rhodesia have very little to contribute to that battle — a significant portion of their minds has been occupied by the colonising force. The journey to a decolonised mind begins with raising consciousness with truth, and lies are most definitely unbecoming.
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