On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, And Justice

>> Stephen Kotkin: Welcome, everybody, I'm Stephen Kotkin, and I'm the director of the Hoover History Lab, which is a co-sponsor of this event, along with our Middle East and Islamic World Working Group. And our director of that, Russell Berman, is here with us today. I have the honor to introduce our speaker for today's book talk, Adam Kirsch.

Adam overcame in his life a number of serious obstacles to be here today. He was born in Los Angeles, that alone.

>> Adam Kirsch: It's another world down there.

>> Stephen Kotkin: He went to Harvard and got a BA there, like many people Theodore Kiczinski, for example, alumni. Some graduated, some didn't.

Anyway, so he overcame that as well. The Harvard degree. He worked at the New Republic, where I first encountered him, when Leon Wieseltere edited the back of the book section, and I was privileged to be occasionally placed there. And Adam was working as a literary editor. He moved on to the New York Sun, which I discovered is still in print.

>> Adam Kirsch: Well, it's not in print, but it is in pixel, yes.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you for that correction. So, one obstacle after another, and look where the guy's going now. He works for the Wall Street Journal. So this tradition of small magazines continues, but much more successfully. He's a published poet, and I highly recommend multiple books of poetry.

He's a published literary critic on many different themes in literature, not just the Lionel Trilling Book, for which he's exceptionally well known and commended, but many others, shorter and incisive pieces that have been collected. He also writes non-fiction about contemporary affairs. But as an ideas proposition, as this book is, if you haven't read it yet, or if you're about to hear about the ideas driven nature of this question.

So many of us discovered, or we had reconfirmed that this idea of settler colonialism is deeply embedded in a lot of academic discourse and activism, political movements, especially on college campuses. And if you didn't know where it came from or what it's about or why it's so pervasive, this is a book that can answer those questions.

Adam takes the idea seriously, as an idea, as an intellectual proposition, discusses its origins and its migrations. In other words, it didn't necessarily end where it started, it spread to other things. If you looked at charts of publications in the last ten or 20 years in the academy, you would see publications on racism, anti racism go like this.

You would see publications on gender and gender fluidity go like this. And you would see postcolonial publications go like this. It is the biggest by far in that industry or in that constellation, and it is ubiquitous across the departments in the humanities. And so whatever one thinks about it, it is a fundamental proposition to be engaged fair mindedly, judiciously, and seriously, which is what Adam does in the book.

The book has the great virtue of concision for those of you who fly to Stanford back and forth from your tax exempt domiciles, to fulfill your responsibilities here. Not even a single flight is necessary, even if you live as close as Montana or Utah or some of the other main residences of state Stanford faculty, not even a single flight is necessary to read the beautiful prose and the serious ideas, so everyone has a copy in front of them for those who haven't read it yet.

And we encourage you to interact with Adam all week this week because he is here this week as a Hoover media fellow, in addition to the this book talk. This book talk is his introduction in some ways to our community. But he'll be here from the Wall Street Journal throughout the week.

He's an editor at the Saturday section, which, you know, deals with ideas and has a lot of tremendous essays, long and short, about ideas driven topics. And it's a perfect perch for Adam. But I couldn't recommend the book any more highly. And so please join me warm welcome, Adam Kirsch on Settler Colonialism.

>> Adam Kirsch: Thank you very much, Professor Kotkin, for that introduction and for arranging my visit here. It means a lot to me because when I was first starting out as an editorial assistant, I editorial assisted some of your writing for the New Republic. So true to be here now is a great sort of full circle moment for me.

As you heard in that description, my biography does not include the word historian, so I'm happy, but also a little diffident to be here at the Stanford History lab. But I do often write about literature and ideas that have some connection with history, and I think that that's really what this book is.

So you'll see, as I discuss it, how some of those connections are made in this case. So when I was talking about the idea of a book on settler colonialism with my editor at WW Norton, she told me that she and the other editors didn't know what settler colonialism was, but all the editorial assistants did.

And I think that that is a good index to the recent rise in prominence, as Professor Kotkin mentioned, of this field of study. And it's not just a field of study, but a methodology or a sort of way of looking at many different subjects. Settler colonialism can be invoked in connection primarily with history.

American history, Australian and Canadian history are the places where it was sort of most often discussed, also Israel and Palestine more recently, but it can also be discussed in connection with almost anything with public health, feminism, gender studies. The environment is a big topic that's often discussed in terms of settler colonialism.

And if you look at course catalogs, you'll see the term everywhere. The reason why I wanted to write this book, and as you can see, it's a short book and was written sort of promptly in response to current events, was that after the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7, I noticed that many of the pro Hamas statements, or at least explaining or apologizing for the attack, statements that came out from individuals and from groups, especially on campuses and in the progressive sphere, many of them, many people who defended the attack or celebrated it, did so specifically using the term settler colonial and settler colonialism.

People would say, for example, the Israelis who were killed on October 7th were not civilians, they were settlers. And therefore, they should not have the sort of protection that we assume civilians should have. A settler is a legitimate target, or that Hamas is resisting settler colonialism and therefore, sort of, in effect, on the side of justice or even on a progressive side.

Even though if you were to look even a little bit more closely at what Hamas says and does, it would be hard to reconcile those commitments. It was, and for some people, still is a progressive idea to say that when Hamas killed 1200 people, mostly civilians, that it was advancing the cause of liberation and justice.

Some people who spoke about the attack, some of the statements that got most publicity, celebrated it in emotional terms and said that it was exhilarating and exciting. As one professor at Cornell said to a student audience, people used the hang glider symbol because some of the Hamas fighters came in on hang gliders as a sort of online logo.

And, of course, over the last academic year, this whole controversy and this conflict became the source of great unrest on college campuses, especially last spring. And although it's less so now, is my impression continues to be in certain ways and for certain people. So what I saw here was an idea that I had been familiar with from my own reading, this idea of settler colonialism as something that was increasingly prominent and salient in the academic humanities, that had now made the leap out of the classroom and into public political discussions.

And as often happens in those cases, there's a great deal of misunderstanding. A lot of people construe it according to different political agendas. One recent example is the debate, if you can call it that, over critical race theory, which became a sort of term that meant many different things to different people that the original users of that term would not have recognized.

So what I wanted to do in this book was to give a critical introduction to the idea of settler colonialism, or what I say in what I call in the book, the ideology of settler colonialism. It's not an ideal name, as I acknowledge in the book, because within the discourse of settler colonial studies, settler colonial ideology means the ideologies by which a settler colonial society, like the United States, reproduces itself.

So, the ideology of settler colonialism is against settler colonialism. So in a certain sense, it would be like calling communism the ideology of capitalism, because it's against capitalism. However, I think it's still justifiable in this context, because settler colonialism is a historical construct that is very ideological in the sense that it explains, is used to explain much of history and also much of what's wrong with the world today, present day society.

And in that sense, I think that it is really less of a historical theory than what you would call a critical theory. It's a critical theory which explains injustices in contemporary society and in the contemporary world by reference to settler colonialism. So what I hope to do is just talk a little bit about where this idea came from, some of its implications, and why I think it's essentially a bad idea and in the end of the book, argue against it.

If you were to use the term settler colony in the 1950s and 1960s, it would be clear that what you were talking about was a country like French Algeria or British Rhodesia or South Africa, which was part of the world that had been conquered by a European empire and where a certain number of Europeans had settled, but did not replace the indigenous population, but rather became a sort of elite ruling minority which exploited the native population for labor and resources and dominated politically.

And so, in combating settler colonialism in those societies, the decolonization movement had a clear political organization and goal, which was to expropriate, certainly power and perhaps property from the settlers, the Colognes, the pied noirs, the settler class in these societies. In Algeria, the European population was about 15% of the total.

In the fifties, in Rhodesia, the European population was about 8% of the total. Those were the people who were being fought in the name of settler colonialism. As I get a little bit into the literature on this in the book, that when the original theories of settler colonialism were advanced in the sixties and seventies, it was particularly to distinguish settler colonies from other kinds of colonies that were extractive.

Where there was not a large imperial population or presence, as in, for example, India, where a very small, comparatively very small british establishment ruled over a very large population, or to a certain extent, in Vietnam, where the french presence was quite small compared to in Algeria. And for some of the marxist scholars, like Kenneth Good, who is one of the sort of early theorists of settler colonialism, in a sort of marxist way, the worst of the worse, the better.

The idea was that settler colonies were actually objectively more advanced towards liberation and towards wealth and progress. Because in settling them, European empires had created a native proletariat. And so the native proletariat, because these countries were more advanced and more integrated into the world trade system than extractive colonies, that when the Europeans left, as most of them did in the course of the fifties and sixties, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes after a protracted war.

The theory was that settler colonies were actually better suited to make progress than other colonies where there was no such proletariat, no class consciousness, has no industrial infrastructure. That was sort of the first wave of thinking about settler colonialism. I think it's a pretty straightforward diagnostic term, this story that I tell in this book, and I think the current story of academic theories of settler colonialism begins in the 1990s.

And one of the most important figures, maybe the founder or one of the founders of this academic field, is the australian anthropologist Patrick Wolf, who's often quoted in this discourse. Patrick Wolf was an anthropologist, and he wrote in 1998, I believe, a very academic book about the history of the field of anthropology in Australian academia and how it helped to construct the way that Australians and the australian government thought about Aborigines and thus treated them.

And it was basically an indictment. But the reason why it became so influential is that, in the introduction to the book, he makes a very powerful rhetorical argument about settler colonialism to describe the history of Australia. And this was at a time when the so called history wars were raging in Australia, and there was a lot of debate about should Australians.

To be proud of their history. Was their history sort of essentially genocidal? A lot of the same issues that are now being agitated in the United States, at least in certain circles. And in this book, Wolf wrote a sentence that I say is the most frequently quoted sentence in settler colonial studies, which is, invasion is a structure, not an event.

By which he means to say that Australia was settled by British colonists in 1788, or that North America was settled by British colonists in 1607 or 1619 is inaccurate. It's not the correct way of looking at the history of colonization. As long as the society is founded by those settlers exist, the process of invasion is still happening.

Invasion is a process, not an event, a structure, not an event. And the sort of implication of that, one implication is that societies founded through European colonization are permanently illegitimate and, in a sense, never the true sovereigns of their territory. Because they were founded in conquest and they were founded against the will of the indigenous people, the people living there when Europeans arrived.

European societies is an ongoing structure of invasion that has been going on for centuries. And this idea has a number of implications. One of the implications is that the struggle against settler colonialism is no longer a political, military struggle in the way that it was in the era of decolonization in Africa and Asia.

Because I think that most people in this field acknowledge, sometimes with regret, but they acknowledge that the United States and Australia are not going to be decolonized in the sense that everyone who is not an indigenous person will leave and go back where they came from, as happened eventually in Algeria.

What it means instead is that when you describe a country like Australia or the United States or Canada, which is where I think most of this literature talks about those countries, because that's where most of the scholars are, interestingly. And maybe we can talk about why, I think it has less to say about Latin America, nothing but less.

Is that these countries, they continue to carry the taint of being founded by European settlement and conquest. And in a way that's sort of reminiscent of original sin, that taint can never be purged. It can never be really redeemed. It can never be done away with. And so to move towards decolonization in a settler colonial society like these, has to mean something more like a moral, political, spiritual reformation and critique.

And that's why I say it's like a critical theory, because often what happens in settler colonial studies is to say the roots of this or that vice or evil in American society is settler colonialism. And here's how the two are connected. So the sort of origin story of the sort of modern, or I'd say, contemporary study of settler colonialism is Australia, then Canada, then the United States.

Israel, which obviously is a country that has a very different history than those countries, is the other country that's almost always mentioned in this context. One of the things I write about in the book is that if you look at the literature of settler colonialism, you'll often find that the US and Israel are the primary examples and are compared and made parallel in ways that are very disproportionate to, for example, the difference in population and territory between those countries.

So there's an anthology of the Routledge Anthology of the history of Settler colonialism. There are four chapters devoted to the United States, three chapters devoted to Israel, no more than one to any other country. Why is that the case? I think I'll come back to that after talking a little bit about some of the effects or critiques in North America.

But I think that it helps to explain a lot of the reaction to October 7th, especially in academia. So one thing that I talk about in the book is that settler colonialism in a way inverts traditional American patriotic historiography of, say, 19th century patriotic historiography in the following way.

If you look at the way that early American historians wrote about America, think of George Bancroft or a Jeffersonian radical poet like Joel Barlow, who wrote a wild poem called The Columbiad, which was sort of a Paradise Lost about Christopher Columbus. One of the themes of this school is that the foundation of the United States, discovery of the New World and the foundation of the United States were the turning points of human history, because it was the first time that liberty and self government were made possible on a large scale.

And so in celebrating this achievement, you weren't just celebrating the foundation of a country, but a sort of turning point in human destiny. And it's the same idea that, for example, in the Gettysburg Address, when Lincoln says, whether this government or any governments can so endure. It's the idea that what's at stake in the United States is human liberty around the world.

In the way that the ideology of settler colonialism writes about those subjects, and there are both academic and popular wings of that writing. There's a lot of academic writing and there's a smaller, but some writing aimed at a popular audience. It sort of agrees that the founding of the United States was the most important thing to happen in the history of the world.

And certainly the discovery of the New world, but for exactly the opposite reason, because it set the world on a path of catastrophe that has never been remedied and maybe can't be remedied. And so a lot of the tropes and themes of traditional historiography appear in this literature in exactly inverted form.

For example, in talking about wars between Puritans and Pequot Indians in New England, the Pequot wars in the 1620s, 1630s. One of the most important historians in this school, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, I don't wanna get her name wrong. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who wrote a book called An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, talks about how the Pequot War started, sort of because there was an incident, isn't named.

And then the Puritans sort of unleashed the innate savagery and sadism of settler colonialism. And that was proved by their war against the Pequots, which ended in a famous massacre which Governor Winthrop wrote about in his diaries, which is a notorious passage, in which he talks about a village being burned and the screams and the smells being like an offering to God.

And so, that is a sort of complete inversion of the traditional idea that Indian warfare was uniquely savage, that Indians sort of set upon American settlers without provocation and used inhumane techniques like scalping, massacring women and children. It's a similar way of talking about that history and leaves out a lot of what you might think of its context or background or what actually happened or what the reciprocal actions were on both sides.

And it essentializes settler colonialism to say a settler colonist is someone who acts like this. So what is like this? The key ideas about a settler, and one of the terms that's often used in this literature is settler ways of being. And the term settler ways of being already suggest that we're not talking about historical events, but we're talking about A mindset, a worldview, a spiritual condition.

Settler ways of being are characterized by rapacity and insatiability, which are evident in what used to be called manifest destiny, right? It's the same thing, once again, inverted. European colonists came to America. They took over the entire continent. They were never satisfied. They never had enough land and territory and power and resources, and until they conquered the entire continent.

Similarly, in Canada and Australia. And so a settler way of being is one that inherits and reflects this sort of original crime of rapacity and exploitation that led to the creation of the United States and of these other countries. That means that, for example, in contemporary society, if you're talking about exploitation of natural resources or carbon emissions, that that can very easily be, and often is described as a settler colonial activity, a legacy of settler colonialism, because it's an example of insatiability and rapacity.

The United States can never get enough resources in the same way they could never get enough land. And that this is in opposition to indigenous ways of being and thinking, which were to live lightly on the land and not make demands of the earth, not extract resources. One thing I say in the book is that if you were to look at the five biggest carbon emitting countries in the world, the United States is the only one that could be called a settler colonial country.

The rest are other really big, wealthy countries like China and India, which are not settler colonial countries. So in a certain sortaf obvious empirical sense, it's not accurate to say that settler colonialism's responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. However, that is the kinda statement that is made habitually and usually unchallenged in the world of settler colonial studies.

And it's one of the ways in which it can be called an ideology, because there's a common way of thinking, a lot of shared assumptions that are seldom challenged, both for political reasons and because I think there's no academic structural motivation incentive for challenging those core assumptions. One of the things that is sorta useful to add is that most of the scholarship, or much of the scholarship that takes place in the field of settler colonial studies is not written by historians or area studies specialists.

It's written by cultural studies people and anthropologists and sociologists. So it's not really about. It's not really about writing about the past or determining what happened in the past. It's more about theorizing what happened in the past, and particularly theorizing it with an eye to the present and the future.

One of the things I say in the book is that if you consider this a radical ideology, a radical way of thinking, on the analogy of Marxism, for example, one thing both of those ideologies have in common is that they are based on a virtuous response, which is indignation against injustice.

Because there's no arguing that the history that we're talking about, when we talk about the history of Native Americans or Aboriginal Australians is a history of injustice and death and suffering. In a similar way, you could say that the exploitation and the suffering that Marx was writing about, Engels was writing about was real, and that the people who wanted to end it and were indignant about it were motivated by a virtuous response.

The question is, does the response which intends to be virtuous actually lead to ideas that could improve the problems or solve the problems, or does it lead to creating new kinds of injustice and different problems? And that's one of the arguments that I want to make in the book.

And there, I think the reaction to October 7th and the ongoing reaction to the Israel-Hamas conflict is exhibit A. In the US, when people talk about decolonization, it's a term that has become sorta surprisingly rapidly become current over the last five years, I'd say, in a whole variety of contexts that aren't strictly political.

So you may have encountered phrases like decolonize your bookshelf, which means read non-white writers. There are people who have written guides to decolonizing your backyard, which means only plant native species. You can decolonize your kitchen, which is sort of about using local ingredients. And some of those are silly examples.

But what it means is that decolonization is really about changing one's inner self and one's behavior. It's less a political movement on the analogy of Marxism. And here's the big difference, and the big contrast between the two of them, although I think there are analogies as radical ideologies, is that unlike almost every progressive ideology, the ideology of settler colonialism is a minoritarian ideology.

It does not say we represent the 99% against the 1%. In fact, it says almost exactly the opposite of that. It says everyone in America, for instance, who's not indigenous can't trace their ancestry back to pre-Columbian America. And, of course, today, that the indigenous population, the native population in censuses, is about 2 and 3%, 2 to 3%.

And many, many of those people have mixed, of course, mixed ancestry. Everyone who's not indigenous is a settler. It's a binary division. If you're not indigenous, you're a settler. So some of the theorists, especially the more consistent and radical ones, will say things like, you're a settler. Even if your ancestors were brought here from Africa as slaves, even if your parents or your ancestors immigrated here ten years ago from Asia, you are still a settler.

In other words, to be a settler, you don't have to be linearly descended from someone who dispossessed Native Americans, because going back to the idea of settler ways of being, American society is structurally settler colonial society, and therefore, everyone in it who occupies the role of a settler is a settler.

And so that means that the vast majority of Americans are settlers. So in that situation, you have a sorta direct converse of, say, the Occupy Wall Street movement, where it we represent the 99% against 1%. And some theorists make that contrast explicit, which obviously limits the potential for political action, right?

It's hard to imagine political goals like decolonization resulting from this movement. And in fact, interestingly, native american advocacy groups don't use the term settler colonialism, and they don't use the term decolonization, especially mainstream ones. They use terms like, they talk about holding the us government to its treaty obligations.

The idea that you would in some way, roll back the last 500 years of american history is not a pragmatic political goal. However, if what it does is inspires you to think about yourself as a settler and all the things within yourself and your life that are settler ways of being, it can be very productive on a spiritual level.

And so some of the things I talk about in the book are quite, in a way, I think, misguided, but in a way, quite touching, at least. So they're really spiritual exercises. You can see this a lot on social media. You can see it on blogs. You can see it on young people, especially young people writing in campus newspapers when they are sort of reckoning with the idea of, what does it mean for me to be a settler?

And many of these people, I would say, are not white. So they're not saying, I'm descended from people who are the original settlers. They're saying, I occupy the settler position in this society. The the American Friends Service group, which started as a pacifist group and which is a quake organization.

On their website has an interesting document which is about how to decolonize guides to fighting settler colonialism. And I think the title is five things you can do to fight settler colonialism, and none of them are things you can do. They're all basically what you would call prayers or affirmations and things that you say to yourself, and if I can find it in the book, I'll read it to you.

They're things like, I will talk from a place of mindfulness and presence, or I will think about, relate to other people with intentionality, terms like that which are very common in our discourse today. And it goes on to say things like, some of the legacies of settler colonialism are things like loneliness, alienation, spiritual disconnection.

All these things are legacies of settler colonialism. So really, things that basically encompass any aspect of the human condition or of modern life that have been decried. And many of the same things have been and can be decried in different ideological terms, right? Marx also wrote about alienation, and there are lots of ways to think about these things, but they can be thought about in terms of.

Thank you very much. So the website of the American Foreign Service Committee offers a list of five things you can do to decolonize. Most of them are not even explicitly about decolonization, but general ethical affirmations, such as, I am taking intentional time to be in an accountable, honest relationship with others.

So you could call that pop psychology, or you could call it sort of new age speak, but it is inflected as settler colonial because in this way of thinking, all these kinds of things, of self division, alienation, insatiability, unhappiness, disconnection from the earth, are legacies of settler colonialism in the american context, in the canadian context, in the australian context.

I think that these ideas have limited political potential for the reasons that I mentioned. They're minoritarian ideas. They don't lead to pragmatic plans of action. There are a few theorists in this field who would envision or say the ultimate goal is for the United States to cede sovereignty over its territory, or part of its territory, to Native Americans.

But I think that it's pretty widely acknowledged that's not a live political option. More often, you'll see people say things like, if anyone who asks what you're gonna do to decolonize is asking because they don't believe in it, they don't believe in the movement, they should look within and do the work, which was very much the same kind of responses that if you had said to someone after the revolution, what will it be like?

Or after the Messiah comes, what will it be like? You say, well, if you really believed, if you were really committed, you wouldn't ask those questions. The things will be solved by themselves. But where this is transforming mores and ideas is among younger, highly educated people. And I think you see that on college campuses.

But like many things, things that start on college campuses, like the students don't on college campuses, they move out into the world on Twitter, or what used to be called Twitter. I guess we still say X, formerly called Twitter, even though it's been a long time, especially among Canadians.

There's a bit of a trend of, in your Twitter bio, when you identify yourself, you say settler in a similar way that you might say, my pronouns are. And I could easily imagine that etiquette spreading to the United States. One of the examples that did spread to the United States is land acknowledgments, which is a sort of public version of that.

I'm an editor at the Wall Street Journal, and in 2018, I was pitched an article by a Canadian writer saying, there's this thing here called land acknowledgment that suddenly everyone is doing. Would you like an article about it? And we discussed it, and we said, no one here has ever heard of this.

This is not an American, so we don't want the article. So that was six years ago. Now, I think it's fair to say that absolutely every educational institution, cultural institution, museum, theater, arts organization, many local governments require a land acknowledgement. They have it in their official documentation. Sometimes they might have it on the wall.

They'll recite it at public events. What's interesting about land acknowledgments to me is that, in a certain sense, of what they're saying is something that absolutely everyone in the audience knows already, because anyone who goes to elementary school in the United States knows that the United States was conquered from native american peoples.

That is sort of the fundamental fact of american history, and it's on the map. All you have to do is look at the map, and you see this names of all the states and the rivers and the places are Indian names. And that is a basic fact of american history.

So no one is denying that fact. But only in the last five years did it come to be seen as sort of standard etiquette or politically virtuous to publicly affirm at a public event. This institution stands on the grounds of a particular land once owned by, controlled by a particular people.

And I was looking at the Stanford acknowledgement, which, as acknowledgments go, is quite, I think, good, and says some concrete things about working with local native American communities, but many of them are quite breast beating and say, this institution is on stolen land. Our being here is an act of privilege, things like that.

And this gets into this connects with issues that I think are of even broader implication and interest, and that we've been litigating in our society over the last ten years, which is, when we look at american history, should we be ashamed? Is there a way to give an account of this country that isn't based on shame, that isn't based on apology?

And land acknowledgments are sort of a very public and explicit example of saying, ritually saying, we, being part of this institution, accept the guilt that our ancestors incurred by being here at all. Now, of course, that doesn't mean that any one of these institutions intends to do anything about it.

And that's another part of what I find frustrating about land acknowledgments is that it's purely verbal, right? There's no even the remotest intention for the Metropolitan museum, or whatever it is, to say, okay, we're gonna go somewhere else, and the land, we're gonna give it back to the people who lived here 400 years ago.

That's one. Another is that they're very ahistorical in that they often will say that the land belonged to or was the immemorial guardians of the land were the people that happened to be living there when Europeans first made contact, which is very sort of dehistoricizing and essentializing and suggests that there was no history in this place before Europeans or Americans got there.

If you were talking about anti settler colonialism as a political movement, if you were to ask, ask, you know, like the FLN, what do you think of land acknowledgments? In Algeria, they would be disgusted and appalled. But in the context here, in the context we're talking about, I think it's very clear that what's at stake in these land acknowledgments or calling yourself a settler or many other examples of this is moral prestige.

And it's moral prestige among settlers. It's a conversation among people who consider themselves settlers, in which those who take responsibility and acknowledge guilt prove that they are morally superior to those who will not take responsibility and acknowledge guilt. And one of the things I get into a bit in the book is that in a very ironic way.

That is precisely the same logic as the original settler colonists, the Puritans in New England. It's a very calvinist way of thinking about responsibility. There's a sin, it was committed in the distant past. I didn't commit it, but I inherited it. There's nothing I can do to purge myself of it.

But the. The first step towards purging yourself of it is to acknowledge that you're a sinner. And so, in a sort of paradoxical way, a person who acknowledges that they're a sinner is more spiritually advanced than someone who won't say they're a sinner. In the same way with settler colonialism, if you acknowledge that you're a settler, you're a better person than someone who won't acknowledge that they're a settler.

So the second part of the argument, and I'll talk about this, and then maybe we can move to discussion, is you can't imagine decolonizing, in any concrete sense, the United States, Canada, or Australia. The place where you can imagine decolonizing a country for real is Israel, because as we know, since Israel was created in 1948, there have been a lot of people whose goal has been precisely to make it no longer exist and to wipe it off the map.

And so I think that when you look at why did so many academic groups, progressive groups, people involved in the field of settler colonial studies, respond so positively to the Hamas attack, I think one big reason is that it was an example of moving from theory to practice.

Here, you can't kill a bunch of settlers, but there you can kill a bunch of settlers. And so when someone did, it was an act of resistance to settler colonialism. I think that's when you get into statements like, there are no civilians in Israel, only settlers. One of the things that I think is confusing about this term when it enters into the public discourse is that for people who follow the Middle east or who follow Israel Palestine, the term settler has a particular meaning.

It means Israeli Jews who live on the West bank, which is occupied territory, not inside the border of Israel. And so those settlers, which is about somewhat less than 500,000 people, compared to about 6.5 million Jews inside the borders of Israel, are often considered radicals, religious or political radicals who are creating an obstacle to peace and violating international law and are widely criticized both inside and outside of Israel.

The people who were killed on October 7 were not on the West bank. They were not settlers in that sense. They were living inside what's called the Green Line, the international border of Israel. And so when those people are also described as settlers and they're described as appropriate targets for violence because they're settlers, the implication is that any jew anywhere in Israel is a target because the state of Israel as a Jewish state should not exist, and that in a just world, it won't exist.

And that the fight against settler colonialism is attempting to bring about that conclusion. And I think that those propositions would be endorsed 100% by all of the student protesters, all of the people who are most anti Zionist, who describe themselves as anti Zionist, and who will say things.

I mean, this is really just taken at random. But recently there was a chapter of Jewish Voice for peace, I think the one at University of Michigan, that quoted, burn the whole colony to the ground. Because if the idea is a colony is a country that was created by injustice and by war and force, like the United States or Australia, and you have the opportunity to burn it to the ground, that that's what you should do.

Of course, that is the same logic that the FLN followed in Algeria and that the PLO has been following or did follow in the 1960s. But there's been an interesting shift in the way that the Palestinian liberation movement describes itself and thinks about itself. And it's partly a generational shift having to do with the rise of these ideas.

So one of the last interviews that Yasser Arafat gave before he died, I think in 2004, one of the things he said was, we are not red Indians, by which he meant, if you analogize the Palestinian cause to Native Americans, that's a defeatist comparison, because we know that in the end, the Native Americans were defeated.

So we do not want to be thought of in those terms, is what he was trying to say. Younger palestinian activists, especially now, 20 years later, often see the idea of indigeneity as a very powerful moral position. And they want to be described as an indigenous people and do describe themselves that way.

One of the interesting moments when this really surfaced in America was in 2016 at the Standing Rock protest, which you may remember was a protest in North Dakota about building an oil pipeline under a Sioux reservation. And it became a sort of international flashpoint, a little bit like Zuccotti Park was during Occupy Wall Street.

Activists came from all over the world to protest, and among them, many palestinian activists, both in the United States and from Gaza. And many people had signs and slogans or wrote books with the idea of from standing rock to Gaza. Now, what do those things have in common?

In any empirical sense, they have nothing in common. But the idea was that they're both examples of an indigenous people standing up against settler colonialism because the United States is sort of an illegitimate sovereign and does not have the right to build on American territory because it doesn't really belong here.

Resisting that oil pipeline was resisting settler colonialism. And when Hamas fires rockets into Israel, that's also resisting settler colonialism because it's resisting a country that also does not deserve to exist and should not be there. Some of the book, towards the end, I sort of try to get into the question of why.

I think that's a bad framing for the Israel Palestine conflict. Now, I started writing this book after October 7 and wrote it in about six months. As you can see, it's a short book in order to sort of have this enter into the discussion as quickly as possible.

And so that means that the war in Gaza was changing a lot while I wrote it. And I don't discuss the war in Gaza in any detailed way in the book. Obviously, the sort of emotional and political grievance or the sort of fuel of the anti Israel protest is the death and suffering of people in Gaza.

So there's no ultimate way to defuse that sentiment or to fuse that kind of protest without some sort of peaceful resolution of the current conflict, and ideally over the long-term. And that's something that I don't, and I don't know who does see as any kind of imminent prospect.

So that is not something that I get into in the book. What I do get into in the book is the way that seeing this conflict through the lens of settler colonialism shapes the way that people think and talk about it. I'll give just one example. One of the sort of shibboleths on the left in talking about the Israel Hamas war is that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

And by shibboleth, I mean, if you will not say that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, you will not be allowed into any progressive spaces or increasingly into spaces like a book panel at a literary festival, where the other two writers on your panel say, I won't appear with a Zionist, by which they mean someone with a jewish last name, which is something that has happened a lot.

I'm in New York, this kinda thing happens every week. There's a new example of this. Sometimes it's very ironic, you had an anti-Zionist Jewish writer trying to have a book event at a bookstore in Brooklyn. The manager of the store wouldn't let him in because he was a Zionist, by which he just meant that he was jewish.

Now, seeing the war in to say that what's happening in Gaza is not a genocide is, in a way a sort of disgraceful and obtuse thing to say, because it sounds like you're saying you haven't killed enough people yet for it to be a genocide, and that I don't care about the people who have died there.

And I understand that that's not a position that anyone wants to be associated with. However, I think it's notable that, as I say in the book, I quote some people that on October 7, there were a lot of people who said this was justified resistance against a genocidal state.

In other words, before there was a response, before there was an invasion of Gaza, the idea was Israel is a genocidal state, therefore, this is resistance to genocide. And I think that if you look at the history of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, if you define genocide to mean the attempted destruction of people, that that is not an empirically tenable description of that conflict.

One way of thinking about it is if you think of the settlement of North America as an example of genocide. In the 75 years after the pilgrims Puritans settled New England, the native American population is estimated to have fallen by about 90% in 75 years, mostly because of disease.

If you look at Israel and Palestine, the Palestinian Arab population in that entire territory has gone. Has grown by about 500% in the last 75 years, from about 1.3 million to more than 7 million today. In fact, between the river and the sea, to use the slogan that we all know, the jewish and arab populations are about equal, about 7 million each.

So clearly, there has not been an attempt to commit a genocide of Palestinian Arabs. The one reason why that idea is so sort of instinctively plausible to many people is that settler colonialism is genocidal by definition. The discourse of settler colonialism is about genocide. There's a quote by Patrick Wolf to that effect as well, that when we talk about settler colonialism, we're talking about genocide.

And you can see how, looking at the fate of aboriginal Australians or Native Americans, that that idea might be more plausible. Although I would say just as a sort of further complication, actual historians of Native America, I think, tend to resist the idea of settler colonialism because they know that, in fact, the story of that war between different peoples lasted over many centuries, and there were different moments at which different groups and entities had the upper hand.

It was not a genocide in the sense that the Nazi Holocaust was a genocide in which, in the space of four years, 6 million people were exterminated. That, of course, is the event for which the term genocide was invented. But in the world of settler colonial studies, the term genocide has been sort of redefined.

Or the extension is the term has been extended so that a genocide is not only the physical annihilation of a group of people, it's the destruction of a people's culture and way of life. And so by that definition, as one person, I think, from the University of London, Damien Short, I think is his name, says it's not actually necessary for anyone to die for there to be a genocide, because a genocide is a structural process in which a people loses its way of life, its language, and its culture.

So, for example, things that have been described as genocidal in this context are national parks, because a national park maintains the sovereignty of the settler society over indigenous land. So a national park is an instrument of genocide, or even more particularly, mining is an instrument of genocide because it's about violating the land that the settler colonial society has occupied.

So when all of those ideas are in the air and the sort of equation of settler colonialism with genocide is almost intuitive and taken for granted, when a war does break out between Israel and Hamas, the idea that it's a genocide is very ready to hand and was adopted very quickly.

So to finish, and this is how the book finishes as well, I don't want to be and wouldn't want to be in the position of denying the injustices that are at the root of the idea of settler colonialism. What I think is important to sort of look at and to think about is how do we respond to historical injustice, especially if we are legatees of it in some way, beneficiaries of it in some way.

There are numerous arguments that could be made and that I have heard people make and sometimes gotten into myself. One is that this is a discourse that looks exclusively at the history of English speaking countries founded by European colonists, plus Israel, and not the entire rest of world history.

Which is mostly the case, although there are some people in settler colonial studies who do, and we'll say, for example, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria was settler colonialism. But the idea that you might look at the history of the world and say, well, why do people from North Africa into Central Asia practice Islam?

That's because of settler colonialism. Why is Russia the biggest country in the world? That's because of settler colonialism. In essence, the entire history of the world is the history of conquest and settlement and cultural destruction and change and imposition. So to single out these particular countries for study, at the very least, is ahistorical.

And to single out Israel in particular, as the one country in the world today where there is an active conflict against settler colonialism, where a country deserves to be destroyed, I think is unjust. It's an injustice. It also leads to certain ways of thinking and talking that I think are very parallel to classic anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism.

That's something else that maybe we could get into. But what I really think is that we have to look at, we have to find a way to talk about the history of our country, the history of the Middle east, and maybe history more broadly. That does not say we have to repudiate it, destroy it, reform it as if it never was.

And a key term in this writing, in this vocabulary, is the idea of redemption, of redeeming the past, which is something that settler colonial studies wants to do. Walter Benjamin, who I talk about at the end of the book, wrote about redeeming the past at a moment in 1940, in his thesis on the philosophy of history, right?

As he was about to die, commits suicide at the beginning of World War two, talked about facing backwards. The angel of history faces backwards towards the past, sees it as an accumulation of wreckage, and that it can be redeemed through Messianic sort of intervention. And that is an idea that I think all of us in the 21st century, all educated westerners in the 21st century, have internalized on some level, because we know that the history of the west in particular, is full of atrocities.

And so when we look at the history of those atrocities, we say we would like to redeem histories as if those atrocities didn't happen, to annihilate their legacy, to sort of work on Messianic transformation. So that, for example, the peoples who lived in North America before 1492 still lived here.

The way of life that they pursued can still be pursued, et cetera, for many other examples. But, in fact, I think that that is a council of despair, because, as we know, you cannot change the past and you cannot redeem the past. In fact, when you're set on redeeming the past and see the past mainly as a story of injustice that needs to be rectified, what you're actually doing is ensuring more injustice in the future by saying, we will make war against the people who inflicted this injustice, will destroy them, will undo the consequences of their actions.

I think you can You can see that very clearly in the way people talk about Israel, for example. And so I don't have a solution, obviously, but I think that viewing that conflict and our history as Americans and other historical stories through the lens of settler colonialism will have the effect of making the future worse rather than better.

And that on that grounds, I think it's worth opposing. So maybe I'll stop.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, dude. So let me see if I got this right, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong. So the move here is to take the idea seriously, right? It is an idea, and it's a pervasive idea.

And so it can only be countered in your mind as an idea through ideas and through argumentation and evidence, right? And your challenge is that it's an idea, but it's an eschatology, right? It's a metaphysics. It's not an idea the way for example, you say either 17 people died or 16 people died, and you get out and count the numbers, and then you figure out which is correct.

It's not about, for example, things fall at a certain speed because Newton figured out, right? It's a worldview, but an eschatological worldview that's not susceptible to the kind of argument and evidence that would, for example, be typical of the Wall Street Journal section that you edit, which is with the paradigm of rationality.

That was my implication. And so the move then is, who's the audience? Because the implication is that the eschatological version of this, you can't argue with them, you can't expose the falsehood of their arguments with facts. You can't get them to give up their view. But yet you decided the book was important anyway.

So the implication, again, is that there are a lot of people out there who are non eschatological, and they're susceptible to the eschatology, but they're recuperable or redeemable to use your language on the basis of fact and evidence and logic and argumentation. So in other words, we can cleave off some of the fallen from the ideologues or the followers of this by teaching them the facts.

And we can do that while also acknowledging the injustices. And our goal is that they don't perpetuate further injustices by falling prey to the eschatology, right? I think that's what I got out of your piece. So you're not trying to undo the settler colonialism literature in the settler colonialism literature?

Because that can't be done. That would be a tilting at Windmills, that would be more like your literary criticism.

>> Adam Kirsch: Well, that's true. And I think that this book is not, to my knowledge, has not been read by any academic settler, colonial people. I mean, maybe it's been read, but certainly has been written about, at least not yet.

It's been out for a couple of months, so maybe that could still happen. But I think you're right that it's probably not gonna make too much of a dent because it comes from outside that world, from someone with no standing in that world, and also is sort of has too comprehensive a repudiation.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Right, you don't look like them, you're not derived. You don't have the bona fides from their point of view, to be able to speak about the issues. So there'd be no reason for them to do anything other than eliminate you because you're another settler.

>> Adam Kirsch: I mean, in a way yes, but I mean, you could make an analogy with the way that sort of the advanced way of thinking in the 1930s was to be pro communist or pro Soviet or pro Stalinist in a lot of cultural spheres.

And in a way, that has a lot of similarities with what goes on now. If you were in publishing or in journalism or in any of these fields, there's a sort of expectation that you would say communism is good and Stalinism is good, and because otherwise, you're a bad person.

There are definitely parts of the world in which to say settler colonialism is a flawed idea or I reject it, would be met with the same sort of like, well, you're a bad person and therefore we don't have to engage with you. However, not everyone is in that world.

Not everyone is in that world. In fact, numerically, it's a small number of people. So what I hope to do with this book, and speaking of literary criticism, this is a lesson that I've learned as a literary critic over many years, writing about books that I think are bad.

When I say this book is no good, even if it's poetry or something like that, where the political stakes are zero, you never convince anyone who's already disagrees with you. But what you can do is you plant a flag and people who might agree with you can come over and say, let's have this conversation here.

And that's one of the reasons I wanted to write this book, because, first of all, I don't think that most people outside of academia and outside of progressive politics really know anything about this idea. So I wanted to sort of just open that up. But then also to say hopefully, and I'd say that the book is at least strives to be written in a way that's non polemical or at least minimally polemical is maybe so that people in adjacent fields or students or people who are interested in this could at least read a reasonable alternative interpretation and say this is not the only way to think about this history.

There are other ways. And I think that when one is a young student and everyone who you learn from and everyone whose approval you want agrees on something, it's very natural to think, well that is the right idea, that's the way it is. And that's certainly true inside the classroom or in terms of activism outside the classroom.

>> Stephen Kotkin: So permission to engage differently from what they're hearing as part of the.

>> Adam Kirsch: Yeah, just sort of offer an alternative.

>> Stephen Kotkin: But here's a second issue before we open up. You'll excuse me again. Well, you won't excuse me, but I'm going to do it anyway. So you want to acknowledge the injustices that are committed because those are historical facts.

But you have trouble validating the categories that are being used in the settler colonial eschatology. So you point out that in fact the category indigenous peoples is a metaphysical category because based upon archaeology and DNA evidence, humans, Homo sapiens originated in Africa. So they can't be indigenous to this part of the world.

They somehow migrated here unless that theory is disproven with further DNA evidence and archaeological evidence, there's not a single indigenous person in the Americas as we understand the term indigenous. They all came from someplace else and moreover, they conquered each other, they murdered each other sometimes they ate each other's flesh, and we have some evidence of that practice.

And so on the one hand you're acknowledging that there was the injustice committed at that time period when Europeans crossed the ocean. But on the other hand, you don't like the categories of thought or the vocabulary in which that's discussed. And yet there's some slippage back and forth where you use.

Some of those categories. You do say, for example, indigenous peoples. You said it today, the presentation was longer than the book, even though it was short. But you-

>> Adam Kirsch: I could have just read the whole thing.

>> Stephen Kotkin: You could have, but you used indigenous peoples as a category.

And so how does one navigate that problematic there, where you wanna acknowledge certain facts, but you're hesitant to validate the vocabulary.

>> Adam Kirsch: Yeah, I don't think that people who use the term indigenous at least mostly conceive it to mean sprung from the soil in a sort of mythological sense.

It means the people who were in a place for a very, very long time before Europeans arrived. That's what indigenous means. So I don't have any problem with that as a historical descriptor. I think that where the problem starts is that the idea of indigeneity can be reified in ways that are intended to be very positive, but are actually very historical and misleading.

So that indigenous peoples are people who are non-violent and non-hierarchical and completely egalitarian.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Dancing versus wolves, as we used to call it.

>> Adam Kirsch: Well, if you read some of this contemporary literature, you can see that it descends in a straight line from Thomas More's Utopia, which was also about Native Americans.

The idea was a European discovers an island off of South America where there's no property and no one fights, and everyone gets along. In the works of a lot of these writers, very similar things are said about pre-Columbian America. Even though if you look at the other writers who are more scholarly and look at things like paleontological evidence, you see that actually there's great evidence for a lot of violence and warfare, of course, right, as one would expect.

So, I don't think there's anything wrong, necessarily, with using the term indigenous, but I do think that turning indigeneity into a kind of moral, spiritual complex. Yeah, that's where the problem is.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, all right, let's go to our live studio audience.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Our co host, Russell Berman, was quick on the trigger there.

>> Russell Berman: Russell, quicken the trigger, because it's such a great talk and there's so many important issues here.

>> Adam Kirsch: Thank you.

>> Russell Berman: I had three points, but just this last exchange makes me add a fourth one. First, the prioritization of indigeneity very quickly puts you in an anti-immigration camp.

You don't want those strangers coming here. So let me just note that.

>> Adam Kirsch: Yeah.

>> Russell Berman: So the politics get weird very quickly. But more importantly, I walk away with thinking about three different buckets. One is that the term set of colonialism does have some validity in the real history historiography of empire and colonization that really did take place, as you pointed out, different kinds of colonies.

That kind of factual engagement with the phenomenon of settler colonialism pretty much disappears in the current usage of it. So this is another shift toward, I will say, literary criticism, thank you. The second point is what the centrality of settler colonialism in the debates that have been taking place on some, actually few campuses and widely in the cultural sphere.

But I really wonder whether those debates are driven by the category settler colonialism or they're a function of other kinds of pathologies that pervade higher education in the cultural sector. And then settler colonialism is one object that is very useful to cassect on, but it's about other stuff that's going on in higher ed especially.

You can tell me about the publishing world as well. Well, I know from Europe, the museum world, the art world, this is also infected by this stuff. It's something I worry about, think about a lot. But the one piece that I walk away from your talk with really having understood something new, thank you for this, is the characterization of this as like religion, except it's not like religion.

It is religion. And let me frame that by saying that in my undergraduate teaching, I have noted away from the settler colonial crowd, away from that radical crowd, there really is a resurgence of spirituality going on. There are the traditional Catholics. There are the traditional non-denominational Protestants who are now speaking up about that in classes.

And I realized that one aspect of what you're talking about is a kind of religious sectarianism. In the center of it is the embracing of guilt. And then nature teaches me, people embrace this guilt first in order to put down the person who hasn't got there yet. So this discourse of guilt is really a will to power on the part of the, I don't know, for lack of a better word, radicals, in order to claim authority over those who are benighted because they don't understand their sinfulness.

We're all settlers in the hands of an angry God.

>> Adam Kirsch: Yeah.

>> Russell Berman: And, yeah, this was great. It's a religion.

>> Adam Kirsch: Thank you very much. I'll just say two things in response to that. I think that one reason why this is so much more of a phenomenon in Canada and the US than it is, say, in Mexico or Latin America, I did sort of come to think in the course of writing the book that it's about Protestantism and that this is a very protestant way of thinking about guilt and about sin.

And so you look at the way that you would scrutinize your conscience and that you have this sense of, I've been born in sin, I can't get out of it by myself. But if I confess the sin, then that is how grace begins, is when you start to confess.

I feel like that protestant dynamic has a lot to do with why this is appealing and maybe particularly why it's appealing to white Protestants in America and Canada, which is, I think, a lot of the people who are at the heart of the enterprise. And then that connects with the other thing about immigration.

One of the sort of hard line ideas behind this is that there's no such thing as an immigrant. And, in fact, there's a book not to only focus on Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, but she has another book called not a Nation of Immigrants, in which she talks about the idea of how the description of America as a nation of immigrants arose in the 50s and 60s.

And specifically says, this isn't about an alibi for colonialism at a time when the Soviets were challenging colonialism for third world leadership to sort of rewrite the history of the United States to say that we are not colonizers but immigrants. And so when, I think it was Arthur Schlesinger, who sort of came up with the idea and sold it to Kennedy, who embraced it and used it, that what they thought they were doing was saying, we Catholics and Jews are Americans just like the Protestants because we were all immigrants.

But from her point of view, what you're saying is everyone here who's not indigenous is a settler. There are no immigrants who are all settlers. And then related to that is that there's a really pronounced and interesting tension between settler colonial ways of thinking and thinking about blackness and civil rights.

So a lot of these scholars, especially the most sort of radical ones, will specifically dismiss and disparage the idea of civil rights and integration. And even multiculturalism, because multiculturalism is about saying, we're all equal, and maybe Native Americans are one group among many, but we're all here to create the symphony together.

But the idea of decolonization is no one should be here. All of you are sort of sharing the loot from a theft. So for people who really wanna be ideologically pure and in the vanguard, they will specifically repudiate those ideas.

>> Stephen Kotkin: And so it's a weird politics of non-solidarity.

>> Adam Kirsch: Yes.

>> Stephen Kotkin: So you were brought here against your will. Somehow, you survived the slave ship, and you're a settler, too.

>> Adam Kirsch: Yeah, or at least in the position of a settler in some way, yeah.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Right, well, you occupy the same objective position. And so what's interesting is, on the campus, right, Chicano studies, walks around chanting viva Palestina in Spanish.

>> Adam Kirsch: Yeah.

>> Stephen Kotkin: And so they're trying to practice the solidarity, right, that it's also a genocide there, like it was a genocide here. But the theorists that you're investigating in the book, that's anathema to them. They don't want anything to do with such an idea that the Chicano studies people are allies because they're just another settler.

>> Adam Kirsch: Well, yeah, it does get very complicated, and it definitely mixes up people's ideas about who's an oppressor and who's oppressed. And that's one of the examples in the book, that latino activists in the southwest who would say, we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us, then the settler colonialists would say, well, why was there that?

Why was Mexico there in the first place? It's because the Spanish stole it from Native Americans. So you shouldn't claim that you have some sort of priority. You were, in fact, just another colonizer who got overtaken by a later colonizer. I think that on another level, and probably on a more pragmatic level, a lot of these people would say the solution to all of these problems is fighting settler colonialism in a similar way that you might once have said, the solution to all these problems is abolishing private property.

Once you do that, everything will sort of work itself out. There will be no more patriarchy, homophobia, environmental dispollution, all of those things, because they're all related to settler colonialism. You solve settler colonialism, all those things will go away.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Okay, who's next? Steve Davis and then Cody.

>> Steven Davis: People have a desire to appear morally virtuous to themselves and others. Many people have a desire to demonstrate their piety in a way that generates approbation and lets them look upon themselves as better than others. And that leads me to conjecture, no, I have no evidence of the point, but conjecture that other things equal, this kind of ideology doesn't make inroads into communities where traditional mainstream religions still have strong structures in place and among individuals who profess strong allegiance to traditional mainstream religions.

So I wonder if that's true empirically. And if it is, it kind of might make you think differently about efforts to push religion out of the public sphere or downplay it, because one view of human nature is we're going to have some kind of religion, and better we have benign ones than crazy ones.

And I just wanted to get your reaction to that.

>> Adam Kirsch: Yeah, no, I know what you mean. I haven't researched that, and I don't know if anyone's researched it, but I do think that a lot of the, you know, you're more likely to find language about settler colonialism coming from a mainline Protestant than from an evangelical right.

And I think that that might have something to do with it, that if the religion is sort of justice and this becomes a cause about justice, that that can become a religious issue. I do think that the people who. And also, I think part of it, which raises a different set of issues when it comes to both, maybe both North America, but particularly Israel, is the idea of a promised land.

And people who are rooted in biblical religion are more likely to be convinced by the argument that this is a land promised to the Jews, and so therefore, they are the people who should be there. I mean, one of the things that I didn't discuss, which is a very interesting part of this, is that, of course, Israeli Jews, and sort of the premise of Zionism is that Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel, and that in returning to their homeland, they were coming back to their place, place where they were born.

And I say in the book, if you could imagine a real decolonization of the United States, in which part or all of it became a homeland for Native Americans, it would look exactly like Zionism. It would look like a bunch of people from all over the world come to this place, start using an ancient language, and try to create their own society and get into a conflict with the people who are already living there because they thought that they were their land.

But that idea, I think, it cannot be articulated in the language of settler colonialism because it's absolutely dogmatic that Palestinian and Arabs are the indigenous people and Jews are white European colonizers. So the idea that Zionism is an indigenous movement, it can't be really parsed.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Cody Nager.

>> Cody Nager: Sure, so I'll preface this by saying that I'm unfortunately quite familiar with this topic, or fortunately, because I'm both a historian of early America and a historian of US immigration and colonization. So there's a decent amount, obviously, going on in that field regarding settler colonialism, particularly historically.

In my sort of question comment is how settler colonialism fits into sort of a larger trajectory of historiography and sort of how it relates to say, these sort of, I guess, decline of imperial histories from the late 1920s when it comes to, say, the structures of the fur trade or so on and so forth.

And how in some ways, settler colonialism is a sort of attempt to reengage with these imperial institutions from a subaltern perspective or something along those lines.

>> Adam Kirsch: I mean, what's interesting, I'm not well versed in the historiography, but I do think that one thing about it that's interesting is that in a way, it represents a transfer of focus from empires to colonies, because all of these countries that are settler colonial countries were colonies once.

And in fact, part of their national identity is that they used to be colonies and now are no longer colonies, right? So there's a historian named Adam Dahl, who I quote in the book, who says, when I call America a colonial society, I'm not saying it was founded by the 13 colonies, I'm saying that its existence today is colonial because it occupies land that doesn't belong to it.

So in a way, it actually works against imperial history in a certain way because the interest is not about the atlantic world or sort of how these people got here or structures of power before the American Revolution. It's much more about expansion across the continent, American expansion, and how that was generated by or depended on this idea of manifest destiny so that the real wrongdoers are themselves the colonists, right, yeah.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Johan, please.

>> Johan Smith: Yeah, I'm just wondering if this is a question of us in the west not understanding history and if time will take care of it. I was talking to somebody who's from South Africa, and they were talking about colonialism, and I brought up that, I mean, this is a black person, and I brought up that her ancestors would have been the Bantu people who left Nigeria and Cameroon 3000 years ago and started spreading throughout Africa.

And they. Conquered the Pygmy and the Khoisan. And she said to me that, yeah, I mean, every south African person knows about that, but she still said to me that the British and the Dutch were colonizers. So I'm wondering, will time take care of this? Is this something that's particular to the west and what your thoughts are on that?

>> Adam Kirsch: I mean, I think it is, I mean, in very long term. Sure. Yes, time will take care of it. But in the near term, I think it is about the west. People are much more interested in the colonialism and the crimes of the west if they're westerners, because it's about self criticism.

And it's a form of self criticism. And in particular, it's about criticizing contemporary society and remaking the future in ways that sort of avoid or purge or make up for atone for this history. So if you were to say to someone who is thinking in terms of settler colonialism, well, x, y, or z, you did the same thing, or even worse, I don't think that would make much of a dent, because that's not really what they're interested in.

They're not really interested in the idea that man is a wolf to man. They're interested specifically in the evil society that I live in. How can it be reformed and how can it settler colonial legacy be challenged. And in a way, I think that that is highly respectable, because if you were to simply say, well, people have always been fighting wars, and that's all there is to it.

That doesn't really lead to anything or put you in a position to change the future. And one of the things I say in the book is that you could say that every society in history has been founded by conquest and war, which I think would be true, just as you could say every society in history practiced slavery until the 19th century.

But that wouldn't mean that we should say, well, then it doesn't matter now if we have slavery or that every country believed that it should be ruled by kings, and so therefore, we should have a king. We do have this sort of sense of moral progress, of political progress, and one of those items of progress.

I think one thing about not knowing history is that people probably don't realize how recent and exceptional the idea that national border should never change is that that's like a post 1945 idea. And so if you were to say, you know, every country prior to 1945, the idea that one country would take land from another country was sort of the norm.

It wouldn't have been this great unusual crime. That doesn't mean that we want to go back to that, but it does mean that in order to have some realistic understanding of the history, you have to know that about the past. You have to understand that about the past.

And I think it's true that most people don't know enough about the past to understand that.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah, but Johan Smith's point is a deeper one, right? They're just not exercised about the facts. They're exercised about certain peoples.

>> Adam Kirsch: Right.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Or certain actions. So the fact that China destroyed the nomads, including in the 18th century, committed a genocide against the Dhungar's, for example, that doesn't exercise them.

>> Adam Kirsch: Yeah.

>> Stephen Kotkin: China can spread as much as it wants, and I don't care. Or Islam, which originates in a small place at a certain time and now is across a huge expanse of territory that can't be.

>> Adam Kirsch: Yeah.

>> Stephen Kotkin: A trouble for them, and then the Russia one you mentioned in your opening remarks.

And one could go on, and one could go on like Johan did about certain parts of Africa. It just doesn't concern them, even though, by their definitions, it ought to be part of their repertoire.

>> Adam Kirsch: Right, I mean, in a way, this whole thing is coextensive with sort of the history of conflict or the history of war or history period.

One of the things I write about in the book also is the tendency in this world to use Palestine as a sort of paradigm for very disparate historical phenomena. So one of the people, I quote, it's actually two people writing together, say, in 1848, in the Mexican American War, Mexico had its nakba, which is how Arabs refer to the catastrophe of 1948, when the state of Israel was created.

You could use many similar examples. That is a sort of, in a way, blatantly ahistorical thing to say, because it's about something that happened 100 years earlier and on a much different scale and on totally different planets, political grounds. But the idea that one country taking territory from another country, the example that occurs to you immediately is the Nakba, right, that's where your mind goes.

And I think that that is a habit of thought that is very common in this world, because in a certain way, Israel Palestine is the symbolic conflict. It's the most important symbolic conflict. And I give some examples of, if people are talking about, it could be almost anything mental health issues, environmental issues, anything can be said.

Well, as happens in Palestine, you can see that these things are important. And that's where I think that it often turns into a kind of classic way of thinking about Jews and Judaism. And in this connection, I sometimes like to quote the historian David Nirenberg, who is now at the Institute for Advanced Study and wrote a great book called Anti-Judaism, which is sort of about how the idea of being anti-Judaism is an important structure in western civilization and takes different forms at different times.

But the basic idea is that Judaism is the internal other. It's everything that we don't want to be ourselves or don't wanna recognize in ourselves, we attribute to the Jews. So whether that is as being stubbornly legalistic or materialistic or greedy. And in contemporary Europe, it means the nation state.

If we can't defend the nation state or if we, as liberal elites, don't like to defend the nation state, Israel is the nation state. It's the ethno-nationalist state. That's what the Jews do. Genocide, which used to be something that was committed against the Jews in Europe and maybe made people in Europe feel bad about it for a long time.

They can say, well, look, now the Jews are committing a genocide themselves. They're even worse than us. All of those things come up. And I think that is a habit of mind that plays into and is encouraged by using Palestine as a paradigm for all these other conflicts.

>> Stephen Kotkin: I have Josiah Ober and then I have Catherine.

>> Josiah Ober: So pursuing this idea of settler colonialism as a kind of religion, and it's a particular sort of religion, right? It's not a religion of ritual. It's a religion of belief in a certain kind of moral ripeness, at a unique sort of moral rightness.

So if you don't accept it, you are wrong and you ought to be corrected or expelled or something like this. So in a sense, this is just a fundamental, non-pluralistic way of thinking about things. It's not like there are a range of possible things, and we may disagree, but we live in a common world, and we should be able to live together.

So I'm sort of wondering about the sort of space of radical thought, let's say, broadly speaking. And one of the attempts to sort of create a kind of a pluralism for, as it were, sort of left radicalism is intersectionality, right? There are many ways to think about injustice, and ultimately, they all can be correct in some way, even though they're all sort of different kind of injustices, but we can embrace them all and have this kind of a pluralistic.

But it seems to me that settler colonialism might be different from that. It might actually say, no, there is one true. And that if you think it's all intersectionality, you're failing to understand that you really have one true identity and that is the settler, and that is your crime, that is your guilt, and that is what must be expiated, and so on.

So is this in terms of a world with limited space as it were, certain kind of radicalism, an imperialistic move to try to drive out all the other forms of opposition to injustice and take over the sort of sweep the board with a single final and true religion, just like various other religions have tried to sweep the board.

If we think about, let's say, 16th or 17th century Europe and the wars of religion.

>> Adam Kirsch: Yeah, that's a very interesting question about relationship, the idea of intersectionality, because I think that conceptually, yes, it is different. But it also, I think people would very much say that all of those issues of identity and injustice that are addressed in terms of intersectionality would say that those are all real and would honor them, but would say that maybe they all stem from settler colonialism or that settler colonialism is sort of upstream from a lot of these other injustices.

So one thing that you often hear is you hear it, for example, in the context of oppression of gay people in Gaza. This is one of the points that where the sort of cognitive dissonance often emerges. And this is often pointed out that, for example, after October 7, a number of LGBT groups, some of whom had Middle east as their focus, but others didn't, came out in support of Palestine, in support of Hamas, and had the idea that Sarah Schulman, who's an activist who writes about this a lot, says that there's something that's called the queer International.

The queer International is sort of everyone who's on the side of justice. And since the Palestinians have justice on their side, that is a queer cause, right? The fact that in practice it's much easier and better to be queer person in Israel than it is in the Gaza Strip is sort of an empirical matter, but it doesn't affect the theory and the sort of theology because really what we're talking about is the source.

So one way that people sometimes try to resolve that is to say before the British came to Palestine, they didn't have any laws against homosexuality. There was no intolerance of homosexuality. That was something that Europeans brought with them and instilled into this indigenous culture. Another example, which comes from Mahmoud Mamdani, who teaches in Colombia and is one of the Leading figures in this field says that if you're an American Indian who believes that you belong to a tribe and feels a sense of affinity and loyalty to your tribe, that basically you've been sold a bill of goods because tribes are a European concept that were introduced by settler colonialism.

So there are intellectual moves that you can make to say everything that we think is bad comes from settler colonialism, even if it's not obvious, right? Even if it doesn't seem that way. And in a way, I mean, not to belabor the comparison, but in a similar way that if a century ago you had said, what about the nationality problem in the Soviet Union?

There's a communist answer for that. You can answer that in terms of you don't have to say the problem is communism. You say communism is trying to solve this problem that was created over centuries of imperialism. In the same way, if you solve settler colonialism or if you could sort of turn back the clock to before Europeans showed up, all of the things that we think of as anti progressive would disappear.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Survivals under Stalinist theory was called survivals. So in other words, it was still there, like for the anti homosexuality in Islam, but it's a survival of something previously that had caused it. So this survival concept in capitalism, imperialism, that's a beauty. That's just so amazing, the kind of work that that can do.

We have Catherine and then we have the gentleman with the enviable glasses.

>> Catherine: So I just wanted to return to your discussion on genocide, which I found really interesting, and to focus on the UN Special report that was released in March by the Human Rights Council that basically said there were, you know, reasonable grounds to believe that Israel was conducting genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

You know, because they're not a group of college students and they're not a group that uses the term genocide lightly. There's only been three legally recognized genocides, Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia. So I'd be curious to hear if you think that the report's understanding of genocide in the context of Israel is misguided and then what the implications would be if Israel was then indeed found guilty by a group of people that hold power on the international stage.

>> Adam Kirsch: It's a good question. Yeah, it's a very good question. Well, one thing that is sort of interesting or that I talk about in the book, is that since the creation of the state of Israel, there have the total casualties in all the wars and all the conflicts fought between Israel and the Arab states and Palestinians before last year was about 60,000.

Since last year, if you accept the widely circulated numbers, 100,000 over the last 75 years on both sides in the Syrian civil war, which took place began a little over 10 years ago. 600,000 people were killed. No one has ever brought a charge of genocide to the UN against Assad or against the Syrian government.

There has been a charge against Assad at the un. It was about chemical weapons. It wasn't about genocide. So the idea that what's happening in Gaza is in some way worse than the Syrian civil war, even though it's not nearly as costly in human lives, I think that that does originate with this idea that I talked about, that the very existence of the State of Israel is an attempt to supplant and destroy Palestinian Arabs.

And so its actions are always going to be interpreted as furthering that end. I think that it's first of all very hard to know what's actually going on in Gaza because there's no independent reporting. It's not a place where anyone is able to or allowed to do independent reporting.

The reports on casualty figures there come from the Hamas Ministry of Health, which, and I certainly don't mean to suggest that many, many, many people have not been killed and suffered there, but I think that we probably don't know yet and may never know the exact circumstances of what's happened there and who has been killed.

But if genocide is defined as killing a lot of people, however many a lot is in that. In that circumstance, then yes. If it's defined as killing people, as In Cambodia, of 2 to 3 million people, obviously not. If it's defined as killing 6 million people, as in the Holocaust, obviously not.

If it's defined as attempting to destroy an entire ethnic group so that it ceases to exist, obviously not all of those things are the way that I think most people, when you use the term genocide, that's what they think of. And none of those things are happening in Gaza.

What is happening in Gaza is an extremely brutal war that surely involves war crimes and deaths of innocent civilians and many things that, God willing, will be investigated and punished. Punished after the war is over. But I think that when that is framed as genocide, and as I said, was preemptively described as genocide even before it started to happen, something else is going on.

And I don't think that the UN in general is a forum in which issues related to Israel can be reliably negotiated, to put it mildly. For example, it's been reported that many of the Hamas leaders who have been killed, including, I think, sinwar, had UNWRA IDs and documents with them.

In other words, they were working for the United nations relief agency that was established in 1948 to care for Palestinian refugees. So I think that it's a very complicated situation. And a lot of it depends on what is it that you're trying to communicate when you say a genocide.

And as I said before, I personally don't want to be, and I don't think anyone wants to be in the position of saying, this isn't so bad, it's not a genocide. I mean, obviously it is very, very bad. But I think that the way that the term genocide is used in this context is being used for specific political aims to shape the dialogue around the conflict.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Sir. And then we'll have to go to Indonesia. It's time.

>> Speaker 9: So if you're an analyst trying to put things in categories, you would probably start with the way things are different, not the way things are the same. And so as it's been observed, lamentable injustices and social exclusion and dispossession as kind of a common feature of most of human existence.

What's distinct about the settler colonies is kind of baked into the name that it attracted people to come there, and it continued to do so. Call them immigrants, call them settlers 2.0, that very quickly, came from building societies that were attractive for habitation. Now you might say, well, no, that's about land, more land being stolen, but there's actually good economic history on this.

Gallman's estimates suggest that as early as the early Republic, the vast majority of growth is not coming from adding land, it comes from investments. And then later in the century, it's coming from technological growth. And so that's the other thing that is. So that's another distinction of settler colonies, at least among colonies, is that they were much likely to get on the train of modern economic growth.

And again, that's a function of having societies that support that kind of thing. And so those are things that, again, you would, as an analytical category, you might gravitate to that in the Description, not you. But like one might gravitate to that first in the description. And I would say part of the process that we observe in the historical record is you get these societies that are where there's widespread economic agency amongst the in-group, but it's a very large in-group as societies go.

And that pivots to widespread political agency, which is. And all of these things are very unusual in human history, I mean, almost unprecedented. So that seems like that would be. I don't know if that's. I know there was the question about what's the redemption? I don't know. That's sort of a value judgment about does creating those things count as the redemption?

Maybe it's impossible, but it seems like I would at least say those are the identifying features of the phenomenon.

>> Adam Kirsch: Right, no, absolutely. I mean, obviously the sort of story of American history, and the only story that was told for a long time was that the reason why the US had such prosperity and social peace was because it was an open land in which European immigrants could come and free themselves from the disabilities and the scarcities of the past.

And one of the sort of great statements of that is from Hector St John de Crevecoeur, who has a great little sort of description in his book, Letters from American Farmer, written in the 1780s, 1770s maybe. Where he talks about a Scottish immigrant who comes to America and has come from a place where he's never been able to own land and he can only eke out a pittance from the soil.

And he meets him and then he sees him again three years later, and he's become a prosperous landowner and he has a family and he can vote. And it's a very patriotic and in fact, very moving description of what it was that America meant to people, what it meant to people who could come here and have that kind of social advancement.

That was what we might once have called the American dream. At the same time, he also has a very interesting thing where for all of his praise of America, he was against the patriots in the Revolutionary War. And he said that if the war broke out, that he would go and live with the Indians and he would say.

And so he fully recognized that the Indians were sort of separate. They were not part of this American experiment. They were somewhere on the outside, he would have said, on a lower level of civilization and that he would rather live like that than live in America engaged in a war against Britain.

So really the question is both things are true, right? As is always the Case in history. Both things are true. There are for many, many millions of people coming to America and living in America was a great blessing that they could never have achieved anywhere else. And for other millions of people, it was a curse because they were brought as slaves or because the society was built on their ancestral land.

So really, I feel like maybe to broaden out a little bit, one of the things that we've been talking about in American society and litigating American society for a decade or more is exactly that. How do you tell both of those stories? And I think that it often breaks down politically that people only want to tell one of those stories, right?

You want to tell the story of the only thing that matters is 16, 19. Or you want to tell the story of the only thing that matters is 1776, and you don't want to hear the other story. And obviously, the real study of history is about knowing both, but most people are not historians, and they don't study history, and they're not gonna read a serious complicated book about history.

They want a story that they can believe in. One of the things I touch on in the book is that the success of the civil rights movement and sort of one of the parts of the genius of Martin Luther King was to sort of coin this idea of a promissory note.

And to say the founding ideals of America were as great as everyone has always said they were, but they weren't carried out. And so when we carry them out today and extend them to everyone, we are actually participating in the founding of the country and completing it. And that's a sort of way of saying, yes, we should be proud to be Americans.

Yes, American ideals are good and honorable, and in fact, we gain honor by carrying them out and bringing them to fruition. And settler colonial theorists specifically reject that idea. They specifically reject King and civil rights because they say, you can't share out land that you stole from someone else.

That just makes you like a gang of thieves. And so it's a very different way of thinking about these things. And I think that it's one of many things on the left where you say, you know, the crime is what matters, and only the crime matters. And maybe at the same time, because these things are so, they tend to polarize each other, the extremes polarize each other.

People on the right will say, you can't teach that in our schools. You can't teach about the Civil War. You can't teach the truth about the Civil War in our schools. And it's really sort of a disastrous spiral that we're engaged in in this way, as in so many other ways.

And what the solution of it is, I certainly don't know. But I do feel like maybe trying to have some kind of both and mentality and being able to see both sides of the history is important.

>> Stephen Kotkin: We're gonna do two more, Norm and Joshua.

>> Norm: So my take on your book is that it's basically a problem of conceptual scratching one ari, I assume, right?

So the idea of settler colonialism really reminds me of these kind of the days of James Scott, where he argues where everything is the fault of the state. And then Samuel Mohan came out with the argument that said that, yeah, remember what the state did? Well, so my question would be, what is the best way, at least in your view, and because you will be much more experienced in this than I am in academia, because you're in the Wall Street Journal.

To put forward this idea and argument of our counterargument to the public, especially policymaking people, because we don't assume our presidents to read conceptual history of Reinhardt Kosolak. Anyway, so which is to really show both sides of this problem and really make them think that this is like a concept that needs to be criticized by itself.

In fact, for instance, in Southeast Asia, the idea of indigeneity is actually a basis of racism. For instance, one of the big things is that big example is the foundation of Singapore, for instance, when it was kicked out from Malaysia because it was mostly Chinese politics, right? Chinese Indonesia, and in Indonesia as well, we have the idea of an indigenous people against Chinese Indonesians, even though the Chinese Indonesians were there since even before Indonesia was founded and etc.

So discontinuity goes on and on. So what is the best way, in your view, the trick to tell this to the policy makers especially?

>> Adam Kirsch: Yeah,

>> Adam Kirsch: I don't have an immediate answer. I think that maybe it gets into the larger question of how do you tell a story about America that is both inclusive and patriotic?

And one way, I think you're right that the concept of indigeneity leads to places that a lot of people who use it don't expect it to go. Traditionally, saying that what you cared about was blood and soil was not considered a progressive position, right? And I get into this a little bit in the book, but the way that Nazi ideologues talked about rootedness in the soil has some echoes with the way that people talk about indigeneity being rooted in the soil, understanding the land, thinking and understanding and feeling in ways that foreigners could never possibly understand, right?

There's an irrationalism to it, it's an irrationalist idea. I mean, maybe the sort of idea of indigeneity is one that should be downplayed. And as has been traditional in American society, that it's not about where you come from, but where you go to and where you are now, rather than where you were in the past.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Let's close out with our Hoover history lab assistant director, Joseph Ledford.

>> Joseph Ledford: You've surveyed the literature, how many scholars who promote this ideology explicitly embrace the violence?

>> Adam Kirsch: That's a good question, none of them do in their scholarly work, they're very careful not to. When you look at the way that people write about Israel and Palestine, they will never say, we should kill people.

They will always say we should desionize, which means end the Jewish state, and create a binational state, or some kind of other solution. And one could argue that the inevitable consequence of that would be violence, but that's not the explicit goal, isn't violence. However, I think that there is a lot of winking and nodding about violence.

One way that you see that is in the way that people write about Fram's Fanon. There's a lot of people who will write very approvingly about Fanon, or even joke about it. One person who plays some pretty major role in this field is named Lorenzo Verasini, who's an Australian scholar and publishes a lot voluminously on settler colonialism.

And in one of his essays, he says he has an essay called Kill the Settler in him and not the Man, which is a paraphrase of a famous thing that was said in the 19th century by the founder of a school for Indian boys, saying that they wanted to kill the Indian in him but not the man.

And so that is ostensibly not a violent reference, but then he says, I endorse a fanonian cull of settlers, which is clearly violent language, if you were to take it seriously. But I think that because all of these people in their academic environment are sort of used to using extreme language without real-world consequences, no one ever sees it as a call to arms.

Which is why when Hamas did create violence, not because they're reading settler colonial studies, obviously.

>> Adam Kirsch: But when they did, a lot of people's sort of spontaneous reaction on social media was very excited, because I think that things that you couldn't say academically, you couldn't say in your published work.

But maybe felt now you could say them on social media, and you could say, this is very exciting, this is very gratifying. So calling for violence? No, calling for explicit ideological work, and saying that my academic work is political, ideological work is very standard, absolutely standard, and surely not just in this field.

But people in settler colonial studies will almost all say, and sometimes, often even in the title of their book, that they are not studying this, they're fighting it, and that the goal of their pedagogy is to end settler colonialism. So that is, we see that in lots of other fields as well, but that is an engaged idea of what scholarship is that's at odds with traditional ideas of historical understanding.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yes, Stalin used to say, if they're not gonna kill themselves, somebody's gonna have to do the job.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, Adam.