Burying Settler Colonialism's Ideologiekritik

In his clearly written, concise little work On Settler Colonialism, Adam Kirsch has done for settler colonialism what John Fonte did for “transnational progressivism” at the turn of the century, Peter W. Wood and Phillip W. Magness did for The 1619 Project in 2020, and Joshua Mitchell, James Lindsay, and Christopher Rufo did for Critical Race Theory and DEI in the early 2020s.  He has taken the latest iteration of Leftist ideology and dissected it, retracing its academic origins and conceptual developments and connecting them to activists and contemporary events, starting with 2024’s anti-Israel campus “protests” that erupted even before Israel’s response to October 7, 2023.  With these well-funded and organized protests, a constellation of theorists, writers, and teacher-activists, along with their youthful minions, revealed itself to the general public.  The Left was on the march again, protesting what it deemed the deepest form of injustice, the “original sin” of modern history and politics, “settler colonialism,” while justifying the most heinous violations of moral and international law.  

Stirred by this paradox of injustice for the sake of Justice, Kirsch searched for the beast, tracking the genealogy of an ideological “worldview” that did not exist only a few decades ago but now has a strong presence on campus and in curricula. As with the best of such critical detective work, Kirsch lets its creators and proponents speak for themselves, citing them throughout. He gives error its due while going beyond it to reset the discussion and the debate.  Thus, while settler colonialism’s proponents truck in fictional dichotomous history (“innocent” versus “guilty”), he is even-handed, even bending over backwards to be fair to history’s colonial losers.  (I think he sometimes goes too far, but this is the excess of a virtue.) And while settler colonialism’s proponents deal in abstract categories and invidious binaries, he recognizes complexities and important differences in the historical record (Israel is not America is not Australia is not  … ). In short, he critiques the ideological character of settler colonialism and returns us to the real human world, with its tragedies and trade-offs and the need for old-fashioned virtues such as moral-political sobriety and prudence in dealing with them. Religion can add necessary forgiveness.

His chief intended audience, however, consists less of those deeply committed to the ideology than those “people who think of themselves as idealists” and, among them, “idealistic, educated young people.” At the beginning of his study, he quotes statistics to the effect that “more than half of college-age Americans seem to believe that it would be justified for Palestinians to commit a genocide of Israeli Jews.” Seeking to counteract their miseducation in the ways sketched above, he especially wants to show them the path their youthful moralism will necessarily take when linked to and subservient to this particular ideological framing of past and present: one of nihilistic repudiation, rhetorical and real violence, and (eventually) tyranny. This is what ideology has historically wrought and always will. He is thus a genuine educator, a tutor of young people’s “moral instinct” in the face of their historical ignorance and ideological indoctrination. One can only wish him well.  

More generally, for all readers, he aims to demonstrate that “it’s impossible to understand progressive politics today without grasping the idea of settler colonialism and the worldview that derives from it.” Thus, while he primarily seeks to provide intellectual clarity concerning the hatred manifested against Israel, he demonstrates that the same hatred has America, Australia, Canada, and other Western countries in its sights. De nobis res quoque agitur.  

Setting the Stage

Kirsch makes this multifaceted case in seven crisp chapters: “The Theory of a Massacre”; “Redefining Colonialism”; “A New American Countermyth”; “Settler Ways of Being”; “The Palestine Paradigm”; “Why Israel Can’t be Decolonized”; and “Justice and Despair”.  The first two chapters set the stage for more particular discussions (“A New American Countermyth”; “The Palestine Paradigm” and “Why Israel Can’t be Decolonized”) and developments (“Settler Ways of Being”; “Justice and Despair”) to follow.  

“The Theory of a Massacre” brings to light the worldview that “justifies” (sic) the massacre and hostage-taking of Oct. 7th   and the subsequent “enthusiastic” defense of that horrible violence by many progressives in the West.  Like a good Socratic, Kirsch listens to what its proponents say about themselves. “Two things about [their] statements are immediately striking. The first is their frank enthusiasm for violence against Israeli civilians” , while “[t]he second notable feature of these statements is the ubiquity of the term settler colonial” (5).  These provide the entry to his subject.  An initial reconnaissance brings to light a number of its essential features: that 1) both terms, “colonial” and “settler,” when brought together, have been ideologically transformed, a characteristic of the kind of thinking which claims to demystify ordinary language but in fact tends to produce its own gnostic discourse: “colonial” now means “genocidal” and “settler” refers to any person in a country who is not indigenous, including the most recent immigrant; that 2) “settler colonialism” is both a view of history and of the present; more specifically, it is a Manichean imputation of “original sin” and of ongoing “settler guilt,” which points to its quasi-religious character; 3) like all “radical ideologies” it is a form of thinking that is intrinsically activist, with built-in moments of “critique,” “delegitimatizing,” and “dismantling” (“the goal of learning about settlement in America and elsewhere is not to understand it, as a historian would, but to combat it”;  by its very nature, students are groomed to become ideologues and activists; and, finally, 4) while it is “rooted in a praiseworthy moral instinct: indignation against injustice”, “history shows that it can easily become the source of a new injustice”.  Here is a neat retorsion: The appeal to history must be applied to those who appeal to it.   Ideology’s track record is quite instructive, revealing mendacity, violence, and torrents of blood (for the case of communism, see The Black Book of Communism). The rest of the study is intended to show that “the ideology of settler colonialism … falls into many of the errors to which radical ideologies are traditionally prone”.  

The second chapter, “Redefining Colonialism,” is a tour de force of political and, especially, intellectual history. Kirsch generally situates settler colonialism  within the intellectual lineage of “critical theory,” which first “analyzed … injustice in Marxist terms.” Then came “the critical race theory that emerged in American law schools in the 1970s [which] understood it in terms of racism.”  “Today, settler colonial studies understands it as the legacy – better, the persistence – of a founding genocide”.  Ideology is a hydra that constantly generates new heads. While Kirsch does not draw the inference, one can predict that there will be attempts at novel iterations as long as modernity continues.  Be that as it may, after situating settler colonialism in its intellectual genus, Kirsch lays out its history and nature more specifically.  

Actual decolonialism occasioned various left-wing efforts to critically understand colonialism’s history and legacy.   These typically began with Marxist frameworks, as with Kenneth Good, the first to coin the term “settler colonialism”. Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe’s 1999 book Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology marked the decisive development in the endeavor. He defined “settler colonialism” used thereafter, wherein the dispossession of aboriginals from their land has been so successful that the victors – the “settlers” –  consider themselves “natives”.   Moreover, this original action of dispossession is so powerful that it provides the overarching “structure” for all that followed in a country’s history.  In “probably the most cited statement in the literature,” Wolfe wrote that “invasion is a structure not an event.”  This “invasion” and the resulting institutional and “discursive” structure it produced aimed(s) at the erasure of the indigenous peoples.  Wolfe wrote in 2006, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism.”  

As is his wont, Kirsh retraces the history of this incendiary term, both before settler colonialism and in settler colonialism, which allows him to observe its conceptual inflation and ever-wider application in the latter. It has been expanded to include any disturbance of Indigenes’ (purportedly) pristine ways of life and all forms of settler-native relations. These “genocidal” options include the granting of sovereign-nation status and the offer of citizenship to the vanquished.  Even multiculturalism is critiqued as being premised on the false claim that the country can be divided up. This is to deny Indigenes’ exclusive claims.

Kirsh regularly highlights a feature of the ideology: its “totalizing” or totalitarian character. Entire categories of human beings are defined abstractly and in toto (as Marxism used to speak of “capitalists” or “the bourgeois” or “kulaks”) as good or bad, innocent or guilty, and an enormously complex and multifaceted process, colonizing, is reduced to one motive – rapacity - , and becomes the chief, if not sole, causal factor in understanding societies that have experienced colonialization. It is the source and sum of all evils. Redemption requires total eradication.

What Is To Be Done?

After retracing its conceptual construction, Kirsch asks the natural follow-up question: What do its proponents want? What is their goal? In principle, their theory requires the complete exit from the country of all who are not indigenous and the restoration of the land and their pre-colonial ways of life to the Indigenes. Settler “blight” must be totally removed from the offended countries, and the status quo ante – various Edenic scenes of indigenous innocence – must reappear. Kirsch points out the many problems, even impossibilities, with this prescription: Where will the current “settlers” go, including the enormous majority who have no other “mother country”? Can current Indigenes really return to pre-settler ways?  Do they want to?  Because these questions expose the radicality of the theory and its application’s utter impracticality, proponents are most often silent when it comes to these matters, saying that the dispossessed “do not have to answer to settlers’ questions.” In practice, it engenders a radical hatred of the status quo and the history that (purportedly) led to it. Its effectual truth is a thoroughgoing “culture of repudiation” (in Roger Scruton’s memorable phrase).  

Not surprisingly, for many, “virtue-signaling” takes the place of concrete action, and Kirsch provides numerous illustrations and hypocrisies in this vein. Even more tellingly, he reports that its purported beneficiaries, native Americans, in the main, do not join in; they lobby for finite, non-radical goals; they stay in the realm of the possible and the political, not the ideological. And in an act of self-respect, they call out many non-natives for “colonizing” and commandeering the discipline that claims to speak for them. While he doesn’t mention it, one can easily see a distinction being made in response between the native American version of “uncle Toms” and “real Indians.” Kirsch, however, does point out that the stark distinction between “Indigenes” and “settlers” indicts the rest of their progressive “allies,” including African-Americans, as complicit in evil. In the progressive contest over “victimization,” one victim – the Indigene - trumps all others. In practice, however, proponents regularly dissemble this divide.  

Ironies

After setting the stage, Kirsch turns to consider particulars – settler colonialism’s views of America, Israel, and the Palestinians – and further develops points (“Ways of Settler Being”; “Justice and Despair”) broached earlier. In these chapters, one learns the embarrassing story of the origin of the locution “Turtle Island” used to designate America before the colonists arrived. While originally a “creation myth” of several northeastern Indian tribes, it was used in 1975 by a white poet, Gary Snyder, to designate the entirety of the North American continent – something which no aboriginal tribe did or could have done. This embarrassing “source criticism” on Kirsch’s part illustrates a wider irony that the ideology of settler colonialism employs Western categories and comes from Western thinkers. As portrayed by their self-proclaimed defenders, natives would never have come up with “settler colonialism.” Here is a form of Western “imperialism” not acknowledged by its detractors.    

The (Sad) Necessity of Ideologiekritik

Following Kirsch’s own lead, I have written this review primarily with students in mind. Like him, I emphasized settler colonialism’s ideological character, which claims to speak in the name of Justice and, therefore, to justify violence that violates moral law and denies a common humanity. This is not an innocent paradox or mere intellectual incoherence.  It destroys the mind, then the soul, then bodies, and finally, societies.  It is the antithesis of liberal education. Ideology is one of the three or four banes of our existence these days. Studying it in various forms is a sad necessity of intellectual and civic life today.  Among the books that make signal contributions to this necessary study is On Settler Colonialism.

Paul Seaton, an independent scholar, is the translator of The Religion of Humanity (St. Augustine Press) and the author of Public Philosophy and Patriotism: Essays on the Declaration and Us (St. Augustine Press).