Who Was Here First?

The Infantilism of Settler Colonialism and Its Priests of Purity

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The phrase “settler colonialism” is a clumsy, belt-and-suspenders epithet, wobbling indecisively between historical accusation, moral posturing, and a vague nod to the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples in North America and Australia. It cannot quite decide whether it is a cudgel to flog Western civilization for its sins, a paean to the supposed virtue of deeper roots in the soil, or a catch-all for those who relish calling out prejudice while conveniently ignoring the rest of the world’s tangled histories.

It is, in short, a term so muddled it collapses under the weight of its own sanctimony.Let us be clear: no one denies the horrors committed in the name of empire. Conquest, displacement, and cultural erasure were real, and their scars endure. But the snide deployment of “settler colonialism” as both a self-deprecating jab at the West and a slur hurled at anyone insufficiently prostrate with guilt over events four centuries past is not merely idiotic—it is intellectually dishonest.

It is a term wielded by those who seem to believe that arriving later to the historical stage renders one inherently inferior to those who were already there. Yet, curiously, those who brandish it are almost invariably as “settler colonial” as the rest of us.

Or perhaps their ancestors arrived a bit earlier? Shall we consult the ship manifests to determine their moral worth? The notion that one’s value as a human being hinges on whether one’s forebears were the first to plant a flag—or, more absurdly, whether one can claim a patch of dirt from an era predating the very concept of borders—is not just risible; it is a grotesque caricature of history. To elevate “settler colonialism” to the status of a unique crime, uniquely indictable against certain populations, is to ignore the ceaseless churn of migration, intermarriage, and historical change that has defined humanity since we first stumbled out of Africa.

If we take the logic of this phrase as it is flung about in today’s activist echo chambers, the only morally pure beings on Earth would be those who, by some miracle, have clung to the same scrap of land since the dawn of time, untainted by trade, conquest, or the mixing of blood. Good luck finding them. The very idea of a “settler” presupposes a binary—settler versus native—that dissolves under scrutiny.