The Term 'Settler Colonialism' Is Worthless.

It's virtue signalling dressed up as virtue.

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Settler colonialism - it’s a bit of a belt and suspenders pejorative. It can’t seem to make up its mind if it’s about historical guilt, the virtue of having deeper roots in the land, or just a comment on the legacy of prejudice toward the Indigenous of North America and Australia (they largely can’t nail down who or what tribe was Indigenous in the rest of the world). 

No one’s denying that many horrible things were done in the name of empire-building. But this snotty use of  “settler colonialism” as both a self-deprecating poke at Western civilisation and name-calling at anyone who isn’t beating their chest in guilt over what happened 400 years ago is idiotic.  

Is it an exercise in self-flagellation by those who seem to believe that coming later to the party makes you fundamentally worse than those who were already there? But those who name-call it are almost always as settler colonial as everyone else.  Or maybe their ancestors came earlier?  

Is your worth as a human being tied to whether your ancestors were first on the scene—or, even more absurdly, whether you can claim a slice of the land from an ancient epoch which predates the concept of national borders altogether?

To suggest that “settler colonialism” is a unique crime to be held against certain populations ignores a few things like migration, intermarriage, and historical change - factors that are not only inevitable but have defined who we are as a species. If we followed the logic of settler colonialism as it’s flung around in today’s activist circles, then, logically, the only morally superior populations on earth would be those who somehow managed to sit on the same patch of land since the dawn of humanity without ever trading or mixing with outsiders. 

Good luck finding them. You see, the very concept of “settler” implies a binary that simply doesn’t exist. There are no clear-cut “settlers” and “natives,” only waves of humans shifting across the globe for better living conditions, resources, or a fresh start.

But let’s suppose your worth as a human being is determined by how long your ancestors have lived on a particular plot of land. What are we to make of societies like, say, the United States, Australia or Canada, where almost everyone is a “settler” of some sort? Does that mean all Canadians should bow down before the Indigenous populations and apologise for breathing their air, although most Canadians today—settler or not—have precisely nothing to do with the atrocities of centuries past? Do we inherit the sins of our Father? Must they now be passed down the generations while the benefits of being “original” accrue without end? No, we don’t, it’s idiotic. 

What about inclusivity? Multiculturalism? Diversity?  Are they all evil concepts underpinned by settler colonialism? 

Consider a recent immigrant or a refugee who has arrived in Canada or the United States, eager to start a new life. Where do they fit into the settler colonialism narrative? They’re settlers, no doubt, as they didn’t live here before the First Nations did. But on the other hand, they might have been fleeing from violence or oppression themselves. So, are they oppressors or oppressed? It must be one or the other.  So, should they be demonised, too? 

The left doesn’t do nuance; they do name calling and then try to shut down conversation; there is no room for nuance; if you say someone is oppressed, a racist, a settler, or a fillintheblankphobe, that settles it, they are not allowed to speak because you said the word and if you say the word it’s true and we must shut up. 

But shutting up has never been my strength. 

Should we rank everyone’s moral worth according to how long their ancestors have been on North American soil? Two hundred years? Well done. One hundred? Not as great, but manageable. A newcomer? Well, let’s put them at the bottom of the moral pecking order, shall we? Can we start a point system? 

And what do we do about intermarriage? Here’s a real dilemma for the identity-politics crowd. Let’s say you’ve got a person whose mother’s family arrived in Canada in the 1800s, but their father’s family is Indigenous. Does that make them half a settler colonialist? Pull out the calculator.   

A .208 settler?  So, every five days, you can be angry at your oppression?  But for the rest of your time, are you an oppressor? 

Do we average it out? Shall we bring in the nerds or the actuarial mathematicians to score everyone?  

They can determine how much moral purity a person can claim based on their percentage of indigeneity, much like one of those DNA ancestry tests that claim to tell you whether you’re 23% Neanderthal.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about Europe. If being the original inhabitants of a land makes you morally superior, then modern Europeans can only look up because they have no right to look down on anyone. Should they bow to the Celts, Visigoths, or even the Neanderthals? The Germanic tribes also seem to be not getting the indigenous respect they deserve. 

The borders of every European country have shifted countless times, with populations moving, conquering, and intermingling. If we’re going to apply the logic of settler colonialism globally, every nation on earth would be in a perpetual state of apology to some earlier group. But of course, that doesn’t happen. 

This nonsense is largely confined to North America and Australia, where white guilt runs so deep that people seem willing to accept any historical narrative that paints them as villains. However, self-hatred is not humility; it’s theatre that creates division and victims.

If we want to talk about colonialism—and we should—then let’s talk about it in terms of what happened rather than in these abstract terms that divide people into “good” and “bad” based on when their ancestors showed up. Yes, Europeans came to the Americas, Australia, and other places and did some truly terrible things. 

But they also built societies, traded with the locals, intermarried, and, over time, created something new. Does that excuse the atrocities? No. But neither does it justify this bizarre notion that people born centuries later are still guilty, nor that their worth as humans is somehow less than that of those who came earlier. And can we stop pretending that destroying old paintings or statues is virtuous violence?

In the end, the concept of settler colonialism isn’t just historically dubious—it’s just another mindless weaponised word that people can put in their virtue-signalling armoury.  

 If we take it seriously, it implies that we should rank people’s moral worth based on their ancestry rather than their character. If we follow that logic to its natural conclusion, newcomers should always be viewed with suspicion. At the same time, those with the deepest roots in a land should be given moral superiority, regardless of their actions. What a recipe for division and resentment.

If we’re going to talk about colonialism, let’s do it honestly—without trying to turn the clock back and assign moral value based on who was here first. Because if that’s the direction we’re headed, and we need to air all ancient grievances, I have a few I’d like to get off my chest. 

My ancestors were essentially pushed out of Ireland in 1904 by the bad behaviour of the English.  How can I monetise this grievance? 

Surely, someone owes me at least a voucher for an all-you-can-eat-and-drink London pub crawl to compensate me for all this historical pain. London, England, and not Ontario, to be clear. 

And for those who love to accuse people of that settler colonialism mindset, are they saying that we are misrepresenting the Disneyfied utopia that was here before Columbus and Samuel Champlain stopped by?  

When the first European settlers arrived in Canada, the Indigenous population density was low compared to the standards of European nations at the time, with a population density of fewer than one person per square kilometre, depending on the specific region. In contrast, European cities were much more densely populated, making the Indigenous presence appear sparse to the arriving settlers.

Estimates suggest that Indigenous life expectancy ranged between 25 and 40 years due to disease, warfare, and environmental challenges. Warfare, hunger and violence were rife in Indigenous communities; territorial disputes, alliances, and trade conflicts often drove actions. The murder rate in terms of deaths due to combat varied, but the rate of deaths in warfare among certain Indigenous societies was higher than what was typical in Europe at the time. 

Cannibalism existed but was not widespread, and there was no end to violence, disease, starvation and environmental challenges. Far from being a static, utopian society, Indigenous peoples had to be dynamic, adaptive, and resilient in the face of constantly changing circumstances. But it was a hard life, no enviro-utopian existence. 

Those settler-colonialists who accuse their fellow settler-colonialists of not offering sufficient respect to the enviro utopia that we evil settlers defiled should open a history book and stop hanging out in the kid’s section of the library looking stupid on those little chairs. 

And maybe society should focus on helping the Indigenous move forward and stop dropping the weight of victimisation on them; it does not help; it crushes them, even if it gets you a whole whack of virtue signalling points. 

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