Podcast #259: The Campaign Against ‘Settler Colonialism’
Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay talks to author Adam Kirsch about the growing corps of academics and activists seeking to demonise ‘settler colonialists’ in North America, Australia—and especially Israel.
[00:00:00] Jonathan Kay: Welcome to the Quillette podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Kay, a senior editor at Quillette. Quillette is where free thought lives. We are an independent, grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary. If you’d like to support the podcast, you can do so by going to Quillette.com and becoming a paid subscriber.
[00:00:21] This subscription will also give you access to all our articles and early access to Quillette social events. And on this week’s episode, I’ll be talking to Adam Kirsch, a Wall Street Journal editor who’s written numerous acclaimed books. His latest is On Settler Colonialism. In it, Kirsch offers a timely and incisive explanation as to why so many Western academics and activists have turned themselves into apologists and even cheerleaders for terrorist groups such as Hamas.
[00:00:52] As Hirsch explains, this unsettling trend among progressive intellectuals is rooted, in large part, in an ideological movement that traces the world’s evils to a phenomenon described as settler colonialism—a malevolent force that they blame for everything from climate change to the evils of capitalism.
[00:01:11] In their academic papers and books, these writers tend to be somewhat geographically selective in their analysis, however. While the planet is littered with many examples of civilisations conquering or assimilating one another, enemies of settler colonialism tend to be very much focused on just a handful of examples…
[00:01:30] …Specifically, Canada, Australia, the United States, and especially Israel. So much so, in fact, that the movement has come to resemble more of a radicalised ideological posture than any kind of coherent scholarly discipline. This became apparent in the wake of the October 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks, which some self-described experts on settler colonialism greeted with unconcealed joy…
Jeffrey Herf
[00:01:54] …a disturbing response given that those attacks resulted in the massacre of about 1,200 innocent people. As Kirsch notes, in fact, this movement often seems to channel religious, even apocalyptic, tendencies. And yet for all their fervour, none of its disciples seem to have any real idea what the process of undoing settler colonialism would look like in a country such as Canada or the United States, where only a tiny fraction of the population claims Indigenous heritage.
[00:02:22] Aside from urging the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, the agenda here seems mostly aimed at inciting a permanent politics of grievance—one that encourages Westerners to regard their nations with a sense of illegitimacy and even shame, including through the use of enforced rituals such as land acknowledgements, which seem to have little practical value to anyone, Indigenous people included.
[00:02:45] Also, if you’re listening to this podcast and don’t see a gold members-only ribbon, that means you’re a free subscriber, and you’ll be listening to a preview version of this episode. To enjoy the full episode, consider subscribing at Quillette.com. As a Quillette member, you’ll gain unlimited access to all our podcast episodes, plus the entire Quillette article archive, participation in our comments section, and early access to tickets for Quillette socials.
[00:03:18] Adam, are we “settler colonialists”?
[00:03:20] Adam Kirsch: Well, it depends on what you mean by “we.”
[00:03:24] Jonathan Kay: I mean you and me.
[00:03:27] Adam Kirsch: [According to the] theory of settler colonialism, as I think it’s elaborated by academics, you don’t have to be descended from someone who you would ordinarily consider a “settler” in order to be a settler. In other words, when you think of settlers in American history, you might think of the Puritans, the people who first settled… Europeans who first came here in the 17th century.
[00:03:44] The idea of settler colonialism is that there’s a sort of ongoing system in which you’re either a settler or Indigenous. So if you’re not an Indigenous person, in other words, if you’re not descended from one of the peoples who lived in North America before the arrival of Europeans, then you can only be a settler.
[00:04:00] And there’s even a tendency in this discourse to say that it doesn’t matter if your ancestors came here, maybe as slaves from Africa—or if you’re a recent immigrant; you still belong to the category of settlers because you’re not an Indigenous person. So in that sense, everyone who’s not Indigenous is a settler.
[00:04:16] Of course, today, many people who consider themselves Indigenous also have ancestry from other groups. There’s a sort of ideological or theoretical distinction between settlers and natives. And I think that for people who have embraced this way of thinking, acknowledging yourself as a settler is actually an important moral gesture.
[00:04:35] It’s not unlike saying, in evangelical Christianity, that you’re a sinner. You say, “I acknowledge that I’m a sinner, that I’m fallen, that I’ve inherited this sin from the past.” So, [as with] original sin, it doesn’t have to be something that you personally did. It’s the continuing legacy of the original crime of settlement.
[00:04:54] Jonathan Kay: Well, you make the point that it goes beyond ordinary Protestant Christian doctrine to a kind of Calvinism, a kind of predestination—that from birth, if you’re a settler, you have this black mark upon your soul. There’s nothing you can really truly do to redeem yourself, [it’s] baked into your blood, this original sin.
[00:05:15] You’ve been predestined to evil. And the world is divided between the good and the bad, the Indigenous and the settlers. Is this a deflected form of Christianity for post-religious, post-Christian societies such as Canada and Australia, and I guess blue-state United States?
[00:05:38] Adam Kirsch: I think that it definitely has a religious spiritual element to it. What it has most in common with Protestantism is the idea that you have to be looking at your own conscience. You have to be looking inward in order to detect the legacy of sin in yourself and to purge it. And I think it’s probably not a coincidence that the countries where settler-colonial theory has really…
[00:06:00] …been most successful are those Protestant Anglophone countries, Canada, the US, and Australia, because it does have this resonance with older ways of thinking. When people introduce themselves as a “settler,” if they put in their Twitter bio, “I am a settler,” which I think is more common in Canada than in the U.S…
[00:06:18] …but it’s probably spreading. As I said, it’s similar to saying that you’re a sinner. It’s saying, “I acknowledge this fact.” And in a strange way, acknowledging it makes you morally superior to the people who don’t acknowledge it. You’ve woken up to the fact that you have a place in this corrupt system and you’re trying to atone for it.
[00:06:35] Jonathan Kay: This movement tends to appeal to people who are very status-conscious in terms of their ideological commitments. Does this movement have any kind of following on a mass political level? I know when I go to the baseball game here in Toronto, they do say a brief land acknowledgement. There’s 40,000 people there.
[00:06:55] Not all of them are college professors. Do you detect any kind of mass following for this movement?
[00:07:00] Adam Kirsch: I think that it is about spiritual prestige. It’s about moral prestige. People who talk about settler colonialism usually see themselves as progressives. It’s an unusual kind of progressive movement because it’s not majoritarian.
[00:07:12] It’s the opposite. It’s not saying we’re going to take the money or power from the one percent and distribute it to everyone. It’s really saying, the 99 percent of people who are not Indigenous are guilty, and they have to repent for the power and the property that they either stole or inherited from people who stole from native peoples.
[00:07:32] That basic idea means that the ideology of settler colonialism can’t really be a mass movement, and it’s not really a mass movement. But as you mentioned with land acknowledgements, if an idea appeals to a certain kind of intellectual elite or moral vanguard, and they’re able to convince everyone that it needs to filter further, that you have to have a land acknowledgement or else you’re defaulting some kind of moral duty, those things can spread very fast because it’s a social norm.
[00:08:03] Land acknowledgments in the United States went from being completely unheard of—no one had ever heard of them—to absolutely everywhere in about three years… maybe from 2018–19 to the last couple of years. So now if you go to any museum, any arts institution, theatre, any non-profit, a lot of local city government meetings, and certainly any university, there will often be a land acknowledgement… either as a sign or as something that you recite… some kind of formula.
[00:08:30] And I think it’s a bit like saying your pronouns, which is something that no one ever thought was necessary. And then all of a sudden, it became necessary for everyone. And if you held out against it, you are considered a reactionary. The purpose of a land acknowledgement obviously is not practical or political because the people making the land acknowledgements don’t intend to give up their land.
[00:08:50] They don’t intend to pick up what they’ve built and move it somewhere else, or give it back to the Native people who they’re acknowledging. It is a way of ritually affirming before the public, or enlisting the public to affirm, that the civilisation that exists here shouldn’t have existed, that it doesn’t have basic legitimacy.
The purpose of a land acknowledgement is not practical or political, because the people making the land acknowledgements don’t intend to give up their land. It’s a way of ritually affirming that the civilization that exists shouldn’t exist, that it doesn’t have legitimacy.
[00:09:06] It was built on expropriation, it was built on crime. So it is a strange thing when you think about a civilisation whose rituals involve saying that the civilisation should not exist. That doesn’t seem like a long-term recipe for stability.
[00:09:20] Jonathan Kay: In this movement, has there been any reckoning with some of these paradoxes you’ve been talking about?
[00:09:25] I’m thinking in particular, here in Canada, professors… academics in general are very big on “decolonising the university.” There’s a focus on decolonising the theatre, decolonising museums, decolonising essentially the most recherché elements of our society. In the case of universities, in particular, many of the people who are most ardent about “decolonising” the university, they have a PhD in their social media handles…
[00:09:52] They make six figure incomes. They’re very excited about their book deals and their panels and their conferences. None of which really has anything to do with how society existed before the arrival of Europeans. I mean, the whole idea of a university is something that was imported [from Europe]. You’ve done an extensive review of the literature, impressively so.
[00:10:11] Has anyone given anything except vague formulations in terms of what “decolonising” a Western institution like a museum or university would look like?
[00:10:20] Adam Kirsch: You’re right. Decolonising is a trendy term that’s used in a lot of contexts, but it is hard to pin down to an actual meaning. And this is one of the ways in which I think applying the idea of colonialism to societies such as Canada and the US creates all these problems, unnecessary intellectual problems and category problems.
Amy Eileen Hamm
[00:10:39] If you’re fighting against settler colonialism in, say, Algeria or Rhodesia, that’s a pretty straightforward political goal. It means you want to take back land and power resources from the ten percent of Europeans who have settled there, and return it to the people who are native to the place where they make up the vast majority of the population.
[00:10:58] That was the goal of driving the French out of Algeria and it succeeded—and when Algeria became independent, the settlers left, almost all of them. [But] you can’t have that kind of decolonisation in a country where 98 percent of people are not Indigenous, and where the process of colonisation began 400 years ago.
[00:11:17] So when people say “decolonise,” they’re not really naming what we would think of as a classic political or economic goal. What they’re really talking about is rethinking the way that you understand your country and yourself. And so it has to do with things like including more non-white, non-European authors in your curriculum… decolonising the classroom; or on a more sophisticated level, it might mean empowering people who are not white or settlers to speak up and have their voices heard in the classroom; and analogous things about decolonising, say, your corporate board… which essentially is about…
[00:11:54] partially about diversity, ethnic diversity, but it also, I think, more importantly, connects to this idea that there are “settler ways of being,” because the way that the terrain on which this battle is being fought is not politics. It’s about thought. It’s about ideas. And the term “settler ways of being”…
[00:12:13] …which is commonly used in this discourse, can refer to all kinds of things that you would might otherwise call a vice. Anything that you might think of as wrong or worthy of criticism in society or in oneself can be characterised as a settler way of being. So things that often get that description are capitalism, economic inequality, and, in particular, environmental despoliation.
[00:12:37] Also, sexism, patriarchy, homophobia, things that are often criticised in progressive circles in other terms can be reimagined as legacies of settler colonialism. Those are “settler ways of being.” So when you’re talking about dismantling settler ways of being, you’re really talking about changing the way that people think and feel and interact rather than…
[00:13:00] …changing institutions. There are some people, some theorists who will say at some point the United States should or will give back some big part of its territory to native peoples, right? They imagine that is a desirable future. But absolutely no one has any idea of how that would work or what that would actually mean.
[00:13:20] And in fact, one of the funny things about this whole area is that whenever that subject comes up, the standard rhetorical move is to say, “Well, if you were really a true believer, you wouldn’t ask that question.”
[00:13:32] If you ask that question, it means that you’re not willing to “do the work” to figure out what that better future would be, which is actually very much like the way communists might have said, if you asked in a communist party meeting, “What will society look like after the revolution?” They would say, “Well, if you really believed in the revolution, if you really understood it, you wouldn’t worry about that.
[00:13:49] You wouldn’t ask that.” Or, for that matter, any messianic movement—what will it be like after the messiah comes? Well, you’re not supposed to speculate about that. You’re supposed to just believe in it and work for it.
[00:14:00] Jonathan Kay: That said, the comparison with communism lands a little funny because communism is essentially a materialist movement that promised a better material life.
[00:14:11] Settler colonialism, as you say, is almost a cult of renunciation—renouncing material wealth and capitalism. You see some slides put up at DEI sessions here in Canada where things like hard work and perfectionism and individual initiative—which we associate with just being a responsible human in a workaday society—are dismissed as [settler] vices.
[00:14:36] There seems to be a kind of consciousness-awakening aspect to this. A lot of the people who buy into it are often people who also buy into new age spiritual stuff in Canada—a lot of wealthy white middle-aged academic women and NGO types who buy heavily into this. And because it’s so spiritually based, there seems to be a wilful ignorance about what Indigenous history actually was.
[00:15:00] People now write whole books about Indigenous life here in Canada that are just totally separate from reality. There’s no understanding of the real and very interesting geopolitical intrigues among Indigenous nations. There was brutality, much like there was even worse brutality in Europe.
[00:15:15] They haven’t really educated themselves about the realities of life such as we know it through historical sources. Did that surprise you?
[00:15:22] Adam Kirsch: I think that’s definitely true. And in fact, one of the interesting things that I discovered is that there’s this tension between historians of Native America or First Nations historians, people who actually study that history as a historian does, and settler-colonial theory.
[00:15:38] A good example of this is the historian Ned Blackhawk, who is a Native American, and a member of a Native American tribe and a professor at Yale. He wrote a book that I discuss—a very, very interesting book, a very good book. It’s basically about how interactions with Indian tribes shaped American institutions in the early [US] republic.
Authors
[00:15:56] So he has this very ambivalent attitude towards settler colonialism because he says, on the one hand, this idea draws attention to his field, right? It draws attention to Native American people. But he knows at the same time that the people who theorise about this are not historians and often don’t really know the material the way that he knows it.
[00:16:15] One example of this is the basic idea in settler colonialism that European colonists came and committed genocide. And by saying “genocide,” you evoke the idea of the Holocaust and an ideologically driven mass extermination. But in fact, the history of America, let’s say the US, which is the history that I know, is [actually] a history of wars being fought over a two or three hundred year period.
[00:16:39] And at different times and places in that [struggle], Native polities had the upper hand in some places, even if, in the long term, obviously, European settlers and then the United States did end up conquering the entire continent, a process that used to be called Manifest Destiny, though it’s now seen as an evil destiny. But if you want to explain what geopolitics was like in North America at the time of the American Revolution, saying it was settler colonists committing genocide doesn’t fit the facts.
[00:17:08] It doesn’t tell you anything about what was actually going on. In fact, for a long time, the Iroquois Confederacy was more powerful in some ways than British America, British Canada. So, if you want to look at the actual past, it’s not a simple story. People who theorise about settler colonialism or the way that this discourse is situated in academia—they’re usually not historians or area-studies people or people who study languages and history.
[00:17:35] It’s mostly people coming from fields like anthropology and sociology, which you might call soft social sciences. And it’s about theorising the past rather than uncovering the past or learning about the past. And as I think many or most of them would explicitly say, it’s an activist scholarship.
[00:17:54] It’s about theorising the past in order to change the present and the future. There’s a book, one book I discuss, called, No Study Without Struggle. The idea is that this is not a detached scholarly discipline. That would be too passive and irresponsible. It’s about analysing what’s wrong with contemporary societies in terms of settler colonialism in order to decolonise them.
Leigh Patel
[00:18:16] So in that sense, what I say in the book is that what I’m calling the ideology of settler colonialism is best understood as a critical theory. It’s a critical theory about contemporary society and how it should be changed. In the same ways that Frankfurt school critical theory began with a Marxist analysis. Critical race theory began with an analysis about slavery and racism.
[00:18:37] Settler colonialism is a critical theory that begins with settlement—European settlement and colonisation as the matrix for everything that’s wrong with society today.
[00:18:46] Jonathan Kay: One perverse effect is that I found, at least here in Canada, that it actually discourages any kind of deep or intelligent study of the often fascinating histories of Indigenous societies.
[00:18:58] Indigenous people are presented as these Ewok figures who are struggling against the evil empire and just have this very simplistic, one-dimensional, communal thing. They have all the qualities you associate with a kindly grandmother. You have one author who you mentioned, I had to read it twice, it’s so bizarre, who theorised about this ancient Indigenous settlement that was abandoned.
[00:19:24] I think it was found near what’s now St. Louis—a huge city by the standards of the time. Something like 40,000 people might have lived there at one time. Tell us why this author, a respected author, theorised about why Indigenous people abandoned this city.
[00:19:44] And this, I think it was the 12th or 13th century—something like that.
[00:19:47] Adam Kirsch: Yeah. So this is what’s now called Cahokia. I think it’s not known what it was called by the people who lived there at the time, but it’s now known by Cahokia. And it’s an archaeological site near St. Louis, Missouri, which based on the things uncovered there is thought to have been a major population center in pre-Columbian America… and then before 1492, it was abandoned in the 12th or 13th century.
[00:20:13] A big question or mystery in archaeology is why was it abandoned? What happened? And the book that you’re talking about, which is by a Finnish-born historian named Pekka Hämäläinen. He basically argues that Native Americans deliberately chose to abandon urban living because it was not egalitarian, because in order to have a city you have to have a ruling class, you have to have agriculture and a priesthood, and that Native Americans basically realised that these things are all bad and decided to live in egalitarian small settlements rather than in a big urban settlement. And he says, at the very same time that in Europe, people were urbanising and giving power to the church and to political leaders, Native Americans were choosing this other path of independence and self-sufficiency and small-scale living.
[00:21:00] And it’s completely unprovable. It’s clearly not a historical thesis. What it really is, and this goes for a lot of the things you were talking about, it’s a very old strain in Western culture, a way of thinking about Native Americans that started almost immediately once reports from the New World began to come back, which is to project onto Native Americans all of the virtues that people felt that their own society lacked.
[00:21:25] So Thomas More’s Utopia, which was written in the 1510s, imagines Spanish sailors discovering an island in the New World where there’s this perfect society, where there’s no private property and no wars and no religious strife. You know, all the things that Thomas More was saying are the problem in Christian Europe don’t exist in this utopian Native society.
[00:21:45] And I think that that basic attitude, it’s more sophisticated, but that basic attitude underlies a lot of the discourse of settler colonialism. There’s this idea that an Indigenous people is authentic and non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian, and Europeans represent [the opposite] of all that, and so settler consciousness or settler ways of being are about things like rapacity and insatiability and always wanting more and never being satisfied.
[00:22:24] The perfect example is environmentalism. There’s a lot of discussion and theorising about how America is a carbon emitter and a polluter because of our settler colonial legacy. Settler colonists believe that you can just take and take and take as much as you want from the earth and never give anything back, which is allegedly in contrast with the way hunter gatherers lived, where they live much lighter on the land—which ignores the fact that four of the five largest carbon emitters in the world are not settler-colonial countries.
[00:22:53] They are countries such as China and India. And in fact, in those places, having a big advanced industrial economy was considered an anti-colonial achievement because it was saying: we’ve caught up and surpassed the West. So the idea that somehow if you decolonise, you’ll no longer have things that people want or need such as oil and coal, is empirically absurd. But it’s a very important ideological structure.
[00:23:20] It’s a way of saying: We could solve all of these problems with one blow if only we could stop being settlers in a certain way.
[00:23:26] Jonathan Kay: Well, you say these countries aren’t settler-colonial countries. But in your book, you make a strong argument that, say, China in Tibet… the Mughal Empire in India: is that settler colonial or do you have to be a white English-speaking person to be settler colonial?
[00:23:41] Adam Kirsch: Well, when I said these aren’t settler colonial countries, what I really meant was they aren’t the countries that people who talk about settler colonialism are talking about or focusing on in their academic theories of settler colonialism. People are talking almost always about the US, Canada and Australia and Israel.
[00:23:58] But yes, absolutely. There are definitely historians who will say settler colonialism is a form of human interaction that’s been going on since the beginning of time and that there are lots of examples of it. There are historians who will write about settler colonialism in the ancient world or the Japanese conquest of Manchuria as an example of settler colonialism in the 30s.
[00:24:19] The idea that basically all countries, all political establishments throughout history were founded in conquest and violence, which I think is a universal truth… it undermines the idea that there’s something distinctive about settler colonialism as a formation, as a way of being. So it’s something that people don’t really talk about.
[00:24:38] And as I said, because people might not even really know [this history]. So if you were to ask people, why does India have one of the largest Muslim populations in the world? As you say, the answer is settler colonialism. It’s because much of the North was conquered by Muslim conquerors centuries ago.
[00:24:56] Or why is it that Russia covers a sixth of the world’s landmass? It’s because over the course of centuries, it started out in its heartland around Kiev and then expanded and conquered a bunch of territory in Central Asia and Eastern Europe and beyond. So the idea that countries are founded by conquest and settlement is a fundamental truth of history.
[00:25:15] And one of the interesting things about settler colonialism is, and maybe this is a segue into the subject of Israel, how often these things are thought of as analogous specifically to Palestine. So that if you’re talking about any kind of conflict or conquest in history, you can analogise it to Israel’s conquest of Palestinians.
[00:25:36] That is the archetype in this ideology for all these historical processes.
[00:25:42] Jonathan Kay: You have a very interesting insight into why Israel is such a point of obsession among settler-colonial theorists, if I may use that term. A lot of people would say, oh, it’s antisemitism. Your analysis is more nuanced than that.
[00:25:56] You provide a few explanations, but the explanation that landed with me was this: that if you’re railing against settler colonialism, in the back of your mind is the fact there’s really nothing to be done in places like Canada and the United States and Australia. I mean, you might posture otherwise, and you might suggest things around the edges, like essentially more affirmative action, and we’ll rename the arts building after a local Indigenous First Nation and so forth.
[00:26:18] But in the back of your mind, you realise that it’s hot air—Europeans aren’t going back to Europe. America, Canada, Australia, all these nations are going to remain what they are. However, when you look around the world, you do see at least one geopolitical context in which it actually may be…
[00:26:37] …possible that the arrow of historical time can be reversed, and through violence and political agitation and my own personal heroism as an academic and my hashtags and my “teach-in” at Bard College about the evils of Israel… that, in this way, the evils of colonialism can be reversed in that one postage stamp of territory.
[00:27:00] And that is why it’s become such a point of obsession: The people who obsess over settler colonialism think this is the one win they can get, even if it’s a win that comes through terrorist violence. We can accept that. Is that what it comes down to?
[00:27:15] Adam Kirsch: I do think that’s a big part of it. I think that it’s about the difference between theory and practice.
[00:27:19] You can theorise about settler colonialism in North America, but in Israel you have people who are fighting to actually destroy a settler-colonial country. You see an active conflict. I think that that was one reason why—and this is the original idea why I wanted to write this book—is that after the Hamas attacks, even before the Israeli response and the war in Gaza, which has taken so many lives… immediately, right away, you saw a lot of people in academia and in progressive organisations being genuinely very excited, very celebratory about the murder of 1,200 Israelis.
[00:27:56] One Cornell professor gave a talk to a bunch of students where he said it was exhilarating and exciting, and a lot of people on social media who are professors or activists said, this is what resistance to settler colonialism looks like, or that the people who were killed weren’t civilians… they were settlers, and therefore they were legitimate targets.
Ryan Quinn
[00:28:15] There was this sense that, at last, someone is doing something about settler colonialism, someone is fighting back. And so, you have this situation where people who think of themselves as progressives are de facto and sometimes even explicitly aligning themselves with Hamas or Hezbollah, which are religious fundamentalist organisations that are not progressive in any way, shape, or form; because they’re seen as fighting a common enemy, which is settler colonialism.
[00:28:42] If you think that the real source of all the problems in the world, the most important enemy, is settler colonialism, then anyone who’s fighting settler colonialism is objectively on the side of progress… even if they are all the things that you dislike in practice. And that’s an old phenomenon with Western third-worldism.
[00:28:59] You see it throughout the era of decolonisation. You see it in the way that people talked about North Vietnam or Maoist China, or even before that, an earlier generation about the Soviet Union. They would say: this is the vanguard. This is where the future is happening. And therefore, all of the things that are going on there that are bad, we just won’t pay attention to them or they don’t matter. They’re not important. And you see people doing the same thing with Hamas and Hezbollah.
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