Humanities for the People: Settler Colonialism and Moral Derangement
01-06-2024Roger Berkowitz
I’ve published an expanded version of my essay on settler colonialism and campus culture on the Arendt Center’s Humanities for the People Medium Page.
Read the full piece here.What is so unsettling about the critique of settler colonialism is not simply its anti-political retreat into moral righteousness. More dangerous still is the elevation of all so-called indigenous people to be in some way more pure, more deserving, and more innocent than so-called setters. The ideology at the bottom of the critique of settler colonialism forgoes self-determination in the name of a righteous embrace and unshakeable exculpation of whomever is seen to be a displaced indigenous person. The elevation of one people as morally superior to another is, quite simply, a form of ideological racism. As Kirsch writes, the “Nazi slogan ‘blood and soil’ conveyed the idea that German land could only truly belong to its primeval inhabitants.” And all manner of terror was justified, by an outraged Nazism, in securing that land for such inhabitants. Similarly, the settler colonial ideology frames and thus defends the violence of Hamas “in terms of indigenous rights and redemptive violence.”