They call us ‘settlers’ because they’re planning to kick us out
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Summary
Settler colonialism is one of the buzzwords of the day, and if you think it came out of nowhere, well then, think again. Adam Kirsch is an editor at the Wall Street Journal and joins me to talk about his new book, On Settler Colonialism.
Transcript
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Settler colonialism. It's one of the buzzwords of the day, and if you think it came out of
00:01:42.880
nowhere, well then, think again. Hello, welcome to the Full Comment Podcast. My name's Brian Lilly,
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your host. We've been hearing this term, settler colonialism, increasingly. Since last October 7th,
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if you've been paying attention on university and college campuses over the past few years,
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you were probably already somewhat familiar with it, and other terms like decolonization,
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white settler colonialism, and names of that nature. But where did they come from? Is it a new
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phenomenon? Absolutely not. That's something that our next guest here on the Full Comment Podcast
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examines in his book. It's called On Settler Colonialism. Adam Kirsch is an editor at the
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Wall Street Journal and joins me now. Adam, fascinating book, interesting book, disturbing book,
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but one that's needed because I've been looking at this term for a while, but I'm one of those people
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that looks at crazy things that happen on university campuses and say, hey, wait a minute, maybe we
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should pay attention to this. And people, oh no, that's just the campus. Well, as Professor Gadsad said
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to me recently, what starts in the social science faculty does not stay in the social science faculty,
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and it spreads. So tell me about where this idea, an ideology really, came from, and how it's impacting
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not only what's going on in Israel now, but Canada and the United States to the point where some people
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are saying, everyone that's not indigenous should be leaving now.
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Sure. Well, thank you for what you say about the book, and thanks for having me on the podcast.
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It's true. This is an idea that I think when most people first encounter it, the idea of settler
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colonialism and the sort of conclusions that people draw from it might strike them as eccentric or sort of
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purely academic. But the reason why I wanted to write this book, and it's a short book, was written
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in the aftermath of October 7th last year, was because I saw that when people were sort of responding
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positively to the Hamas attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, there were people,
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as we saw at the time, before the Israeli response, before the invasion of Gaza, people were celebrating
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this. As soon as the news came, they were celebrating it. And they were mainly people in academia or in
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progressive groups, activist groups. And what I noticed is that many of these people used the term
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settler colonialism or settler colonial in the statements that they issued approving of the Hamas
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attack. They said things like, Israel is a settler colony, or this is resistance to settler colonialism,
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or as one person said, the people killed in Israel were not civilians, they were settlers,
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and therefore they were valid targets. And it seems to me that this is one of those cases where
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an idea that started out in the academy was really starting to emerge into the public sphere and affect
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real-life political debates. And I think that as the debate and protests over Israel and Palestine
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have been going on since then, over the last year plus, the term settler colonialism has become more and
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more widespread and more important. So what I try to do in this book, which is a sort of a short
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introduction, is just to look at the genealogy of this idea, where it comes from, what some of the
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implications are that people draw from it for the history of the United States and Canada, and then
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finally, for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Well, we've got people protesting outside events.
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Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was getting an award from Toronto's Jewish community,
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and people standing outside saying that they're protesting it because, you know, obviously, Zionist
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and Zionism, and they've got to denounce that, but they're also denouncing so-called Canada.
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They're standing in the face of an event that is celebrating the despicable relationship between
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so-called Canada and the criminal state of Israel. Now, when I heard that, I thought, okay, they're
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taking what's being used against Israel, and they're now drawing it back to here, but in the book,
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you say it really started with Australians moved to Canada and the U.S., and is now being applied to
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Israel. Do people really go so far as to say, we should all be leaving? You cite a paper in the
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Wang Yang and Eve Tuck. Eve Tuck is a University of Toronto professor. I guess she's about to move to
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NYU, but she's at the Ontario Institute, or has been, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
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very radical school. And the quote that you have in the book says, settler colonization
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can be visually understood as the unbroken pace of invasion and settler occupation into native lands.
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Decolonization as a process would repatriate land to indigenous peoples, reversing the timeline of
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these changes. They really do believe, give all the land back and go back. I don't know where we'd
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all go back to where we came from, but that's not a metaphor, is the term they use, right?
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Right. That's a very influential paper in this field, this academic field of settler colonial
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studies called decolonization is not a metaphor. And it gets to one of the sort of key questions.
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I hadn't heard so-called Canada, but it expresses a sort of basic insight into how settler colonial
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studies views the history of these countries, primarily or originally Australia, Canada, and the
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U.S., countries settled by the British. And then sort of by extension, Israel, which is now the one
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that's most in the news and probably most talked about. The idea that it's so-called Canada expresses
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the idea that these countries are not legitimate, that they should not have existed and in some sense
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can never become legitimate. So I think that one of the key distinction for settler colonial theory is
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it doesn't tell us anything about the history of these countries that we don't already know,
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right? Everyone who learns the history of these countries starting in elementary school knows
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they were founded by British and French colonists who came to North America or Australia and
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eventually over generations took the land from the people who had been living there, from Native
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Americans, First Nations people, Aboriginal Australians, and created new societies there. So that
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is sort of not a controversial statement. What's controversial is the idea that as Patrick Wolfe,
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who's an Australian anthropologist who's often considered the founder of this school of thought,
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said, invasion is a process, not an event. That's a line that's often quoted. And what he meant by
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that is you might think that the invasion of Australia by the British is something that took
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place in 1788 or the colonization of North America in Massachusetts is something that happened in the
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early 17th century more than 400 years ago. But in this way of looking at things, these are ongoing
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processes so that everyone and everything created in the aftermath of these invasions is itself still part of
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the invasion. And what that means is that America, Australia, Canada can never really be legitimate
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sovereigns over their territory. They're always what people disparage as settler colonies, which means
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that they were created by force, they're here and maintained by force, and that in an ideal future, they would
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cease to exist. Now, it's impossible, even I think for most advocates of this idea, to actually envision in
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concrete terms what it would mean for these countries to cease to exist. The term settler colonialism was
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originally applied to countries like Algeria and Rhodesia in the decolonization period after World War II.
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And in those places, when you say you're fighting for decolonization, it's a very concrete goal. It means
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something like 10% of the population in Algeria and Rhodesia were European. They had all the power and the
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land and the money. And the idea was by decolonizing, you were going to expropriate them, return the power
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and the money and the land to the 90% of the people who are the native population. And that is basically
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what happened in Algeria. There was a long war, the French lost, and all the European settlers, almost all
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of them left the country. But you can't imagine that outcome in Australia or North America, because in these
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countries, the indigenous population is only about 2% of the total. European settlement and then
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settlement from other places is something that happened much longer ago and much more thoroughly.
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So if you're talking about decolonizing the United States, for example, I'm American, and this is the
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part of it that I'm most familiar with, you can't really imagine a situation in which 98% of the American
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population pulls up and leaves, right? That's not going to happen.
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Where would they go? Exactly. I mean, when you think when people in these countries think about
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themselves, traditionally, they do not think of themselves as settlers. Settlers is not a term
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that we would apply to ourselves, because we're not the ones who settled the land. You might say
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the pilgrims and Puritans were settlers in the United States. But people who are here now don't think of
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themselves as settlers. But if you think of it as a binary distinction between settler and indigenous,
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so that you're either indigenous, meaning your ancestors were here before the Europeans arrived,
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or you're a settler, that means that everyone who's not indigenous is a settler. And that can include
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people who who might not think of as settlers at all. For example, in American history,
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many of these theorists would say descendants of African slaves are settlers, because they're not
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indigenous, and they occupy the position of a settler in this binary. So even if they were slaves and did
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not choose to come to here, they are now settlers. Or the same is true if you're an immigrant who came
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here last year. You know, you came on an airplane rather than on the Mayflower. You still are a
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settler because you occupy the settler position and not the indigenous position. So when you frame things
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in that way, it's basically impossible to imagine decolonization or the end of settlement. But I think
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one reason why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so important and so exciting to a lot of people in this
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field is that they see there a place where you could actually imagine the settlers, which for
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them means the Jews, being kicked out, the end of the settler state, which for them is Israel.
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So just before we get in, move on to focusing on Israel, just keeping it in North America for a
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moment, we had a protest about two months ago here in Toronto. A couple dozen schools from middle school,
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actually from grade three on, so elementary through middle school kids, were taken to a protest. Now,
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the protest was ostensibly about a First Nations reserve in northern Ontario called Grassy Narrows.
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Their water supply in their region was poisoned by, I believe, a paper mill decades and decades ago.
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And so there's, you know, long calls for something needs to be done for the water,
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get rid of the mercury poison. And the kids are all told, and the parents who are approving
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of this are told, we are going to observe the protest, but not participate. Not only did they
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participate, but at least one teacher, if not more, told the kids, wear blue to identify yourself as a
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settler, wear your native regalia if you're indigenous. That's down to grade three. And then,
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of course, the confluence of this ideology and the anti-Semitism that is so rampant. While
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they're at a protest for water on a reserve in northern Ontario, but the protest is in downtown
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Toronto, they're chanting from Palestine to Turtle Island, occupation is a crime. So, you know,
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this has gone from theoretical academics down to grade three students being told, you're a settler,
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Right, exactly. I mean, the whole term Turtle Island, which was sort of coined or popularized in
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the 1970s as a ostensibly authentic Native American term for North America, suggests that the things
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that are here now, things like Canada and the United States, are not real, that they're not what
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should be here. What should be here is Turtle Island, which is the way that Native Americans,
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First Nations people thought of this continent. It's a spurious concept because, as I say in the book,
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before 1492, neither Europeans nor people living in North America had any concept of North America
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as a continent. There was no idea that this is something called Turtle Island. This was created by
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taking elements from certain people's creation myths and sort of turning it into this term. But it's a
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modern term. It's a 21st century term, not a sort of old authentic term. And what it means is that,
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as you say, that we are all occupiers on this land. In the same way that Israel occupies its land,
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Canada and the United States and Australia occupy land that really belongs to other people.
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And the consequences that flow from that are hard to discern sometimes. I mean, it doesn't
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exactly lead to a concrete political program, but it definitely leads to the idea that we should be
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ashamed of being here, that the civilization that we've created here is criminal, is sort of something
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that should be apologized for or atoned for. And that goes beyond the original settlement. I think
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what gives this idea its political appeal to those who do find it appealing is that it draws these
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lines from settlement to everything in contemporary society that one might want to protest. So people
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will say environmental damage, capitalism, patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, that these are all
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sort of legacies of settler colonialism. And settler colonialism becomes, as I say in the book,
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it's almost a religious concept. It's sort of like original sin. It's saying because these countries were
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born in sin, they remain tainted by it in perpetuity.
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Yeah, well, that was one of the notes that I'd made was to ask you to expand on that, the idea
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that settler colonialism is the original sin of this movement. So, you know, I'm very familiar with
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the term original sin. I'm sure most of the listeners are, but given the way societies move,
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some may not be. So fill me in on what you mean by that.
00:16:21.280
So original sin is a term in Christian theology, which is a way of interpreting the story of Adam
00:16:27.600
and Eve in the Bible, which says that when Adam and Eve sinned by eating from the tree that God
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had forbidden, that they committed the original sin, the first sin, and that they passed on that sin
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or the guilt for that sin to everyone afterwards, so that all of humanity is sort of tainted by that
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sin, bears that sin, and it's responsible for the reasons why we act sinfully ourselves. We live in
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a fallen world, we've fallen from Eden, and we are all sort of affected by this original sin. And it's
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not something that you or I did in the course of our own individual lives. It's sort of part of our
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condition as human beings is that we are fallen, we're in sin. And that's why we need to repent and
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we need God's grace in Christian thought in order to atone for this sin. It's a very similar way of
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thinking about settler colonial societies in that it's not something that you or I did. You could be
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born hundreds of years after settlement took place. But if you're a settler, you are sort of
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responsible for and affected by this event that took place long before your birth. And the sort of terms
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of your spiritual and moral life are dictated by how you respond to this, how you atone for it, how you
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make up for what's sometimes called settler ways of being.
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Well, you've touched on this a bit earlier, but it appears that we do continue to sin. As you write in the
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book, if settlement is a genocidal invasion, and invasion is an ongoing structure, not a completed event, then
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everything, and perhaps everyone, that sustains a settler colonial society today is also
00:18:01.980
genocidal. I don't know how many times our prime minister has called Canada a genocidal state.
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He's very careful about referring to other events happening in other countries as genocide, but he's
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happy to say that we are a genocidal country. So it's gone all the way from grade three up to the,
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well, from university down to grade three up to the prime minister. This is a deeply embedded
00:18:27.560
Yeah, and I think that it's part of a larger debate, maybe the most extreme expression of a
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larger debate that is happening in America and Canada, and maybe in Europe as well, about history,
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about how we understand our history. For a long time, I think in the 19th century, if you look at
00:18:45.980
the way American history was written, it was very patriotic, and sort of saw the foundation of the
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United States as the hinge on which world history turned, the idea that the sort of the fate of liberty and
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self-government in the world depended on the United States. Then sort of Abraham Lincoln famously said
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that the civil war was about whether government by the people would perish from the earth. In other words,
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America was the bearer of liberty for the entire planet. In a similar way, now I think the foundation of
00:19:14.560
these countries and the colonization of North America is often described as the worst thing that ever happened.
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It was sort of a hinge of history that sent things in the wrong direction, that was responsible for
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introducing a lot of crime and sin and greed and unhappiness into the world, and that we have to sort of
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make up for it. And since we can't abolish ourselves physically, what we have to do is abolish what people
00:19:36.620
call settler ways of being, which are all the things that we inherit from settlement, from colonialism,
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which are things like insatiability, rapacity, appetite, but also things like the desire for
00:19:49.600
scientific progress, or for material improvements in life, or even in some cases, you know, individualism.
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These are all seen as settler ways of being, they're legacies of European colonialism that we have to
00:20:03.940
And as you mentioned earlier, of course, throw capitalism in there because, you know,
00:20:08.720
of course we have to get rid of capitalism. It's evil. It improves lives. It, you know,
00:20:16.500
improves living standards, but therefore is evil.
00:20:20.160
Well, it's definitely part of a bigger progressive critique. And one of the ironies is that
00:20:24.860
one of the sort of main things that was charged to settler colonialism is despoiling the environment, right?
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So the idea that settlers came and they took more and more and more land and more and more and more
00:20:36.860
resources, and that this is a sort of settler way of being versus indigenous ways of being,
00:20:41.080
which live lightly on the land and don't take from the earth. Well, so there are people who will say,
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and I quote some of them in the book, if we want to reduce carbon emissions or stop global warming,
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we have to get rid of settler colonialism. But if you look at who are the biggest carbon emitters in
00:20:56.460
the world, the United States is one of the top five and others are China and India, which are not
00:21:01.820
settler colonial societies in the terms of this discourse. And in fact, in those societies,
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achieving industrial power and capitalist wealth are sort of signs of emancipation from colonialism.
00:21:13.600
They're saying we're catching up with the West and going beyond the West. So if you think that
00:21:17.620
the desire for, say, automobiles, right, or cheap manufactured goods or other things that consume
00:21:22.200
natural resources is due to settler colonialism, it doesn't really explain the fact that everyone
00:21:27.160
everywhere in the world wants and needs these things. It's a very ideological way of looking at
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reality, which leaves out a lot of the picture.
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I'll ask you to comment on one idiosyncrasy before we take a break and then move on to how
00:21:40.000
this applies to Israel, because it's disturbing what I see go by my window every single week. I'm
00:21:47.120
sure I'll be seeing them later tonight or tomorrow with the screams of settler colonialism and take us
00:21:54.300
back to 48. But it does strike me that so many of the people that buy into and propagate this theory
00:22:01.680
also seem to believe that we should have open borders of immigration. And have you understood
00:22:08.780
how they reconcile that, that this is all indigenous land, that anyone else being here is settler
00:22:15.840
colonialism, but that we should throw the doors wide open?
00:22:19.640
Well, it's interesting. You mentioned Eve Tuck at the beginning. I believe in that essay that I was
00:22:27.960
talking about, Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, she describes herself in the course of the essay as
00:22:32.280
a trespasser, meaning she lives on land that she shouldn't be on. She sort of is a trespasser on
00:22:37.760
native land. So if you have this idea that everyone has a certain piece of land that they are aboriginal
00:22:42.540
to or indigenous to, and if you go to someone else's land, you're a trespasser, you sort of have to
00:22:47.720
start to unravel the entire thread of world history because everywhere you look, people have moved
00:22:52.380
onto and taken, conquered, and settled on other people's land. And this concept can cut in lots
00:22:58.560
of different ways. One of the examples in the book is in the American Southwest, it became a sort of
00:23:05.600
slogan or rallying call in the 1960s for Latinos to say, we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us,
00:23:13.600
meaning that Mexico used to own the land that's now part of the southwestern U.S.
00:23:17.720
so that when people came to the United States, they weren't crossing a border, they were sort of going
00:23:22.100
to a land that had originally been Hispanic in the 19th century and earlier. Well, and that's true,
00:23:27.940
of course, but then the Hispanic civilization there was also the result of settlement. It was the result
00:23:32.820
of Spanish settlement and conquest. So if you keep going back and sort of looking at earlier points
00:23:38.600
in history, everyone is a settler and a colonizer depending on where you draw the line.
00:23:42.680
And one of the things about land acknowledgments in particular is that they often take the form
00:23:48.560
of saying that we, the institution making the acknowledgment, acknowledge the people who were
00:23:53.960
on this land as the custodians of the land from time immemorial. Well, of course, all that really
00:23:59.740
means is that those are the people who were there when Canadian-American civilization encountered them.
00:24:07.040
We have no way of knowing who occupied or who controlled any particular piece of land before that
00:24:11.420
because there are no records. And if you look at, you know, what we do know about Native American
00:24:15.740
history, there was constant warfare, displacement, rise and fall of civilizations. So the idea that any
00:24:21.100
group of people is indigenous to a place and has lived there since time immemorial is sort of
00:24:25.780
fundamentally ahistorical. And I think that that's one reason why it's not really an enduring or
00:24:32.080
lasting basis for a better future because it rests on a myth, a historical myth.
00:24:36.220
The Six Nations Reserve that I grew up near, they were all settler colonialists who moved north with
00:24:46.960
Joseph Brandt from New York State after the American War of Independence. I do like how you
00:24:52.500
describe land acknowledgments in the book. You said, rather, these formulas serve to ritually renew the
00:24:59.140
audience's responsibility for the act of dispossession in accordance with the settler colonial view of
00:25:05.040
history. It reminds me of the group act of contrition in the old Latin Catholic mass where you strike your
00:25:15.280
breast three times and say, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, except there is no absolution for the
00:25:21.200
sin. You're just saying, I'm a sinner over and over again. And there's no relief. You are just perpetually
00:25:28.660
a sinner. We'll take a quick break. And when we come back, we will discuss how this theory is now
00:25:35.260
being applied in Israel and is the basis for so many of the people who are supporting a terrorist
00:25:43.160
group back in moments. Settler colonialism, the idea that came out of the academy, took over college
00:25:49.840
campuses. And as we discussed, elementary schools now headed towards or being used against the state
00:25:56.100
of Israel. Adam, I know this is an ongoing fight, but let's be honest, how anyone can say that Jews
00:26:03.940
are not indigenous to that region, to Jerusalem, to Judea and Samaria is obviously ignorant of history
00:26:13.640
or wanting to rewrite it. But they are using the indigenous narrative, the settler colonial narrative
00:26:19.920
to try and erase Jewish history from the region of Israel, you know, predates the state in 1948.
00:26:30.340
Well, one of the sort of basic ideas of settler colonialism is that in every situation, there's an indigenous
00:26:37.280
and a colonizing population. And seen through that lens, Israel and Zionism is a white European
00:26:43.980
colonial movement, which came to dispossess a non-white native indigenous people. And that's
00:26:50.920
the way of framing the conflict that Palestinian activists and leadership resisted for a long time.
00:26:57.260
I say in the book that Yasser Arafat specifically said, we are not red Indians, meaning he did not
00:27:03.100
want people to think of Palestinians as being like Native Americans, because he thought that that was a
00:27:07.460
defeatist approach, because in the end, Native Americans were defeated and lost their land. And he didn't
00:27:12.040
want people to think the Palestinian struggle was analogous to that. But in a new generation in the
00:27:18.240
last 10, 15 years, I think younger people have started to see the idea of being an indigenous people
00:27:23.840
as morally very powerful. So they are embracing the idea of Palestinians as an indigenous people
00:27:29.740
and Jews as settler colonizers from Europe. You mentioned the sort of way that this can, there's
00:27:35.920
this odd confluence between Native American and Palestinian activism. In America, we saw that
00:27:41.460
in a big way in 2016, in the Standing Rock protests, which were about a pipeline that was going to be
00:27:48.880
built underneath a Native American reservation, Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, exactly. And it
00:27:55.620
became a sort of rallying point for a lot of different left causes. And one of them was Palestinian
00:28:00.820
activism. And there were a lot of the slogan was from Standing Rock to Gaza. In other words, these are both
00:28:06.100
occupied territories. North America is occupied by settlers in the same way that Israel occupies the
00:28:12.220
West Bank and Gaza. And that these are sort of the same situation in two different places. In order to
00:28:18.100
maintain that idea, you have to deny, or at least sort of overlook the fact that Zionism was a
00:28:24.040
self-consciously indigenous movement. It was a movement in which people said we were going back to our
00:28:28.920
indigenous homeland that was taken from us almost 2000 years ago. And we're going to create our own
00:28:33.980
sort of self-determination in our historic homeland.
00:28:36.540
And it's, but it's not like all Jews had left. Jews have been living there for 4,000 years, at least?
00:28:46.180
Well, I'd say that since ancient times, there were probably always at least some Jews in the land of
00:28:50.660
Israel, but often very few, numbering in the hundreds or low thousands, say in the Middle Ages
00:28:55.580
during the Crusader period. So there were never absolutely no Jews there, but there was, it was not by any
00:29:01.260
means a Jewish majority. And when the Zionists began to settle there in the 1880s, they were a
00:29:06.800
very small minority. Jews were coming to settle in a province of what was then the Turkish Empire
00:29:11.800
that was predominantly Arab and Muslim. And so it's true, on the one hand, it's true that from the
00:29:20.600
Palestinian Arab point of view, Zionists appeared as colonizers. They came from outside.
00:29:25.120
They wanted to buy and take over land. And the people living there, the Palestinian Arabs,
00:29:30.520
strongly opposed this from the very beginning, eventually by force. And it ended up being the,
00:29:35.980
coming down to a war, which the Israelis won. And that's why there's a state of Israel,
00:29:40.020
because they were able to win the war in 1948. But the idea that maybe both of these peoples have
00:29:46.940
some sort of claim on the land, or that more than one people can be indigenous to a land,
00:29:50.960
to a parcel of land, that really complicates the settler colonial framework, the settler colonial
00:29:59.420
idea. It means that you can't just say, these people belong here, and these people don't.
00:30:03.820
And one of the things I say at the end of the book is that in treating Jews in Israel as settler
00:30:10.060
colonists who came from elsewhere, and ought to go back to elsewhere, or that their possession of the
00:30:15.040
land is illegitimate, it makes it into a zero-sum conflict, which can never be resolved. I mean,
00:30:19.760
the Israelis have nowhere else to go. In that way, they're unlike colonists in Algeria or
00:30:24.360
Rhodesia and other places. There's no mother country. That's one of the chief ways in which
00:30:28.820
Israel is not like a colony. It wasn't the colony of an imperial power, it was established sort of
00:30:33.060
in defiance of imperial powers, in particular, in defiance of the British Empire. And so if you say
00:30:40.240
Israel must be destroyed, Israel, the Jewish state cannot exist, it should never have been created,
00:30:44.640
then the seven million Jews in Israel have no choice but to fight for their survival,
00:30:49.620
right? The only way to a peaceful future is to acknowledge that there are two peoples here that
00:30:54.960
both aren't going anywhere. Well, unfortunately, one side has outright refused to acknowledge that.
00:31:02.120
But if you take the settler colonial narrative, and okay, let's apply it to the people that we now
00:31:08.100
call the Palestinians, we used to just call it the Arabs. Arabs came primarily, from my understanding,
00:31:18.880
with the movement of Islam into the region. And Islam didn't exist until the 670s, early 700s,
00:31:25.680
showing up in that part of the world. So would they therefore not also be settler colonialists?
00:31:32.640
Right. I mean, if you look at it historically, there's always going to be someone who was there
00:31:37.000
before you. In this scenario, I think the reason why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
00:31:43.080
appeals to and energizes the ideology of settler colonialism is that you say it sort of overlaps
00:31:51.080
with or is compared to different situations, so that there's a powerful white conqueror from Europe
00:31:56.560
and a powerless non-white native population, and one commits genocide against the other, right?
00:32:02.800
That's the way that the history of Canada and the United States is seen through the lens of
00:32:06.460
settler colonialism. But in fact, that's not the history of Israel and Palestine. And right now,
00:32:12.380
there are about equal numbers of Arabs and Jews living between the river and the sea,
00:32:16.180
about 7 million of each between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. So it's not a story of
00:32:21.800
conquest and displacement and genocide. It's really a story of Jews gradually gaining a
00:32:27.600
foothold in this territory and sort of wanting to defend it. Now, I think the situation is different
00:32:33.740
if you look at the West Bank, which is occupied territory, where there is a sort of two-level
00:32:38.980
society where the Israeli government attends to the needs of Jewish settlers and not to the needs of
00:32:43.880
Palestinian Arabs. And I think that that's why traditionally those are the people who are
00:32:48.260
called settlers, right? Jews living in the West Bank, which is not officially Israeli territory,
00:32:53.160
have been called settlers on the West Bank. But in the view of settler colonialism, you saw this very
00:32:58.260
clearly after October 7th, all Jews anywhere in that region are settler colonialists. There's no
00:33:03.700
difference between the West Bank and what is officially recognized as Israel. The Hamas attacks
00:33:08.340
on October 7th were not in occupied territory. They were behind what's called the Green Line,
00:33:12.360
the internationally recognized border of Israel. So when people say everyone, every Israeli is a
00:33:18.800
target, they're not civilians, they're settlers, you're basically saying there's no solution to
00:33:23.240
this conflict short of driving out all the Jews or at the very least abolishing the Jewish state.
00:33:27.520
Well, you go to somewhere like Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is a city that didn't exist previously. There was
00:33:34.720
no settlement there. It's next to Jaffa, but it's its own city. That was built out of sand.
00:33:45.600
But it's still considered settler colonialist areas.
00:33:49.580
Definitely. And that's a classic example because it's an example of an Israeli city that sort of
00:33:55.600
springs up next to when it comes to absorb and displace an Arab city of Jaffa. And I think there's
00:34:02.020
no question that just as with the history of the United States and Canada and Australia, it is a
00:34:05.900
history of conflict and conquest and in which the people who won were able to create a new society.
00:34:11.660
But the way in which that happened in Israel is the scale, the time frame, and the results
00:34:16.880
are so different from those other places that I think comparing them is really a
00:34:21.600
tendentious ideological move. It doesn't accurately describe what's going on.
00:34:26.320
So, what do we do about this movement, this ideology? Is there a way to counter it? To me,
00:34:34.860
it seems an incredibly misguided and at times dangerous ideology.
00:34:41.760
Well, one reason I wanted to write this book, and it's a short book written in about six months
00:34:46.020
after October 7th, is because I think that this is an idea that usually people are exposed to in
00:34:53.140
in the academy and universities or in progressive spaces where they don't hear any dissenting voices.
00:35:00.580
It's not sort of one idea among many. It's sort of like, this is the truth. This is the way
00:35:04.200
we understand things. And I think that by shedding some sunlight on it and saying,
00:35:09.260
actually, there's other ways of looking at these phenomena. There's other reasons to not
00:35:13.060
use the settler colonial paradigm to understand these things, that that's already a step in the
00:35:17.580
right direction because it shows that there are alternatives.
00:35:19.800
I think that it's an idea that is very entrenched in those places. It will not
00:35:24.820
easily be displaced. But just having a sort of debate about it, discussion about it, and saying
00:35:31.020
that there are other ways that are maybe better ways to understand this history, I think that's
00:35:35.960
the sort of contribution that I was hoping to make with the book.
00:35:38.920
Well, just being aware of it would be, as you say, a good start. And perhaps
00:35:45.860
making sure that if you've got kids or grandkids headed off to university, that they're made aware
00:35:53.720
of a book such as yours and ideas such as yours so that when they arrive, they've got some kind of
00:36:00.340
defense. Because this is overwhelming on campus. I live right next to the University of Toronto
00:36:05.460
campus. I walk through it. You look at the signs posts on the lamps as you walk through, on the
00:36:11.820
billboards. This is a dominant ideology. Or not dominant. Perhaps that's the wrong word. It is
00:36:18.420
pervasive, though. It is everywhere, even if many of the students are just ignoring it.
00:36:23.580
No, I think that's true. I think it's taken for granted in those places. And one of the reasons,
00:36:27.400
I think, is that, just to talk about the American context, over the last 10 years, America,
00:36:34.460
politics and culture have become so polarized that the extremes polarize each other. So that you have
00:36:40.100
people on the left who say, everything about American history is bad, or America is a settler
00:36:44.540
colony and should not have existed. And then you have people on the right who say, well, we don't
00:36:47.940
want to teach anything critical of American history. We only want to teach the things that can be
00:36:52.640
celebrated. And then those extremes sort of drive each other further apart. And I think really what
00:36:58.600
we need is a way of looking at our history that acknowledges the full truth and also, you know,
00:37:02.620
which means the good and the bad, the hopeful parts, rather than the hopeless parts.
00:37:07.460
I would agree. And I've been making that argument for a long time. Adam,
00:37:11.820
thanks so much for the time. You can get On Settler Colonialism. I'm looking at it right now. It's
00:37:17.920
an audio book on Audible. You can get it on Kindle. You can get a hardcover. Thank you so much for the
00:37:24.740
time today. Thank you. Full Comment is a post-media podcast. My name is Brian Lilly, your host.
00:37:30.960
This episode was produced by Andre Pru with theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive
00:37:36.380
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00:37:42.260
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