On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

by Adam Kirsch

True decolonization movements, from the American Patriots of the 1770s to the FLN in the 1950s, used actual violence to drive out their oppressors. Intellectuals who use the language of settler colonialism to critique their own society, by contrast, have no mass movement at their back. That has been the predicament of the ideology of settler colonialism from the beginning: everyone knows that calls to “eradicate,” “kill,” or “cull” settlers can be only metaphorical, so there is no need to put a limit on their rhetorical ferocity. But what if there were a country where settler colonialism could be challenged with more than words? Where all the evils attributed to it—from “emptiness” and “not-enoughness” to economic inequality, global warming, and genocide—could be given a human face? Best of all, what if that settler colonial society were small and endangered enough that destroying it seemed like a realistic possibility rather than a utopian dream? Such a country would be the perfect focus for all the moral passion and rhetorical violence that fuels the ideology of settler colonialism. It would be a country one could hate virtuously—especially if it were home to a people whom Western civilization has traditionally considered it virtuous to hate.