On Settler Colonialism Quotes

“In the American context, as we have seen, settler colonialism functions as an all-purpose explanation for capitalism, sexism, and climate change. Adding the Israel-Palestinian conflict to the mix is powerfully energizing, giving a local address to a struggle that can otherwise feel all too abstract. The price of collapsing together such different causes, however, is that it inhibits understanding of each individual cause. Any conflict that fails to fit the settler colonial model must be made to fit.

This Procrustean process is never more conspicuous than when Western progresskves insist that the struggle for LGBTQ rights and the struggle to liberate Palestine are one and the same. ...
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To make Israel fit its ideologically allotted role, theorists of settler colonialism must similarly redefine two central concepts: indigeneity and genocide.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

“But there is a great difference between Fanon's bloody knives and Sartre's bloody scalpel. 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, in 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 only be 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" to "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 a 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.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

“The name America was not invented to change the identity of a place previously called Turtle Island; rather, the name Turtle Island was invented to change the identity of a place called America.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

“...but turning a myth upside-down only produces a different myth.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

“Another way of expressing this difference between history and settler colonial studies is that the former is primarily interested in the past, while the latter is primarily interested in using a story about the past to change the present. And for that purpose, it's necessary to make the past as morally legible as possible. One way of accomplishing this is to describe the violence of white settlers against Natives while omitting any mention of the violence deployed by Natives resisting settler expansion.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

“According to the UN, the number of people living under colonial rule fell from 750 million in 1945 to 2 million in 2020.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice

“It may seem paradoxical that opposing what one scholar calls "the slow violence of settler colonialism" should lead people to celebrate the quick violence of terrorism. But part of the appeal of radical ideologies, of the right and the left, is that they make violence virtuous. And October 7 marked the moment when settler colonialism emerged into public view as the watchword of a new ideology, one that is already influencing the way many Americans think about their country and the world.”
― Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice