With the permission of the Jewish Review of Books, TTN is posting in two parts, “Unsettling Ideology,” Michael Walzer’s review of Adam Kirsch’s book, “On Settler Colonialism,” published in its Fall 2024 issue, beginning here:
Irving Howe once told me that the purpose of a polemic is to kill your opponent—with words, not knives; still, at the end, the opponent should be politically, intellectually finished. But you can’t kill an ideology (as Israeli generals have recently told us), so Adam Kirsch’s beautifully argued critique of the new understanding of “settler colonialism” isn’t designed to kill the idea but rather to show that the politics it inspires will end (has ended) in destruction and death. His critique is calm and careful, but it is also smart, sustained, and fierce. And then at the end, Kirsch gives his readers a moment of grace and the possibility of reconciliation.
Settler colonialism as an actual historical process is indeed a tale of destruction and death as settlers from Europe displaced and sometimes replaced the native populations of their countries’ colonies. The process is well worth studying (and even theorizing) since it has happened again and again in world history. You could say that conquest, settlement, destruction, and death are history’s dominant themes. It turns out, as Kirsch says, that all the indigenous people were once settlers themselves: “Every people that occupies a territory took it from another people, who took it from someone else.” Each moment of conquest and settlement is a moment of cruelty on the one hand and suffering on the other. So we need both a historical account and critical reflection on settler colonialism.
But do we also need the militant new ideology that mobilizes opposition to settler colonialism, broadly and ahistorically construed? Certainly, we must understand it. As Kirsch writes, “The term encapsulates a whole series of ideological convictions—about Israel and Palestine, but also about US history and many social and political issues, from the environment to gender to capitalism.”
The Academic Theory
This ideology originated in the academy, though much of the academic work was ideological from the beginning—calling for a political project. Something like that project was anticipated in places like post–World War II Algeria, where the colonial settlers did not replace the native population (which included both long established Berbers and their Arab conquerors, now indigenous together). Instead, a dominant minority of European settlers, the pieds noirs, ruled over an Algerian majority. So the struggle against the settlers had a fairly democratic character: the goal was popular sovereignty or, since the majority identified itself as a nation, national liberation. The struggle was brutal on both sides, and it ended with decolonization—the forced departure of the settlers, back to France.
The case of the United States (not to speak of Australia, Canada, etc.) is obviously different, and here radical settler colonial ideology gets tricky. Settlement was a long-term process that virtually eliminated the Native Americans, and the settlers’ descendants now make up something like 97 percent of the population. So there can’t possibly be a democratic struggle against them; there certainly can’t be a forced departure. There could be—in fact has been—a liberal struggle for minority rights, but the new ideological militants aren’t interested in that. Indeed, the establishment of a truly liberal regime, with civil rights for everyone, would be a monumental defeat for the theorists of settler colonialism. For it would mean that the remaining Native Americans had assimilated into the political culture of the settlers, accepting the crumbs of citizenship, giving up on the feast of sovereignty. “A struggle for equal citizenship,” writes Columbia anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani, “looks like a masked acceptance of final defeat: total colonization.”
So equality is rejected, and then what? Much of Kirsch’s book is an effort to describe the strangeness of the militants’ politics and to expose the implicit, sometimes explicit, cruelty of their ideological commitment to decolonization. His account of their program for the United States is a revelation even to political obsessives like me. Who knew about the necessary “relinquishing of settler futurity”?
What that means, it turns out, is that only the Native Americans deserve a future. What twentieth-century American leftist ever imagined, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang insist in a 2012 paper titled “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” that justice requires a process that “would impoverish, not enrich, the 99%+ settler population of the US”?
Decolonization is the political opposite of Occupy Wall Street’s project for the 99 percent. It is in fact a zero-sum game, in which, Kirsch explains, “Natives win (land, sovereignty, power) only if settlers [that is, the rest of us] lose.” But how to bring about that loss? I have already suggested the magnitude of the problem: there are well over three hundred million Americans whom theorists like Tuck and Yang classify as settlers. According to the theory, settlement isn’t something that happened in the past; it is happening right now, and all of “us” are involved: “Invasion is a structure, not an event.” This line from the Australian historian Patrick Wolfe is, Kirsch writes, the central maxim of settler colonial ideology. All of us settlers inhabit the structure and enjoy the advantages it brings.
So I am a settler, though my grandparents arrived almost three hundred years after the Puritans landed in New England. My maternal grandfather is especially blameworthy, since he “settled” on a farm in Connecticut (with the help of Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a sponsor of poor Jews from Eastern Europe) on land that belonged, and will always belong, to one of the Native American nations. Black slaves, indigenous in Africa, became settlers when they were brought here, even though they were brought against their will. Slaves as settlers, as a friend remarked to me, sounds like “a category error.” But according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which adheres to the new ideology, Black Americans “benefit from the settler-colonial system as it stands today.” They, too, are implicated in the structure.
What is to be done?
Kirsch’s effort to find an answer to that question in the sometimes brutal but always elusive literature of the militants is heroic. In principle, they want all the settlers, all of us, to be gone, or to cede sovereignty to the Native American nations (and live, presumably, as their subjects). As Kirsch sums up a key text: “America is something that should not have happened.” Calls to “eradicate,” “kill,” or “cull” the settlers are, Kirsch remarks, “only metaphorical, so there is no need to put a limit on their rhetorical ferocity.” The ferocity is ever present, often accompanied by quotes from the Algerian writer Frantz Fanon, which give it a realistic touch. But since there really is nothing to be done, a radical critique of “settler ways of being” is the actual politics of the militants here in the US.
Their aim, Kirsch writes, “is to deconstruct the social order founded by settler colonialism.” This “founding” is not the birth of liberty but rather the origin and cause of everything that is wrong in the US: “racism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism”— that’s the short list; environmental degradation is the most common addition. As Kirsch dryly notes, how any of these evils occurs in countries without a known history of settler colonialism is a mystery.
The greatest evil is genocide—which is an ongoing process, begun by the original settlers and continued by their heirs. Pretty much everything that today’s settlers do—that we do—is effectively genocidal. Even efforts at reconciliation, writes Lorenzo Veracini, contribute to “the extinction of otherwise irreducible forms of alterity.” The examples of cultural and material genocide that militant theorists provide—the creation of national parks, industrial farming, the offer of citizenship and equality—suggest how easy it is to define genocide down. Mockery seems the obvious response to those who would put Yosemite in the same category as Auschwitz, but the argument about genocide gets uglier when its focus shifts from the United States to Israel.
Since the ideology of settler colonialism demands a politics that can’t be acted out, at least not in the US, it is best understood, Kirsch argues, as a political theology. Here I will have to simplify an especially rich analysis. Settlement is the original sin, or, better, the settlers’ insatiable desire for more land, more wealth, more power is the original sin. All the evils of exploitation, racism, misogyny, and homophobia follow from the everlasting settler moment. Redemption comes only with decolonization: some secular mix of a return to Eden and the advent of the messianic age.
The picture of life before settlement is idyllic. The Native Americans lived in a society of equals, at peace with their neighbors, at home in the natural world. They understood the cues that nature provides for a harmonious life. Exactly what comes after decolonization is harder to describe. The world will be idyllic again, transformed, much as it might be after the messiah comes or after the Communist revolution.
[Click here for Part II, addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.]