David Frum versus ‘settler colonialism’

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The Canadian Institute for Historical Education hosted author David Frum for a December speech in Toronto, “settlers & colonialists,” which has now been turned into an article for The Atlantic (you can read it here), where Frum is a staff writer. Frum, a former aide to U.S. president George W. Bush and chairman of the U.K. centre-right think tank Policy Exchange, spoke to the Post’s Rob Roberts via email:

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Q: You drew a fair number of people to a church hall on a snowy night to discuss the trouble with “settler colonialism.” You made what I thought was an interesting point: the term is accurate, and yet has become a weapon that misleads people.

Nobody likes to be insulted. As “settler colonial” has descended into a term of insult, naturally the term is resented and rejected by the targets of the insult. On the other hand: yes, the present-day nation of Canada traces its origin to a string of European colonies, peopled by European settlers. So do Australia and New Zealand. You could apply the term to Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay too if you were minded. The United States began as colonies with a population that was majority settler with a substantial minority of forcibly transported slaves. That’s not the whole of the story, but it’s the beginning of the story.  

Q: Do you see it as another creation of academia that has escaped to infect the world? It’s become shorthand for a worldview of oppressor and oppressed. Why is that so dangerous?

Academia should be a place of fact and analysis, but many modern academics want to be activists too. Such scholar-activists create concepts to explain the world – and then repurpose those concepts to justify changes that might not stand the test of real-world democratic politics.

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Q: I was intrigued by your analysis of the evolution of the official embrace of the word genocide. Is that the sort-of original sin in this debate, that term?

Indigenous people were again and again brutally shoved aside by the European settlers in North America. The U.S. military campaigns against Native American nations were ferocious and atrocious. In Mexico and Peru, those who survived the diseases of the first contact were often reduced to serfdom and mercilessly exploited. We should not suppress or deny any of that history. But words have meanings. The word “genocide” has the heaviest meaning of them all. In Canada, that word has been misused.

Q: Do you think the (proposed NDP) law banning “residential school denialism” could ever pass? How does it become possible to have a conversation about that that both sides will listen to?

No, I don’t think a law banning residential school denialism, so-called, will pass. But as we have all witnessed since May 2021, there are many ways to suppress, silence, and forbid even without the use of criminal law.

Q: How do we acknowledge and repair the ills of our Indigenous policies without being held hostage to that burden?

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I don’t have a ready answer to these painfully difficult questions. But I do believe that nobody wants to return to hunting rabbits with stone arrowheads or watching children die because of an abscessed tooth. The challenge is to share progress more broadly – not to revile that progress or the people who delivered it.

Q: Are we making a mistake in largely restricting our discussion of history to first contact? Does that distort the state of play when we arrived?

Imagine opening a public event in Europe: “We stand here in Alsace-Lorraine, since time immemorial the historic homeland of the French and the Germans.” Such words would omit a lot of history. We are invited to believe fantasy stories about pre-contact North America as a land without conflicts, even without change. We project modern concepts of sustainability and environmental stewardship backward in time to people who thought and behaved in very different ways. We fetishize in order to moralize, rather than study in order to understand.

Q: You talked about how the world lost its mind because of COVID, whether on George Floyd or Kamloops. What impact did the pandemic have on the pendulum swinging so far out on these issues, and do you think the discourse is reversible?

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I trust in the Latin proverb, “Truth is mighty and will prevail.”

Q: How much is the misuse of the term “settler colonialism” in the Mideast on your mind in this debate?

In Canada, the term “settler colonialism” is merely unhelpful. In the Middle East, it’s actively harmful.

Over 3,000 years of recorded history, the area that’s now the State of Israel has toggled back and forth between two conditions: colony of somebody else’s empire – or self-governing Jewish state. The area has never been self-governed any other way than as a Jewish state. Empire, Jewish state, empire, Jewish state – that was the pattern to our own time.

Attempts to apply the concept of “indigeneity” to the land bridge between Africa and Asia end up either ludicrous or sinister. People were always coming and going! Jews began returning to the area in large numbers in the 19th century. The landowners from whom the Jews bought property were often descended from Ottoman officials who arrived just a century or two earlier. You say the Jews came from what’s now Poland? Many of the Ottoman officials came from a region then called Circassia – much of which is now part of Russia. How is any of this an enlightening discussion?\

Rather than trace genetic origins, let’s start from where we are to build an enduring peace. One reason to study history is to gain the intellectual resources to free ourselves from its nightmares.

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