Many of the world’s worst ideas come from the United States. Critical race theory and affirmative action, for example, are all-American. Even when bad ideas lack American origins, US academics manage to execute hostile takeovers of (say) French nonsense like postmodernism or queer theory early on in proceedings. This is then exported in over-simplified form to the rest of the world, to other countries’ considerable detriment. Even the American political system—which works well enough for Americans in their own country—tends not to travel. US-style presidential regimes are “one of this country’s most dangerous exports,” in Aaron Sorkin’s memorable West Wing phrase, “responsible for wreaking havoc in over thirty countries.”

　　However, other countries can also wreak ideological havoc, even quite small countries. It’s worse, I suspect, when those small countries have a reputation for peace and prosperity and order and competence in areas other than academic scholarship. Australia is one such country. And Australia is responsible for about half—perhaps more—of the settler-colonial theory now exploding metaphorically all over US university campuses and literally all over Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon.

　　Worse, the ideology of settler-colonialism has a deleterious effect in the USA and Australia because it plays on a pair of distinctive national weaknesses neither country shares with the other. Briefly, Australia’s tall poppy syndrome (a bad trait) is corrosive to American exceptionalism (a bad trait). Carping, Australian-style attacks on a country’s sense of itself can dissolve the epoxy resin holding a national story together—especially one with the soaring optimism of America’s—and must be used with great caution. Let me explain.

　　Going Home

　　In October last year, I returned to Australia after a six-year, pandemic-induced absence. While I was there—in fits-and-starts, touring the country and eating too many salted peanuts in various airport lounges—I read Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice. I did so in part because October 2024 was the one-year anniversary of two important events, one much better known globally than the other. The first, on October 7, concerned Israel-Palestine. The second, on October 14, concerned an Australian constitutional referendum. Both concerned what Kirsch calls “the ideology of settler-colonialism” and others refer to as “decolonisation.”

　　I’ve written elsewhere about Australia’s failed constitutional referendum and the troubling way national debate before and after it was coloured by poisonous “decolonial” rhetoric. Unlike Kirsch—who came to the likes of Franz Fanon and Patrick Wolfe in the wake of October 7—I’m long familiar with both. I encountered settler-colonialism as an exercise in moral derangement at 17, under the name “post-colonial literatures.” This was in 1990, in Australia.

　　However, because Fanon (and other simpatico theorists, like Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak) wrote before Australians like Wolfe or Peter Read or Robert Manne or Lorenzo Veracini, I’d always viewed the various decolonisation and genocide theories popular among Australian humanities academics as imports. I was wrong to do so. The likes of Fanon may have believed benighted, murderous things—his Marxism comes to mind—but those ideas were nonetheless worked up in response to genuine wars of independence and wider civil conflict. They were then grafted—very, very awkwardly—onto dissimilar Australian history and conditions by that country’s intellectuals and exported thereafter throughout the English-speaking world.

　　Like past Helen, Kirsch observes a pattern where Australian and later Canadian or American scholars borrow bits of Fanon to give a sanguinary rhetorical garnish to their writing. “Fanon’s praise of violence is a large part of his appeal for Western intellectuals,” he notes. “Many of the sentiments expressed in The Wretched of the Earth, coming from a European or American writer, would immediately be identified as fascistic.”

　　This, Kirsch argues, is because—outside Israel—the ideology is little more than a parlour game. Given how few indigenous people there are in countries where these arguments are most often mounted, “everyone knows that calls to ‘eradicate,’ ‘kill,’ or ‘cull’ settlers can be only metaphorical,” Kirsch observes wryly, “so there is no need to put a limit on their rhetorical ferocity.”

　　Poppy-chopping

　　Which brings me back to Australia. The various Australian organisations hosting me converged on a single request, albeit one with differences of detail: they wanted me to provide an aetiology of cancel culture. I’m generally considered Australia’s Patient Zero when it comes to the modern phenomenon, which includes a mix of doxxing, snitching to the employer, and complaints to professional associations—based on the target’s publicly or privately expressed political views.

　　Identifying those components meant discussing professional jealousy and workplace bullying as much as things like, say, Graham Linehan’s Father Ted musical being canned because he thinks men aren’t women. In an Australian context, that means tackling the country’s well-known “tall poppy syndrome” and its people’s related tendency to be “a nation of knockers.” To knock something in Australia is to criticise it, but in a pessimistic and undermining way. How much of cancel culture, I was forced to ask—at least in Australia—is down to a perception that not a few people are unjustly rewarded, separate from any views they may (or may not) hold?

　　A lot of odd nerds with niche obsessions who hadn’t been taken seriously in either the USA or Australia found a great way to get revenge. And the USA is the tallest poppy of them all.

　　Until those conversations, I found Kirsch’s description of the Frankenstein mix of Australian and third-worldist ideology that swept all before it when introduced to the United States unpersuasive. Somehow, even the cringeworthy Australian custom of land acknowledgments has managed to spread first to Canada and then the US in a reversal of the usual process whereby America sneezes and so gives its Hat a cold. Why did this nonsense take root?

　　Australia’s tall poppy syndrome—which manifests in the harsh way it treats its most gifted—can in mild forms be socially useful. It stops people—often clever young people of school age—from thinking they’re better than others or have a right to tell them what to do based purely on intellect or wealth. Directed at someone who does think rather too well of himself, it’ll be morally improving.

　　However, it can spill over into nit-picking disapproval, where nothing the targeted “poppy” does is any good: damned if you do, damned if you don’t—a sort of schoolyard Kafka Trap. Viewed at the highest level of abstraction, applied as it sometimes is to entire sporting teams, standout entrepreneurs, and gifted artists, it’s a net negative. It’s one of those bits of Australia that—as a rule—just isn’t for export. It’s also facilitated the globalisation of another unpleasant Australian trait: the “cultural cringe,” a belief that everything done by foreigners must be better than anything done at home.

　　Unfortunately, the Australian talent for poppy-chopping finds its métier in taking the US down. While decolonisation as an academic programme has (predictably) targeted Australian education and sought (in Kirsch’s words) to “validate the most extreme criticism and denunciation” of the country, do remember Australia has no sense of temporal exceptionalism. Australia has national myths, of course, but the country has never seen itself as an emanation of the divine will or the pivot upon which history turns. The ideology of settler-colonialism thus shrinks the US in a way it doesn’t Australia. Australians are under no illusions about their national founding when people “knock” Australia’s post-1788 history. That history provides inspiration for every work of science fiction featuring a violent penal colony or inhospitable prison planet.

　　There was nothing deliberate about putting Australia’s tall poppy syndrome to work undermining American proposition nationalism, either. My father always maintained that there’s such a thing as black serendipity. This is an example. In something resembling introduced species in island ecologies, the foreign transplant has grown wild: grey squirrels in the UK; rabbits, cane toads, prickly pear in Australia; cats in New Zealand.

　　People in America—most of them academics—were receptive to the claims of settler-colonialism, and the battle was soon joined between this pair of distinctive national weaknesses. When settler-colonial ideology was competently argued for by someone whose first language was English and who emerged from a familiar intellectual tradition—Wolfe was all these—and then stripped of much of Fanon’s Marxism, it took. A lot of odd nerds with niche obsessions who hadn’t been taken seriously in either the USA or Australia found a great way to get revenge.

　　And the USA is the tallest poppy of them all.

　　Although destructive of “manifest destiny” historiography widespread in the nineteenth century, Kirsch is right that decolonisation theory also degrades Martin Luther King’s more inclusive vision for the country. King’s promissory note metaphor only works if American civilisation and the US nation are worth joining—only if King the creditor is lining up to get his debt paid. However—in the zero-sum world of settler-colonial ideology—the United States should not exist.

　　This emerges naturally from the oft-quoted Wolfe aphorism that “invasion is a structure, not an event,” a trauma constantly renewed because the ideology transforms “settler” into a heritable identity. “Every inhabitant of a settler colonial society who is not descended from the original indigenous population,” Kirsch says, “is, and always will be, a settler.”

　　“Settler” here includes people transported to both America and Australia in chains—slaves and convicts. And yes, that seems like the category error to end all category errors. But once Fanon is Australianised, this kind of reasoning becomes pervasive. African Americans “benefit from the settler-colonial system as it stands today,” the Southern Poverty Law Centre tells us, in very serious tones.

　　Forced Teaming

　　Kirsch’s attempt to explain how Australia was analogised with Fanon’s Algeria and then how Israel was analogised with Wolfe’s Australia is heroic but ultimately fruitless, in part because the casuistry he seeks to elucidate is so tortured. The phrase “forced teaming”—borrowed from law enforcement—captures the extent to which these countries are … not like each other. Evidence that Australia’s ideologues of settler-colonialism haven’t thought their thoughts through to the end is pervasive. At one stage, Kirsch discusses how Veracini believes “that referring to Algerians and Palestinians as Arabs is transferist, because it implies that they are part of a larger collective that inhabits many places, rather than belonging exclusively to Algeria or Palestine.”

　　Helen Dale speaks with Nigel Biggar and Niall Ferguson on The Decline of Institutions and the Fall of Empires at the Centre for Independent Studies 2024 Consilium. (Photography courtesy of the Centre for Independent Studies) Apart from the fact that Arabs tend to refer to themselves as Arabs (often with some pride), this occludes the fact that Arabs in many countries—and especially Algeria, the Ur-nation of settler-colonial theory—are themselves settlers. Arabs and Turks—along with Europeans—produced expansive and imperialistic religious cultures notable for their ability to supplant entire prior civilisations.

　　One of Fanon’s rhetorical sleights of hand is to class all Algeria’s non-imperial residents asnatives. This creates a generic indigenous identity that obscures any history, including that the only difference between the nineteenth and twentieth-century French and the seventh and eighth-century Arabs is that the Arabs made their cultural, religious, institutional, and settlement stick. The French did not.

　　Some of this confusion is down to Australians failing to distinguish their roughly forty thousand years of Aboriginal prehistory from Algeria’s extensive recorded history. Australians of all political stripes have often sought to make their country’s national story more impressive than it is by laying claim to that long period of forager civilisation. Aborigines have been in Australia for longer than Native Americans in the US, while neighbouring New Zealand is younger than Canterbury Cathedral: the Māori got there in about 1300. However, Australian Aborigines were not like the Arabs who dotted Algeria with magnificent mosques or the Italians who left it glorious (and under-visited) Roman ruins. History and pre-history are importantly different. Those people were representatives of major imperial civilisations with everything this entails. So were the later French.

　　The law’s great gift to public reason is precision argument based on analogy and comparison. How is this like or not like that? Is this case on all fours? At bottom, settler-colonial ideology is an utter failure of analogical reasoning, and it makes this lawyer’s toes curl.

　　That said, it’s nonsense pre-history as well. Waves of invasion and dispossession are a feature of Homo sapien prehistory from before we were human. Forager populations are at particular risk of full, or near full, replacement because population numbers are low. It’s easy for small groups to drop below the capacity to sustain themselves, while invading foragers lack the motive or capacity to incorporate newcomers into their societies in number. Forager skills are also of limited use to invading farmers or pastoralists.

　　The Homo sapien forager populations that replaced Homo neanderthalensis in Europe were replaced in their turn. Even the farmer-builders of Stonehenge—who had replaced the previous foraging population—were almost entirely replaced by pastoralist invaders. Waves of newcomers to the Americas pushed previous arrivals South long before Europeans arrived. Brutal wars were a feature of human societies in the Americas both before, and during, European settlement.

　　Political Theology

　　This replacement of history with myth leads Kirsch to argue the ideology is a “political theology,” that is, a secularised religious concept expressed civically. A form of original sin where the everlasting process of colonisation means never-ending exploitation, racism, misogyny, and genocide, it suggests only the Noble Savage that is the Native can redeem us.

　　In one of the field’s most influential papers, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Eve Tuck of SUNY New Paltz and K. Wayne Yang of UC San Diego write that “relinquishing settler futurity” is necessary if we are to imagine “the Native futures, the lives to be lived once the settler nation is gone.”

　　And here’s me thinking futurity referred to a competitive equestrian event for younger horses.

　　As Kirsch says, “The goal is not to change this or that public policy but to engender a permanent disaffection, a sense that the social order ought not to exist.” So intellectually moribund is it, I caught myself preferring Hamas’s 1988 Islamist charter to its 2017, all-singing, all-dancing, re-written decolonial charter. The former has merits of candour and clarity, coupled with a deranged but nonetheless worked-through theology. The latter is word salad.

　　You can address a national tendency to blow too much smoke up your country’s bum without believing everything you’ve ever done or will do is genocidal.

　　Much of On Settler-Colonialism turns on Kirsch’s argument that because it requires policies that can never be implemented (“deport 97 per cent of the US population!”), it’s merely depressing and stupid. “America should not exist” is never analysed with a view to doing anything apart from making the place miserable with itself. Israel, by contrast, is “much younger and smaller than the United States, and it is easier to imagine its disappearance, but again, not without massive death and destruction.”

　　I’m not sure I agree with this. October 14, 2023, is where it led a prosperous, peaceful, well-governed, and far richer country than Israel or its Arab neighbours. Just after the Hamas slaughter in Israel, Australians voted on whether a “Voice to Parliament”—a dedicated body of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representatives—should be included in their Constitution, to assuage Australia’s settler-colonial sins.

　　As public support fell before polling day, the YES campaign—in a pattern familiar to those who remember the UK’s 2016 Brexit referendum—began to reek of bothcondescension and victimhood. Anyone pointing out problems was stupid, duplicitous, and racist: an oppressor of Aboriginal people. After the defeat, YES continued to stigmatise NO voters as racist and ignorant andintensifiedits decolonialrhetoric. There was no violence, but I did wonder what could have happened had the result been close.

　　No, this isn’t Israel or Gaza. Australia hasn’t endured murdered hostages or flattened hospitals; endless missile strikes or artillery barrages; thousands upon thousands of deaths. But it’s not nothing, either. If Australia and America are on stolen land, this denies existing constitutional protections to current landholders. That’s the sort of thing that just invites lawfare and conflict.

　　Some of Australia’s cultural cringe is warranted. Australians are brilliant empiricists with a flair for civic organisation and public administration, but we suck at abstract intellectualism. Our most capable people enter the professions, public administration, agriculture, and natural resources development. They do not become university academics. The admissions structure in Australian higher education—which has existed since 1945, so covers nearly everyone in the country still alive—means the gifted are creamed off and allocated to the hands-on roles at which Australians excel. Humanities and social sciences get the leftovers.

　　I suspect even very patriotic Americans must get bored of national exceptionalism. The ideology of settler colonialism pulls on that thread, drawing on Australia’s tall poppy syndrome to unravel America’s national story: how dare you put yourself up so high? Don’t let it. You can address a national tendency to blow too much smoke up your country’s bum without believing everything you’ve ever done or will do is genocidal.

　　Everyone on earth is living on “stolen” land. Move on.