The Ideology of 'Settler Colonialism' and its Poisonous Influence

Review: Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

If you’ve ever wondered why thousands of young, university-educated Britons and Americans—and many of their teachers—took to celebrating the sadistic atrocity of Hamas’s attack on Israel of 7 October 2023, this eloquent book will give you the answer: the malign influence of the ideology of ‘settler colonialism’.

Of the earliest ideologues, the most influential was the Australian activist and anthropologist, Patrick Wolfe, whose 1999 book, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, and 2006 article, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native”, have been seminal. As Wolfe has it, the kind of colonialism imposed on Australia and North America, which aimed to replace native societies with new, European ones, was characterised by “the logic of elimination”.

As is typical of radical left-wing politics, the theory of ‘settler colonialism’ redefines words for political effect and erases normal distinctions. Crucial to its view is the loosening of the definition of the morally laden concept of genocide and its expansion beyond massive physical killing to include policies of cultural assimilation and equal citizenship. Indeed, in the hands of another Australian academic, Lorenzo Veracini, who co-founded the journal Settler Colonial Studies in 2010, physical killing becomes just one of twenty-six species of ‘transfer’. ‘Transfer’, or the replacement of one society by another, is the fundamental and gravest wrong; massive killing is merely one of many means, set alongside—astonishingly--the granting of equal voting rights.

This unilateral conceptual redefinition is completely at odds with international law, which takes the physical elimination of the Jewish people in the Nazi Holocaust as the paradigm of genocide. The proposal to include a cultural species in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was rejected. Kirsch does not point this out, but, more basically, the redefinition turns the normal, Christianised, Western hierarchy of moral goods upside down: the survival of a society is made more important than the lives of its individual members. It is no coincidence that the proponents of ‘settler colonialism’ tend to be anthropologists, who are wont to idealise indigenous societies and cultures.

Driven by doctrine rather than data, the theory purports to grasp the world through abstractions. Accordingly, it views all kinds of social injustice as flowing from a single source: “the primary insatiability in the soul of the settler” (p. 60). As Sai Englert, lecturer in Area Studies at the University of Leiden, has boldly asserted, “settler colonial processes connect to … capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, nationalism”. Consequently, some theorists go so far as to identify the struggle for LGBTQ rights with the struggle to liberate Palestine—in breath-taking defiance of the facts that Hamas condemns homosexuality as a primary example of Western decadence and Israel is the state most supportive of gay rights in the Middle East.

This disdain for data is the reason Kirsch is correct to counsel that ‘settler colonialism’ is best understood as a variety of critical theory rather than of historical study. It completely ignores the historical fact that the mass migration of peoples, and the overwhelming and displacement of some by others, is a universal phenomenon, conducted on every continent by people of every skin colour. In the 1630s and ‘40s, for example, the Iroquois in North America expanded northward from the southern shores of the Great Lakes, displacing the Huron, who then moved westward, displacing other native peoples in their turn. While they adopted female and juvenile captives, they tortured, killed, and ate male ones. In the early 1800s the militarised Zulu kingdom invaded westward, conducting at least one war of extermination and scattering other African peoples to three of the four winds in what is referred to as the ‘Mfecane’ or ‘Crushing’. And when the Māori invaded the Chatham Islands in 1835, they killed about ten percent of the Moriori people and enslaved the rest. As for Aboriginal Australians, who comprised different peoples vying with one another for resources in a harsh environment, they, too, invaded, killed, and displaced one another. Settler colonisation was not a peculiarly European sin. As Kirsch puts it, “[a]s far back as we can see, there is … no true indigeneity. Every people that occupies a territory took it from another people, who took it from someone else” (p. 124).

A major effect of ‘settler colonialism’s view of the world is to deny moral legitimacy to states built on the replacement of indigenous societies with European ones. As the oft-quoted assertion of Patrick Wolfe puts it, “Invasion is a structure, not an event”. Accordingly, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, it is claimed, continue to invade and oppress indigenous peoples, and every non-indigenous citizen is an invader. This is what ‘land acknowledgements’ made at every public event constantly affirm: we stand on stolen land and do not belong here. Yet, in fact, it was the common practice of colonising Britons in the 18^thand 19^th centuries—unlike Iroquois, Comanche, Zulu, and Māori—to purchase land with consent by means of treaty. Indeed, the transfer of land was made a monopoly of the Crown, so as to prevent native peoples being defrauded by settlers and provoked to violence. This was certainly so in British North America, except British Columbia. It was also so in the United States, although treaties there were too often broken. It was not so in Australia, however, where aboriginal peoples were nomadic, numerous, small, and politically flat, making it difficult to discern whether a certain territory was a people’s property and with whom to negotiate its transfer. Nonetheless, it is not true that colonisation generally took place by invasion and theft.

Uninhibited by historical facts or moral discrimination, the ideologues clamour for the complete eradication of settler colonial structures, thereby, as Kirsch notes, removing the ideology of settler colonialism from the realm of practicable politics (p. 32). Predictably, its advocates are not very articulate when it comes to imagining a “decolonial future” concretely and offering practical solutions to the problem, as they have conceived it. When pressed, they tend to “slip into evasive pieties” (p. 57).

Much worse, they fantasize about the rejuvenating powers of violence, imagining that, in the cathartic act of destroying the Old, they are clearing the ground for the spontaneous growth of the New. Kirsch aptly observes the fascistic qualities of this celebration of “redemptive destruction” (p. 128). “Under the banner of decolonization”, he writes, “fantasies of murder and hymns of praise to national glory are rehabilitated for use by progressives” (p. 75). Thus, the Ojibwe-Canadian poet, David Groulx, gaily chanted in 2019, “Sing me Fanon, sing me inferno” (p. 97).

His invocation arises from a collection that bears the title, From Turtle Island to Gaza. ‘Turtle Island’ is the name given to North America by some native American peoples, and the gist of Groulx’s poetry is to identify Canada, the United States, and Israel as illegitimate ‘settler colonial’ invaders of indigenous lands. Kirsch notes the unjustified selectivity of ideologues like Groulx, pointing out that the most egregious instances of settler colonialism in the 21^st century are probably China’s occupation of Tibet and its coerced ‘re-education’ of Muslim Uighurs. He could also have mentioned Russia’s recent occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, and the deliberate displacement and transfer of people, not least children. But from such non-Western invasions and colonisations, the ‘progressive’ ideologues wilfully avert their eyes.

Apart from residual antisemitism, Kirsch speculates that the reason for the disproportionate attention paid to Israel is that it is a supposedly settler colonial society small and vulnerable enough to make the possibility of its destruction realistic: Israel is “the perfect focus for all the moral passion and rhetorical violence