The illusion of origins
There’s a widespread assumption that anti-colonial discourse is the voice of the oppressed — a collective speech act by formerly colonised peoples demanding justice from former empires. In reality, it’s almost the opposite: the idea of structural guilt tied to colonialism was invented, refined, and institutionalised within the metropoles themselves — mostly by people with excellent educations and plenty of spare time.
The French impulse: Sartre and Fanon
In postwar France, colonialism became a visible irritant. The defeat in Indochina, the Algerian war, and American pressure all pushed the intellectual class toward a moral reevaluation of empire. A new language emerged, framing colonialism not as policy but as existential violence.
Jean-Paul Sartre was the first to universalise the concept of guilt. In his view, the white European was guilty not for what he had done, but simply for belonging to a civilisation that once exercised power. The individual bore structural complicity, regardless of biography.
Frantz Fanon, born in Martinique and active in the Algerian revolution, went further. For him, colonialism deformed the psyche. It turned the colonised into an object, and the coloniser into a subject trapped in superiority neurosis. Liberation meant not a transfer of power, but a break with the very ontology of the coloniser.
Said and institutionalisation in the US
By the late 1970s, the West — especially the English-speaking part — entered a second phase: academic consolidation.
In 1978, Edward Said published Orientalism, a book that redefined scholarly authority. The argument was elegant and sharp: Europe did not describe the East — it invented it, discursively, hierarchically, asymmetrically. Knowledge itself was power. Philology, archaeology, history — all became implicated.
Said’s framework became the foundation of what is now known as postcolonial studies, which expanded rapidly across American and British universities. By the early 2000s, the lexicon was stabilised: white privilege, epistemic violence, decolonising the curriculum. The tone shifted — no longer critique, but accusation.
Political mainstreaming
In the 21st century, the discourse became political. It moved from monographs into university policies, grant criteria, and corporate ESG reports. The emphasis shifted from systems to identities — not colonialism as a project, but the white subject as a structural threat.
Anti-colonialism ceased to be a critique. It became a normative framework. Apology was no longer symbolic — it became the price of admission. Reflection wasn’t introspection — it was an entry condition. Guilt became a form of institutional loyalty.
The Soviet influence: direct and indirect
The picture is incomplete without a key actor: the Soviet Union. Often treated as a propagandistic footnote, it played a more foundational role — both crudely and effectively.
From the 1950s, the USSR systematically promoted the view that colonialism = capitalism = imperialism = racism. It was the standard vocabulary of Soviet foreign policy, aimed at the Third World. Through Cominform, non-aligned alliances, and universities like RUDN, Moscow exported a worldview in which the West was structurally evil and the Soviet bloc the agent of emancipation.
The rhetoric was crude, but the structure would feel familiar to today’s campus activists: the oppressed suffer not incidentally, but systemically; history demands restitution; freedom requires inner decolonisation.
More subtly, the West found itself forced to explain its own moral standing. The Cold War required demonstrable virtue — and that meant building a language of internal critique, a language that made clear the West was not imperial but self-aware, not dominant but capable of reform.
Out of this emerged a mirrored discourse — no longer Marxist, but still accusatory. Class was replaced by race and identity. The proletariat gave way to the postcolonial subject. The logic remained: structure is guilty, the subject is privileged, and liberation requires deconstruction.
Moral politics in place of confidence
What began as a strategic language of the Cold War became the moral operating system of the Western academy, media, NGOs, and increasingly, public institutions. It rewarded symbolic power through ritual self-accusation.
No other civilisation has embedded the presumption of its own illegitimacy into its institutional core. China, India, the Islamic world — none of them apologise for their imperial histories. Only the West has turned guilt into procedural morality — first under external pressure, then out of habit.
Conclusion
Anti-colonial discourse is not a moral import from the Global South. It is an export from the intellectual centres of empire, later repackaged as virtue. It was devised by those who governed — not by those who resisted — and it was embedded by the very universities that once trained colonial administrators.
The Soviet contribution, while blunt, was lasting. It helped stabilise the logic of Western guilt — later adopted not under duress, but voluntarily. Not because the West lost, but because it chose to appear righteous. And so, it began — with apology.
In historical terms, civilisations that relinquish subjecthood voluntarily don’t usually enjoy long-term stability. But they do simplify the playing field — for those who have no reservations about power. Voluntary Islamisation says hello.
We’re not talking about conquest. We’re talking about cultural substitution — cases where domestic elites, mostly in academia and public institutions, abandon their own normative frameworks in the name of inclusion. In their place comes a more confident, less self-questioning model. In British cities, this is visible quite literally: empty Anglican churches become mosques; humanities departments adapt syllabi to avoid offending students with strong traditional values — including restrictions on which authors, periods, or ideas may be taught.
While the West explains why it has no right to speak as a subject, others arrive without explanation. This is a competition over who defines the norm — one the West has largely opted out of, in the name of postmodern virtue.
And under the ruins of that postmodernism, it may well remain. ■