A Brief History of Settler-Colonialism

So many American civic holidays of my youth seem to be getting the axe these days, in our modern age of woke rejectionism: intolerable public relics of a horridly white, male, colonialist past. (Columbus? Won’t see him no more.) As my colleague Jack Butler cautions, Thanksgiving is seemingly the next to feel the squeeze. Given the light recently shed on the evils of “settler-colonialism” by our younger and more properly educated betters currently out in the streets waving the flag for Hamas, it seems like no American holiday so nakedly based on our settler forebears’ scraping by with the help of people they’d later wholly overawe was going to last long.

And honestly, I’m offended too. I’m offended by the whole damn racket, this business of people just up and conquering other people. I’ve had it up to here with the intolerable cruelties of the colonialist yoke, and speaking as a typically overeducated yet acceptably mainstream public commentator, I declare: It’s time to break with tradition. I’ve gotten “woke” myself. I now feel moved to write, with all the disgust and anger I can muster about this unworthiest of all races, “A Brief History of Settler-Colonialism.” For I reject humanity and all of its works.

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I really do mean all of it, because we need to be completely fair about this. I have some blind spots, mind you. Like most Americans, I’m confessedly ignorant of everything that happened in sub-Saharan Africa before 1848 other than in the obvious historical sense of “this is a source of American disgrace and you know why.” Meanwhile, Australia’s primary wars have been losing ones; successfully colonized first by aboriginals — who, fair play to them, had to battle both kangaroos and all the most exotically poisonous creatures known to mankind — then in turn by British criminals, this shabby land known mostly for its very large, nondescript rocks was subsequently conquered by rabbits and then, even more shamefully, emus. (The flightless birds, who defeated a military armed with machine guns, graciously chose not to seize the proportion of the voting franchise properly theirs by right of conquest.) So all the aboriginal tribes — you’re off the hook. All those various sub-Saharan nations? Well look, I lived through Rwanda and I also remember Idi Amin, so you don’t get off entirely scot-free. But the same mostly applies and, to be fair: There’s always the Boers. I simply don’t know everything.

Other than that, though? Some people think history started the year they were born; I, with my impressive galaxy brain, understand that history properly started the moment modern humans, bastards the whole lot of them, first departed from Africa during the Pleistocene Epoch somewhere around 58,000 b.c. People, let me tell you: It’s all been downhill from there in terms of settler-colonialism. I’m taking the activists at their word; if even Americans are stained with the sin of settler-colonialism, then why set arbitrary boundaries?

No, let’s start the clock right where it properly begins to count: that moment 60,000 years ago when something fewer than 10,000 humans straggled together as a group out of Africa into the modern Middle East, supplying the rest of the non-sub-Saharan human race to the world. From middle-easterners to south Indians and Han Chinese, from the Iranian plateau to the Indo-European horselords to all the vast peoples of the New World, from the blue-eyed, red-haired Celts of Ireland to dark-skinned aborigines of Australia or Papua New Guinea: All of them originated from this extremely tight bottleneck of humanity. (The African continent’s human future would be subdivided by the Sahara desert: North Africa’s heritage would belong almost entirely to various waves of these “bottleneck” people, while sub-Saharan Africa remained largely a world unto itself, to this day the most linguistically and genetically diverse region in the world owing to the long millennia of relatively unimpeded free and recombinative gene flow within otherwise circumscribed boundaries.)

Sounds like a pretty neat achievement, you’d think. Humanity breaking free to an unspoiled world! Actually, it’s been a bloodbath since then. Because those first humans out of Africa met some unexpected company once they finally crossed over to the Eurasian mainland in the Middle East: Neanderthals. Yes, Homo sapiens sapiens was not the first intelligent hominid to escape from Africa: The Neanderthals (and their even more primitive ancestors the Denisovans, who headed east into Asia and South Asia before they too were overtaken by the descendants of this initial cloudburst of humanity) had beaten us to the migratory punch long ago. But we as a demographically attenuated species weren’t feeling particularly picky ourselves at the time, whether it came to mass slaughter or to getting horizontal with nonhumans. That’s right: Modern genetic studies have now proven beyond all question that literally all of non-sub-Saharan humanity is at least 3 percent Neanderthal because we are all descendants of that one rather, um . . . awkward initial “mixing event.”

The Neanderthals were extinguished to the last man after that one event, in a brutal demographic struggle that took fully 10,000 years to complete. This suggests that the term “mixing event” is of course white-privileged academic code for “slaughter of the men and haremization of the few surviving women.” There will be many more such “events” throughout the remainder of this story, because of course this hunter-gatherer population of escapee Neanderthal-rapists then subsequently spread all over the world, both west into Europe and — slowly — east across the vast Eurasian plain, splitting in all directions and recombining in various ways until a similarly tight bottleneck of people broke through to the North American continent. In the Neolithic era, hunter-gatherers in a band spanning the Levant to Iran first learned to apply their colonialist “discourse of dominance” to cruelly subject Mother Earth herself, marking another grim milestone: the agricultural revolution. Peaceful farmers these were not: These patriarchal, tribally based societies slowly moved both westward out of Anatolia and southeastward from the Iranian plateau, pitilessly conquering the hunter-gatherers who had arrived before them. These are the sketchy men whose even sketchier descendants ultimately built Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Valley Civilization, as well as Stonehenge, after fusing with or replacing the natives. As Nigel Tufnel once aptly observed, “no one knows who they were, or what they were doing,” which is all the evidence I need to know that they were up to no good.

Don’t worry though, they would get theirs. Because somewhere around 6,000 years ago, pretty much the worst thing ever in the history of the world happened: A bunch of scumbags in southern Ukraine finally figured out how to domesticate the horse. And as if that wasn’t enough, soon they began riding them as well (prior to that, horsemeat was on the menu). Ever since that moment when one lucky “first-mover” prehistoric group tamed the blameless and noble equus somewhere in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, they’ve used it to ruin the rest of the planet. (Exemplifying man’s innate settler-colonialism, there is only one naturally wild breed of horse left on earth — thanks again, humanity!)

Rather than spreading epic love poetry, or engaging in mutually self-affirming cultural exchange, these people — known academically as the Yamnaya and the Corded Ware Cultures nowadays, but more infamously as the proto-Indo-Europeans — immediately took to their stallions and began spreading their genes instead, always emphatically at arrow-point and sometimes with entire nations of migrants in their train ready for some full-scale population replacement. We now know that Scandinavians, Slavs, and Anglo-Saxons have rather negligible pre–Corded Ware ancestry within them — what little they do was inevitably acquired in the least seemly of ways — while the pre-modern Greeks, Latins, and Indo-Iranians by contrast are cultures that first conquered and then largely intermixed with preexisting populations.

None of this happened peacefully. The Celts were some of history’s biggest settler-colonialists before becoming some of history’s biggest losers, wiping out entire neolithic farming civilizations in an explosively furious spread from modern-day central Germany radiating outward all the way from the shores of the Black Sea to the southwestern coast of the Iberian peninsula. Then they met their cousins the Romans and Germans, and that’s all she wrote. Now, their forefathers have left them Ireland, a nation whose primary claim to fame is a capital that literally only exists because ninth-century Vikings wanted to have a more congenial wintertime home to relax in after looting English monasteries or pillaging northern France.

The Balkans? Forget it, Jake, there’s a reason we call it “balkanization.” Ask the Pelasgians and the Minoans about the Mycenaeans. Ask the Mycenaeans about the Dorians. Ask the Helot about the Spartan, or the Melian about the Athenian. Ask them all about the Macedonians, and, well, I guess the Macedonians can stop whining about oppression, forever. (We haven’t even mentioned the Romans, Slavs, or Turks yet.) As for Italy, even if the Latins didn’t already have endless blood on their hands from fighting their way down the boot heel of the peninsula — you could ask an Etruscan about that, but they’re all dead now — these are still the same people who, after unifying under the Romans, went and deleted Carthage from the map before starting an empire of some historical consequence. (Don’t feel too bad — the Carthaginians were the worst sort of settler-colonialists as well, Phoenicians from modern-day Lebanon with an alarming taste for both child sacrifice and long-distance boating.)

Both racially and genetically, the pre-historic and even early historic Middle East and Europe have all been one constantly overwritten palimpsest of colonization, conquest, reconquest, recolonization, genetic replacement, linguistic replacement, cultural replacement, and admixtures in between of varying shades. In the Middle East this churn has been taking place since even before the birth of agriculture, so it’s been provably ugly since day one. The Egyptians have been throwing their weight around for as long as anyone can remember. The Sumerians were overtaken by the Akkadians, who yielded to Babylonians, who were beaten by Hittites and the Mitanni; somewhere in the middle of it all the Assyrians were collecting enemy heads in baskets, and that’s before the Persians, in one of their many dynastic forms, swept in and out of the region over the next millennium. (Then the Greeks and Romans came, but to the best of my knowledge the region has been more or less peaceful ever since.)

The newly woke me is pleased to note that the Han Chinese are actually one of the few populations that wasn’t particularly settler-colonialist, at least outside of exterminating their Denisovan predecessors whilst — hey now! — copulating with a few along the way. Beyond that, they really only learned their true vile colonialist ways during the 17th century, when the Manchu dynasty — itself of steppe origin — showed zero gratitude by extinguishing the last of the great horse-lord empires upon China’s northern border. (Frankly, anyone who can’t appreciate being subjected to a good Mongol invasion every now and then has forgotten what is best in life.) Later their ambitions turned west, to the Xinjiang, but seeing as this column is sponsored by both Nike and Apple, all I can say is that I applaud the sincere reeducation efforts being undertaken there. The Japanese were formed as an ethnic group out of the genocide of the native Ainu and other related original inhabitants of the island chain by the Yamato people 2,200 years ago, but at least they’ve been on their best behavior since then.

And while the First Americans — who arrived in a virginal New World via coastal migration well before the post-glacial maximum — weren’t technically guilty of settler-colonialism at first, it was really only a matter of time. Because they pretty much immediately got down to the business of blowing it completely by hunting megafauna to extinction with industrial-era rapine, mowing a Great Plains–sized hole through the North American heartland via slash-and-burn agriculture, and then turning on one another as they expanded across a soon-to-be-sullied continent. Little need be said about Mesoamerica, a civilizational cradle of bloodshed so red that entire cultures were religiously organized around how many hearts could be ripped out in a single day, most sporting events were played to the death, and “the Flayed God” was heartily worshipped. (The Aztec rain god Tlāloc could only be propitiated by the tears of vivisected children — foreign children, that is.) As for Native Americans in the territorial United States, I suppose you might say we owe them a solid on Thanksgiving, but in the larger scale of human settler-colonialism my global, far-reaching approach enables, I think it best not to bicker over who killed whom unless we want to start developing a new field: criminal forensic archaeology. We’ve all got blood on our hands, and if you go back far enough, most of us really are all related.

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So although my direct genetic ancestors may have been busy being raped by Cossacks on the Polish plains or farming for dirt in Appalachia, my newly woke understanding allows me to connect with, and condemn equally, all of my cousins. Some people seem to think history ended halfway through the 20th century, and that the board must be frozen in place there. I, for one, won’t be happy until all of humanity outside of Africa has returned to the only place it ever properly belonged: the Middle East. I’m sure there’s room.

Happy Truthsgiving, everyone.

N.B. Somewhere in the midst of all of this, a small tribe of Semitic peoples worshipping a monotheistic religion in the Levant gained, lost, regained, re-lost, and regained once more a homeland. An interesting little story in its own right, but a bit of a sideshow in the grander scheme of things.