Why Colonialism Remains Relevant

And a Good Thing

Welcome back, and thanks for reading! I realized, while in the midst of my series on the White Rajahs of Sarawak (Read Part I and Part II) and discussing the reality of Belgian colonialism in the Congo, that I haven’t really explained why I think it’s still relevant in a very different age. In this article, I’ll try to do so. As always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how the algorithm knows to support it. Thanks again, and enjoy reading!

An underappreciated aspect of most problems with which we now continually deal, whether mineral prices that march ever upwards or teeming throngs of Third World masses washing up upon our assaulted shores, is that those problems are entirely self-inflicted. We needn’t have Haitians living in Ohio, much less 4% of the total Haitian population living in America. We needn’t house hordes of Guatemalans in some now-flea-ridden hotel in New York City. We needn’t be running out of refined copper¹ or seeing an ever-tighter supply crunch for platinum group metals.²

All of those problems, and the many more like them, could be alleviated if not eradicated with relatively little effort or government spending…far less, in fact, than has been spent on encouraging dysfunction for the past half-century.³ Really, all it would take is will and recovering something of the mindset of our ancestors. That is, it would take the will to recreate the colonial system, and to maintain it in the face of many crocodile tears and gnashing of teeth. Yes, colonialism is the panacea to our present dysfunction.

Listen to the audio version of this article here:

[AUDIO] Why Colonialism Remains Relevant

The Colonial Achievement

Many lies have been told about the colonial project and the civilizing mission that was its impetus, the worst lies of which are assaults upon the Belgian achievement in the Congo. As a result of those lies, particularly the mendacious falsehoods⁴ pushed by Adam Hochschild in King Leopold’s Ghost, the Belgian Congo is remembered as a hell on Earth in which natives had their hands cut off by despicable European tyrants, as millions of them died so that rubber could be extracted. That is nearly entirely a lie, as proven by Bruce Gilley in The Case for Colonialism.

In reality, the Belgian Congo became—thanks to the decades-long efforts of King Leopold II and the Belgian government—a territory in which the natives were ruled well by competent Belgian administrators. Further, it was one provided with education and medical care in a land that went from being a relic of the Stone Age to one crisscrossed by railroads and paved highways for motorcars. I discussed this in some detail here:

Everything You Think You Know about the Belgian Congo Is Wrong

That Belgian accomplishment is just one example of many of what colonialism—here broadly meant as the process by which Westerners took over countries, sent in settlers and administrators, and governed them with an eye toward economic benefit—accomplished.

It transformed lands blighted by horrid rule stretching back into prehistory into gems that glistened as brightly as the precious minerals in their soil. It created a better world generally defined by just rule, economic development, and European administration that transformed the lives of the natives much for the better while also benefiting the colonizers themselves.

Colonialism and the Wealth Under Our Feet

One of the best examples of that process is the Belgian Congo, which the Belgians poured investment into for decades so that they could reap the rich mineral wealth lying under its soil, growing wealthy from the abundant natural resources while also bettering the lives of the natives in quite a noticeable fashion.

It could do so not only because of the natural rubber that existed in such prodigious quantities that it saved the colonial project early on,⁵ but thanks to the Congo’s immense wealth in critical and valuable minerals that are hard to find elsewhere. Copper, cobalt, cadmium, germanium, gold, manganese, platinum, tin, uranium, and zinc all exist in immense quantities, particularly in the Congo’s Kantaga region.

Even today, after decades of infrastructure destruction of the sort described by Mike Hoare in Congo Mercenary and shown in stomach-churning detail in Empire of Dust,⁶ Katanga remains one of the world’s main sources of copper and cobalt. It is an incredibly mineral-rich region of the world, much as Zimbabwe is incredibly rich in platinum group metals and lithium, Zambia has world-famous copper deposits,⁷ or South Africa is blessed with colossal reserves of gold and diamonds.

Further, it was able to mine them in a relatively safe, modern, and efficient manner because of the Belgian presence. It built the rail and road infrastructure that made the minerals possible to transport in an economic manner. It built the facilities in which the miners could live, the machinery with which they pulled great wealth from the ground, and the establishments that kept them healthy and their children educated. And, of course, it created the combination of property rights and law enforcement that turned the hellishly anarchic land described in How I Found Livingstone into one in which Europeans could do business safely and even take their families on vacation.

The same is true of the British presence in South Africa, Zambia, and Rhodesia. It was colonialism that discovered the great mineral and agricultural wealth for which those states were famous, and then created the environment in which it could be profitably and safely extracted.

All the roads, railroads, and ports had to be built. Legal codes had to be established and police forces raised. Modern agricultural practices had to be brought over wholesale, modern mines sunk, and fledgling industrial enterprises finally built. Western medicine had to be brought over and modern hospitals had to be built in which it could be practiced. Every single piece of that had to be built in an environment in which none of it had existed, and the Europeans managed to not only build it but to do so in the context of projects that were still broadly profitable.

And while Africa is one of the clearest cases of this, the same is true of pretty much everywhere else as well. It was the Rajahs of Sarawak who made Borneo’s gold and oil extractable,⁸ men like Herbert Hoover who brought modern mining to China,⁹ and the British who turned Australia into an agricultural production and mineral extraction powerhouse.

Without colonialism, much of it privately funded and accomplished, little to none of that would have happened. The Stone Age would still triumph, the untold riches under the earth would lie dormant, and the great triumph of the civilizing mission would never have been accomplished.

Avoiding Migration

Further, while liars like Hochschild allege that European colonization brought hellish trials and tribulations to the natives, much the opposite is true. In the Congo, the Belgians brought an end to the predations of cannibalistic chieftains and Arab slavers, creating a relative paradise for the natives.¹⁰

In Rhodesia and South Africa, stout-hearted men in red jackets and pith helmets brought an end to the incessant warring that had left those territories even more impoverished and depopulated than they otherwise would have been, much as the white rajahs ended the intractable pirate problem that afflicted Sarawak.¹¹

What those accomplishments did was render lands formerly on the verge of being uninhabitable, thanks to easily solved problems, quite habitable. The natives, suddenly blessed by the only good and just government they had ever known,¹² could live their lives like the European companies and administrators in their midst—untroubled by the barbarities that had once plagued them but suddenly became non-existent. In short, they could stay rather than flee.

That’s not to say there was no migration. For example, the reason for the “depopulation” myth pushed by Hochschild and others like him about the Congo is that the Congo Free State administration spread slowly, and the areas firmly under its domain were far better than those outside its grasp. So, those who could moved to its territories and created the impression of depopulation in the others.¹³

But, generally, those under European control had reason to stay home rather than flood into Europe or America. No Camp of the Saints existed when Europe still ruled, as the just and good governance brought by them obviated any potential reason for such risky and generally disadvantageous migrations.

The Results of Colonialism’s Death

All that ended with the Cold War, which brought with it the gratuitous destruction of the colonial project in the name of equality; “local rule” and egalitarian policies were considered more important than just rule and local prosperity.¹⁴ Thanks to that intentional destruction of the colonial order, now nearly all the benefits colonialism brought with it are gone, with dire results for all involved.

In Katanga, for example, that mineral-rich region developed so intensely by the Belgians, could have been richer than Croesus. This is why it wanted to secede from the decolonized Congolese state and become an independent, Belgian-allied state in the early 1960s.¹⁵ Instead, for the reasons described by “Eddie” in Empire of Dust—namely hatred of the colonial legacy for ideological reasons—nearly all of the formerly excellent infrastructure the Belgians left behind, from trains to mining equipment, was allowed to rot into total disrepair.¹⁶

Now, those natives not lucky enough to work for the few remaining Western companies in the area, such as the mining company Glencore,¹⁷ work in open-pit cobalt mines in some of the worst conditions on Earth. Here is one such glimpse from hell:

And that is just a scene from a mine, which at least is still functioning. Much of the rest of the country has been wracked by civil war ever since the Belgians were kicked out by the CIA for ideological reasons,¹⁸ and now millions are dead and millions more refugees who suffered the worst sorts of indignities and injustices.

The savage atrocities that Hochschild accused the Belgians of did occur, just after they were gone by those they fought to keep out of power. Had they remained, most of the country would likely exhibit the competence and relative prosperity exuded by Glencore’s remaining operations.¹⁹ Instead, open-air pit mines and the savagery of civil war are the depressing norm.

Such is true across the region as well.

Zimbabwe’s problems are ones I have described in depth before, so suffice it to say that they are as tragic as they were avoidable, and much the same sort of destruction of productive assets through malice and neglect seen in the Congo happened there as well.

South Africa was once a hub of prosperity, productivity, and innovation. It invented the CAT scan and pioneered the world’s first heart transplant. It was a military and agricultural powerhouse with world-famous gold and diamond mines. Now, it struggles to keep the lights on and is on the verge of starving,²⁰ though its mines are in far better shape than most in the Congo.

That’s not to say there are no post-colonial success stories. Zambia mostly returned to sanity by the ‘80s, though it remained less pleasant than it was when called “Northern Rhodesia,” and Botswana is famously a reasonably prosperous place in comparison to its neighbors. So are Mauritius and the Seychelles, Singapore and the Sultanate of Brunei.

But a few islands, a city state, and a couple of patches of relatively less terrible land do not a successful order make. They are merely little bastions of stability in a sea of disorder, and that raging ocean of chaos is causing major problems.

A Loss of Wealth

For one, the perennial disorder has brought with it the very sort of economic loss one might expect. Production of everything is down dramatically, particularly in the realms where that is least affordable: the world could survive without Zimbabwean wheat or tobacco, production of which has mostly recovered, but is in a pickle without Congolese cobalt, production of which has fallen off a cliff since decolonization.

For example, we are entering a copper crunch because decades of overregulation have made copper mining, smelting, and refining nearly impossible in the Western world at the same time as Latin American instability, another legacy of colonialism’s end, kneecapped the regions’ famously rich copper mines.

In such a situation, being able to lean heavily into the production of Congolese copper ore would be quite helpful; instead, its mines languish under the yoke of decolonization and, in some cases, produce less than 10% of what they did when the Belgians were in charge. In nearly no case is production as efficient as it was in the colonial era.

Such is the problem playing out repeatedly. Uranium, cobalt, manganese, platinum group metals, tin, and so on are not just useful but critical to our technological society. Without them, little of what we rely upon would be possible. But they are also rare and somewhat difficult to extract and refine; what cases there are of their existence need to be exploited.

However, we can’t do so because all of the problems solved by the Belgians, French, and British are back with a vengeance. Instead of order, there is violence and chaos. Instead of competence and good governance, there is the sort of kleptocracy for which the post-colonial regimes are famous. Instead of prosperity and productivity, they have famine and decay. Many of the post-colonial nations are, in short, reverting back into the Stone Age hell from which the Europeans once saved them.

Naturally, though the lack of minerals is annoying, the real problem is much larger.

Migration with a Vengeance

A study of colonial history shows, largely, that those areas with relatively just and effective European administration—and the economic opportunity that came with it—saw influxes of migrants from places without such rule.

Whether internal migration to properly administered areas, like happened in the Belgian Congo, or the transnational flow of migrants, like the (limited) flow of Chinese economic migrants into the American land of opportunity, where migration was allowed and migrants could get to a better-administered, more prosperous land, they did so. Such is how those who can think do think.

For the colonial era, that wasn’t much of a problem. Nearly everywhere was ruled by those of European descent, directly or indirectly, and so local governance was generally good enough to avoid the migration issue. That’s not to say it never happened, it did, but there weren’t torrents of migrants pouring across borders.

Then came decolonization, and it wreaked havoc. Civil wars, famines, and the end of colonial economic zones created severe suffering and a lack of opportunity that pushed refugees across borders. Western governments lacked the spine to tell them “no,” and in many cases encouraged them, and so Europe and North America were flooded with a mix of opportunity seekers and impoverished refugees.

Hence the North Africans causing chaos in France, the Somalis wreaking havoc in Britain and Minnesota alike, the mass influx of illegal immigrants into America and South Africa, and the tidal wave of random post-colonial migrants onto Europe’s shores. Their countries, which could be under stable colonial administration, are instead hellholes from which they want to flee,²¹ and leftist NGOs that want to destroy our civilization import them as weapons.

Now Britain often doesn’t feel British, nor France French, nor America American. Instead, the lands of opportunity draw opportunity seekers of various sorts like moths to a flame. That has been hugely expensive in terms of cash and blood,²² and now The Camp of the Saints looks more like reality every day. Decolonization is to blame.

It’s All So Unnecessary

None of this need have happened. Were it not for decolonization, the Congo would have remained a jewel of Africa instead of regressing back to the hell it is now and was before the Belgians arrived. Were it not for decolonization, Somalia would have avoided the disastrous civil wars and criminal misrule that has flooded America and Britain with Somalis. Were it not for decolonization, we’d still be getting huge quantities of efficiently mined cobalt, copper, and all the rest from Katanga, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere.

But there was decolonization, and so now we’re living with all that and more. The lives of the natives are worse, our lives are worse, and there are so many lost economic opportunities that it’s impossible to list them all. Decolonization—the idea that local misrule is better than paternalistic, competent rule provided by Western administrators—is responsible for all of that.

Hence why colonization is still relevant. There are men like Erik Prince who want to recolonize the post-colonial world to the extent that doing so is practicable in these imbecilic times, as shown by his operation providing security in the Congo²³ or his desire to be made “Viceroy” of Afghanistan so that he could profitably stabilize and rule it.²⁴ We need its minerals and want its people to stop flooding into the West; the best way to achieve that is to reestablish security and provide a variation of the colonial order so that the minerals can be extracted efficiently and the natives have no reason to try to leave.

That is a tough pill to swallow. The American Empire has so far largely been characterized by the opposite of realism,²⁵ and “invade the world, invite the world” has left many (rightly) skeptical of intervention abroad.

That mix of sowing disorder for ideological reasons and pairing it with IMF-led predatory loans is often called “neo-colonialism” or “neo-imperialism,” though really it is something else and is much worse. Restoring colonialism in a real way would mean restoring order and creating opportunity for the good of all involved, not sucking the lifeblood of afflicted areas like irremovable leeches. Restoring a proper sense of what colonialism is and how it can be effected is critical.

Soo, if we are to return to a period of dynamism, continue building great new things into the future, and shut off the migrant pipelines, we need the old colonial mindset back. We need to bring back the idea that great things can be accomplished and that it is right to establish just and good rule, whatever the inequalities of doing so are.

The civilizing mission was, thanks to the economic basis that undergirded it and the paternalist framework it created, a great thing. It led to much good and much achievement.

We need to bring it back, as that colonial order is how we can dig out of this dual mess of mass migration and natural resource scarcity.

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1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/21/copper-supply-demand-analysis-international-energy-agency

2. https://investingnews.com/metals-focus-pgms-forecast/

3. For example:

4. Professor Bruce Gilley refutes these lies superbly in his The Case for Colonialism:

5. Discussed here:

6. Described here: https://x.com/Will_Tanner_1/status/1843671114918334860

7. Zambian copper is such a big deal that it was one of the major points of contention as it and Southern Rhodesia split, as discussed here:

8. To be discussed in this series:

9. Discussed well in the very short and readable Herbert Hoover by Eugene Lyons.

10. Discussed here:

11. Discussed here:

12. As Bruce Gilley notes, the years of Belgian rule in the Congo were the only years of good government that the Congolese ever got

13. This general myth and what actually happened is discussed by Gilley in-depth in The Case for Colonialism:

14. Described here:

15. Generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Katanga

Also told be Mike Hoare here: The Road to Katanga

16. Described here: https://x.com/Will_Tanner_1/status/1843671114918334860

17. Noted and described here: https://x.com/AugustCohen4/status/1943682971002691945

18.

19. Watch, for example: https://x.com/BulosoW/status/1943662794915676549

20.

21.

22. The economic cost described here:

23. https://www.theafricareport.com/381915/erik-prince-returns-to-the-drc-amid-us-mineral-security-push/

24. http://network.aljazeera.net/en/pressroom/head-head-blackwater-founder-erik-prince-admits-2016-trump-tower-meeting

25. A great example of this is Carter’s race-communist destruction of Rhodesia: