The Left's Mirror
The hardest racism to name is the one that wears a friendly face. Many Western progressives have made their peace with people from the formerly colonized world — provided those people remain suffering, grateful, and below them.
This chapter is not an argument against the left. It is an argument from inside it. The political tradition that produced anti-colonial solidarity, the civil rights movement, anti-apartheid organizing, and most of the actually-existing critique of empire is also, in its Western and well-fed wings, the home of a quieter, more self-congratulatory racism that deserves its own page.
Call it the racism of the open hand. Its first principle is: be merciful to the person who needs you. Its unstated second principle is: do not tolerate the person who does not.
§ 01
The White Savior Reflex
There is a particular kind of Western progressive who finds purpose in helping. Helping abroad, helping refugees, helping the visibly suffering. The work is often real, the donations often useful. But underneath the helping is a structural assumption: that the relationship will always run in one direction. The Western helper will never be the helped. The 'beneficiary' will never be the equal.
The clearest sign of this dynamic is what happens when the formerly-helped grows up, gets rich, starts a company, builds a movement, or simply stops being grateful. The warmth, very often, evaporates. The same person who could be praised as a heroic recipient of aid becomes, the moment they ask for parity, ungrateful, demanding, or 'difficult.'
From the Archive
Wikimedia-sourced photographs and documents related to this page.
Last updated 23 June 2026Submit a correctionMethodology
References
Sources & Further Reading
- [1]Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978).
- [2]Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (François Maspero, 1961; English: Grove, 1963).
- [3]Lila Abu-Lughod, "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?", American Anthropologist 104:3 (2002).
- [4]Teju Cole, "The White-Savior Industrial Complex", The Atlantic (21 March 2012).
- [5]Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (Verso, 2018).
- [6]Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007).
- [7]Iraq Body Count Project, Documented civilian deaths from violence; Burnham et al., Lancet 368:9545 (2006).
All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.
§ 02
The Permission to be Modern
When a Western progressive imagines a 'good' non-Western country, they typically picture handicrafts, sustainable agriculture, colorful festivals, deep spirituality, and a wise old grandmother teaching her granddaughter. They do not picture a chip fabrication plant in Hsinchu, a payments platform in Nairobi, a vaccine factory in Pune, or a teenage girl in Tehran doing competitive mathematics.
The implicit rule is: you may be authentic, or you may be modern, but you may not be both. To be modern is to become a copy of us — and copies are always inferior to originals. This is racism in the costume of multicultural appreciation.
From the Archive
Wikimedia-sourced photographs and documents related to this page.
Last updated 23 June 2026Submit a correctionMethodology
References
Sources & Further Reading
- [1]Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978).
- [2]Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (François Maspero, 1961; English: Grove, 1963).
- [3]Lila Abu-Lughod, "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?", American Anthropologist 104:3 (2002).
- [4]Teju Cole, "The White-Savior Industrial Complex", The Atlantic (21 March 2012).
- [5]Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (Verso, 2018).
- [6]Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007).
- [7]Iraq Body Count Project, Documented civilian deaths from violence; Burnham et al., Lancet 368:9545 (2006).
All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.
§ 03
Selective Outrage
The same Western publications that write thousand-word essays about the misogyny of a particular Iranian, Saudi, or Afghan policy will quietly ignore comparable or worse statistics from a politically friendly country. The treatment of women becomes a serious moral question only when the women in question can be used as a rhetorical weapon against a regime the West already wants to weaken.
Likewise, civilians killed by an enemy regime are 'victims of slaughter.' Civilians killed by a friendly regime — or by Western weapons — are 'collateral damage' or, increasingly, simply uncounted. The bodies are the same. The headlines are not.
From the Archive
Wikimedia-sourced photographs and documents related to this page.
Last updated 23 June 2026Submit a correctionMethodology
References
Sources & Further Reading
- [1]Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978).
- [2]Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (François Maspero, 1961; English: Grove, 1963).
- [3]Lila Abu-Lughod, "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?", American Anthropologist 104:3 (2002).
- [4]Teju Cole, "The White-Savior Industrial Complex", The Atlantic (21 March 2012).
- [5]Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (Verso, 2018).
- [6]Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007).
- [7]Iraq Body Count Project, Documented civilian deaths from violence; Burnham et al., Lancet 368:9545 (2006).
All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.
§ 04
When Solidarity Has Conditions
Genuine solidarity does not require the other person to be poor, wounded, or grateful. It does not require them to share your aesthetic preferences, your political vocabulary, or your taste in tea. It does not give you a veto over how they organize their own society. It does not pause when they criticize you.
What much of the Western left calls 'solidarity' has, in practice, been a series of conditional contracts: we will support you if you are oppressed in the right way, by the right people, with the right slogans, and if you allow us to remain the protagonist of the story. The Cuban Revolution, the Vietnamese resistance, the Palestinian struggle, the Bolivarian project in Latin America, the Iranian revolution of 1979, and most recently the rise of Asian and African economic confidence have each, in turn, been celebrated and then disowned the moment they failed to take direction.
From the Archive
Wikimedia-sourced photographs and documents related to this page.
Last updated 23 June 2026Submit a correctionMethodology
References
Sources & Further Reading
- [1]Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978).
- [2]Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (François Maspero, 1961; English: Grove, 1963).
- [3]Lila Abu-Lughod, "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?", American Anthropologist 104:3 (2002).
- [4]Teju Cole, "The White-Savior Industrial Complex", The Atlantic (21 March 2012).
- [5]Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (Verso, 2018).
- [6]Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007).
- [7]Iraq Body Count Project, Documented civilian deaths from violence; Burnham et al., Lancet 368:9545 (2006).
All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.
§ 05
The Acceptable Foreigner
There is a quiet test that the Western progressive class often applies, usually without noticing. The foreigner who is grateful, soft-spoken, mildly accented, and willing to position themselves as a guest is welcomed warmly. The foreigner who is confident, technically superior, unimpressed, and unwilling to apologize for their origin is, very often, isolated, undermined, or politely informed that they would do better elsewhere.
Anyone who has worked inside a Western institution as a person from the Global South knows this test. It is not in the handbook. It does not need to be.
From the Archive
Wikimedia-sourced photographs and documents related to this page.
Last updated 23 June 2026Submit a correctionMethodology
References
Sources & Further Reading
- [1]Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978).
- [2]Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (François Maspero, 1961; English: Grove, 1963).
- [3]Lila Abu-Lughod, "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?", American Anthropologist 104:3 (2002).
- [4]Teju Cole, "The White-Savior Industrial Complex", The Atlantic (21 March 2012).
- [5]Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump (Verso, 2018).
- [6]Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (The New Press, 2007).
- [7]Iraq Body Count Project, Documented civilian deaths from violence; Burnham et al., Lancet 368:9545 (2006).
All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.
A working definition
A society is racist not by what it does for people in trouble, but by what it does for people in parity.
In short
Did left-wing and socialist parties in power also practise colonial violence?
Yes, repeatedly and on the documentary record. Parties that campaigned as anti-imperialist or as champions of the colonised often governed as colonial powers once in office, and in several cases directed repression, forced removals or prolonged silence that matched or extended practices associated with the political right.
The pattern is not an accusation of hypocrisy in the abstract; it rests on dated votes, named ministers and documented operations — from the French socialist government that escalated the Algerian war in 1956 to the British Labour government that expelled the population of the Chagos Archipelago between 1968 and 1973.
The ledger
Six documented cases
| Party in office | Action | Date |
|---|---|---|
| SFIO (French Section of the Workers' International) | Guy Mollet's government secured special powers from the National Assembly and escalated the Algerian war, including the systematisation of internment camps | March 1956 |
| British Labour Party | Harold Wilson's government secretly agreed with the United States to depopulate the Chagos Archipelago, forcibly removing the Chagossian population to Mauritius and Seychelles | 1968–1973 |
| Partij van de Arbeid (Dutch Labour Party) | Willem Drees's cabinet authorised the second 'police action' military offensive against the Indonesian Republic | December 1948 |
| Belgian Socialist Party (POB/BWP) | Socialist ministers sat in coalition governments that maintained forced labour quotas and the Force Publique in the Belgian Congo through the 1950s | 1945–1959 |
| Portuguese Socialist Party | Successive governments after 1976 declined to open a formal reckoning with colonial-era massacres such as Wiriyamu (1972), leaving prosecution and full archival access unresolved | 1976–present |
| Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) | Governments under Felipe González and later leaders maintained the 1976 Amnesty Law's practical shielding of colonial and Civil War-era abuses, including in Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara policy | 1982–present |
Each row is drawn from parliamentary records, declassified files or peer-reviewed history; see sources below.
Doctrine
Anti-colonial in opposition, administrative once in office
The gap between programme and practice was rarely concealed; it was argued over inside the parties themselves. The SFIO's own left wing, including figures such as Alain Savary, resigned from Guy Mollet's government in 1956 in protest at the conduct of the Algerian war, and historians including Benjamin Stora have documented how a party rooted in the Second International's anti-militarist tradition became the executive authority for a war fought with internment, forced population transfers (the 'regroupement' camps) and widespread use of torture, later confirmed in testimony gathered by the French National Assembly's own historical commissions.
The Dutch case followed a similar arc. The PvdA had campaigned domestically on social reconstruction and decolonisation in principle, yet Prime Minister Willem Drees's cabinet approved the 'Operatie Kraai' offensive of December 1948, which captured Indonesian Republican leaders and was condemned by the United Nations Security Council. The 2022 Dutch government-commissioned study led by historian Ben Schoenmaker (the 'Independence, Decolonisation, Violence and War in Indonesia' research programme) concluded that Dutch forces committed 'structural extreme violence' during 1945–1949, under cabinets that included socialist ministers.
Denial
Silence as a form of continuity
Where the left did not order the violence directly, it has in several cases been the party of record that later declined to fully investigate it. In Portugal, the Socialist Party governed for most of the period after the 1974 Carnation Revolution, yet the 1972 Wiriyamu massacre in Mozambique — in which Portuguese colonial troops killed several hundred villagers, exposed at the time by missionary priests and reported in The Times of London on 10 July 1973 — has never produced a state-sponsored judicial reckoning or a comprehensive opening of the relevant military archives.
Spain presents a comparable pattern under different law. The 1976 Amnesty Law, upheld in practice by PSOE governments from 1982 onward, has been read by legal scholars including Paloma Aguilar as extending impunity not only for Civil War-era crimes but for colonial-era abuses in Spanish Guinea and the Western Sahara, a reading reinforced when the United Nations Human Rights Committee in 2013 recommended Spain repeal or amend the law; no PSOE government has done so.
Mechanism
Why governing parties converge
Historians who study this convergence, among them Frederick Cooper and Todd Shepard, point to a structural explanation rather than personal betrayal: once a party holds executive power over a colonial administration or a strategic military asset, the incentives of the state — maintaining base access, avoiding parliamentary defeat, retaining military loyalty — routinely override the party's founding programme. The Chagos case is the starkest illustration: Harold Wilson's government valued the Diego Garcia military base sufficiently to keep the depopulation plan classified for decades, a fact only fully established through Foreign Office files declassified and analysed by researchers including David Vine from the 2000s onward.
None of this equates the scale or intent of these episodes with the crimes documented elsewhere on this site, nor does it excuse them; it identifies a distinct and recurring failure — the substitution of institutional continuity for the stated principles of anti-colonial solidarity — that belongs in the same historical record as the record kept on conservative and imperial parties.
FAQ
Frequently asked
- Did the French Socialist Party support the Algerian War?
- Guy Mollet's SFIO-led government obtained special powers from the National Assembly in March 1956 and escalated the war, including internment and 'regroupement' camps; several SFIO figures, including Alain Savary, resigned in protest.
- Which British government expelled the Chagos Islanders?
- Harold Wilson's Labour government secretly arranged the depopulation of the Chagos Archipelago between 1968 and 1973 to allow construction of the US base on Diego Garcia; the removal was only fully documented decades later through declassified files.
- Did the Dutch Labour Party support military action in Indonesia?
- Willem Drees's cabinet, which included PvdA ministers, approved the December 1948 military offensive against the Indonesian Republic; a 2022 government-commissioned study concluded Dutch forces committed structural extreme violence during 1945–1949.
- Has Portugal investigated the Wiriyamu massacre?
- No state-sponsored judicial reckoning has taken place under any Portuguese government since 1974, including Socialist Party governments, despite the massacre being reported internationally in July 1973.
- Does Spain's amnesty law cover colonial-era abuses?
- Legal scholars including Paloma Aguilar argue the 1976 Amnesty Law, maintained under successive PSOE governments, has functioned to shield colonial-era abuses as well as Civil War-era crimes; the UN Human Rights Committee recommended its repeal in 2013.