What Exactly is “settler colonlialism”? WHO cares? Just be sure to make a display of posting against it online.
"Settler Colonialism" is the newest buzzword belched out of Liberal Arts academia (a field that I have found to be just as, if not more ignorant of Earth Sciences and biology than many others) that I've seen parroted throughout various circles to describe a very vague and broad multitude of modern ills afflicting our declining biosphere. My annoyance at this due of words and it’s silly nonsensical modern context spilled over however, when I saw a slant against Steve Irwin, the beloved conservationist who inspired millions to see beauty and awe in organisms and habitats that they might not have otherwise cared about. I was never a Steve Irwin fan, but I respect the guy for getting others to have respect for wildlife and ecosystems. So I had trouble finding out why he was the target of a rather obscure and deranged rant (by a college professor on twitter, of course - where else?) against him that mentioned he was guilty of "settler colonialism". I never found anything,I think it was just because he was white. Or maybe it was because it was the 90s and white liberals hadn’t yet gotten into the habit of publicly lashing themselves, emptily declaring that they’re an “ally”, and gasing up their audiences with land acknowledgements yet. Whatever the case, Steve Irwin was now being cancelled. What a useful expense of energy.
While I've been hearing the word parroted mindlessly (nobody ever giving a clear definition of what it is - I had to look it up, and even then, like most things puked out of "progressive" academia, it was still rather vague and definitions seemed to vary) for a few years now, it finally seemed like it was becoming popular enough to say without any clear description of what exactly makes someone a "settler colonialist".
To be clear, the exact definition of "settler colonialism" is "a a society that seeks not only to take the land of another culture and society, but that seeks to eradicate that culture and society". Say what you will about history, but in America that seems pretty close to what 18th and 19th (and even parts of early 20th) Century European arrivals to the new world (as we call it in biology) seemed to do. The historical context of "Settler Colonialism" has a very real and easily-defined definition.
But the terms in which I've heard it parroted by young academic white kids trying to explain racism to each other never uses it in the historical context - it's always in reference to something that is going on today - not that it has left a legacy that we still live with today, but that it is actively still occurrring. Sure, why not…
While I don't give a shit what anybody believes so long as they don't try to tell me about it if I didnt' ask, I do identify - for better or worse - as a "leftist". I believe in the colletive good over individual profit,I want equal opportunities for all, I want affordable health care, decent education, and I think things like money worship and wealth worship lead to a deranged, values-less society. I could go on about the things I believe in, but the fact is that due to what I believe in I find myself in leftist circles. I don't pay attention to what the right does because, frankly, their beliefs have always seemed fucking insane to me. Boring and vacuous at best and sociopathic at worst. The right is the party of the rich and the climate deniers. The right is the party of those who have seemingly never explored themselves - not to mention had a bad trip, had to ride the bus on a cold night at 2 am, etc.
But it seems like the last ten years I've found myself so perpetually annoyed and boderline grossed out by elements of the "perpetually-online left" (because that's what its become - perpetually online) that I reach for the bottle of Tums when reading takes from my own "side" more than I ever thought I would ten years ago. I blame most of my nausea mostly on the left’s recent embrace of identitarianism - that 2-dimensional fixation on ethic identity which is something wholly apart from (and should not be confused with) an acknowledgement of a history of oppression, racism, and other deranged worldviews that were so ingrained in America and many other first world european-based socities for much of recent history.
This all brings us to "settler colonialism". If it has a historical context, why is it frequently being used to describe something that is festering today? Buzzwords sound good in memes, but they bring out the laziest and sloppiest among actual ideas. So what are shitty condescending social media comments getting at - and what are memes that are attempting to cancel Steve Irwin - actually try to articulate when they sloppily wave the sword of accusation of “settler colonialism” and the “settler colonialism mindset”?
I think about what's killing the world that I love everyday. Everyday I think about why there is less and less habitat, why there's a mass extinction going on, why it becomes harder to find time or places to spend time around the things that I find sacred - wild plants, wild habitat, intact biological landscapes and ecosystems. I used to joke that the grandiose entity that's behind the annihilation of what I love is the "Honky Death Cult", until I began to travel and realize that this mindset and worldview that's responsible for such is seemingly everywhere. It wasn't just white people doing it. And why would it be? Lack of melanin content, respectively, doesn't code for worldview. Culture can, I suppose, which is sometimes tied to that impossibly small section of the genome that us humans used to make up the idea of "race", but the "death cult" as I call it, was everywhere. Tracing its origins seems a lot harder than just focusing on the idea of one culture taking another's land and almost annihilating the culture that lived there. Even more, the destruction that I saw was happening EVERYWHERE, in multiple countries and on multiple continents by multiple "races" (because remember, race doesn't exist, we're all the same species - race is just a series of alleles that code for melanin production and some other miniscule superficial features ...all of which evolved in response to a particular population of humans spending a prolonged amount of time at a particular latitude that received a particular amount of solar insolation throughout the year).
So if race wasn't an accurate predictor of where the "death cult" (we are using this label tongue-in-cheek, for lack of a better word) came from, I guess that means that we have to look at the actual values of the "death cult" worldview and paradigm itself. Ugh….how laborious! It’s so much easier to just verbally fart out buzzwords!
Anthropocentrism, a subconscious belief that the only living things which possess any inate value in this world are those which directly benefit humans, a belief that the world was put here for us and us alone, a feeling that we have no responsibility to take care of the land that we live on and that it and all the life forms on it are expendable, endless growth, success and happiness as defined by material wealth, beauty as defined solely by external appearances, a belief that any individual who has trouble achieving self-sustainability must be discarded as there is no inherent societal responsibility to take care of them and see that they succeed....That list is just off the top of my head. It is what I came up with in 90 seconds. I could go on.
If somebody asked me what I thought was killing the world and I were to just say "settler colonialism", not only would I feel like a fucking jackass but none of what I just stated would be articulated. It would be confusing and vague, and I would just *hope* that whoever heard me knew that I was was talking about was bad and that they too should be against it. But if we don't articulate problems, we can't fix them. Since "settler colonialism" just refers to the taking of land and the extermination of a culture, and most people alive today in the United States don't have any present-day context for that as it happened here 150 years ago, it just sounds fucking confusing. But again, that's ok because in the case of "settler colonialism" it's just being read online and whats important is that we all like and share the post - even though none of us really have any idea what the fuck it means - and we all receive moral validation from our peers and we go on scrolling and viewing the world from a rather foggy and vague moral filter based loosely around the identitarian lense of whether someone is "bad" or "good" based on what race they were born into.
No matter what, the actual ideas and values of the worldview that got us into this mess of mass extinction and climate change and civil unrest continue to be obscured and ignored. Great idea.
How fucking sloppy.
And of course, since most people are NOT critical thinkers and tend to just swallow and parrot whatever their social group puts in front of them without taking it apart and analyzing it, the lowest-common-denominator value that gets put on all of this, of course, is "race"... and so we get endlessly-self-flagellating honkies desperate to prove that they are, indeed, "allies" and we get people who are basically on the same ideological "side" and who want the same things and who COULD be supporting each other in solidarity as a means of acheiving those goals instead endlessly attacking each other online and being accused of not "centering" a particular race and of not "being a true ally", or we get them fixating on the totally wrong things which in the end are just a distraction from the actual ideas, etc. So much dischord and moral policing sounds like a great way to ensure that nothing ever actually gets accomplished, and further, it sounds like a great way to ensure that people who are not already in the small ideological bubble through which all this silly bullshit already percolates NEVER gets turned on to it because it seems like a silly, garbled, high-strung mess parroting vague words that nobody can really seem to define. Sigh. And so here we are. If I were on the opposite of the ideological spectrum and wanted to take apart a political or ideological movement, this is probably the strategy that I would choose. Except I wouldn't need to, because the people in that camp already did it themselves.
I guess that's what happens when we let college kids build the structure of ideology for us.
