The Twin Theory to ‘Settler Colonial Theory’

Is Settler Colonial Theory (SCT) and The Great Replacement Theory actually the same conspiracy theory? When I tried to ask ChatGPT on the matter, it seemed that I upset our AI overlords. With strong moral indignation, it told me: “Settler Colonial Theory is more focused on systemic injustice, and Great Replacement Theory is often used as a framework to incite fear and justify exclusion.” Well, that’s handy. One is a friendly, nice theory that does some great work on “systematic injustice,” and one is a nasty theory that “incites fear and exclusion.” So, what are these two theories? Why do I claim that they are actually the same junk science? 

The Great Replacement Theory 

The term “Great Replacement Theory” was coined by French writer Renaud Camus in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement (The Great Replacement). The fact beneath the theory is that the demography in Europe is changing due to immigration, sometimes quite radically. For Europe, this immigration comes from everywhere but particularly from the area to the immediate south of Europe—the mainly Muslim MENA region. For America, this is the south of the border— meaning Latin America. Camus’ claim is that a group or groups from within the elites are consciously trying to replace Europeans with immigrants. 

In its mildest form, Great Replacement Theory speaks about lax immigration laws that have been enacted by governments in Western nations. Of course, everyone can agree that immigration laws, their enforcement, and the interpretation of refugee status have led to huge demographic changes worldwide. What makes this claim a conspiracy theory is the idea that some elite is consciously pursuing this demographic shift for a specific purpose. Perhaps to create a permanent voter base. The idea here is that immigrants would always vote for the parties that allowed them in, thus engineering a permanent Democratic rule in the U.S. Well, if that was the plan, it kinda… didn’t work. Turns out people with roots in Latin America, like anywhere, can have ideas of their own, including who they vote for. Who knew? The people who believe this are disregarding other options that may be driving immigration, such as empathy towards refugees, economic benefits of a workforce coming from the outside, or simply the difficulty involved with patrolling borders. It seems awfully narrow minded to think of it as a grand plan with a particular purpose formulated by some shadowy elite. 

However, the most radical version of Great Replacement Theory is actually the most telling. Unbelievably for one small demonstration, the far-right Charlottesville rally in 2017 gave us not one, but two, memorable quotes. Firstly, Trump made this rally famous by the, possibly misleading, soundbite “fine people on both sides.” The other famous phrase to come out of the rally was the chant “Jews will not replace us.” Now, you may find this odd. Why would Jews want to conspire to take whatever job the Confederate-flag-toting hooligan might have? Turns out this is not what they mean. They are talking about Great Replacement Theory. The Jews are not coming for their jobs personally. Rather, they are rubbing their hands with glee, enacting their evil plan to flood America with immigrants. It is these immigrants who will take the hooligans’ jobs. Phew! Glad we sorted that out. 

Behind the theory, radical or mild, is the populist idea of a mass of downtrodden “people” being betrayed by an elite. Sound familiar? It’s basically Marxism with new(ish) heroes and villains. The “people”—the hardworking, good, decent people who happen to be white—are being swamped by the alien hordes, let in by a conniving elite cabal. While the less radical supporters of the theory may be vague about who the elites are, the radicals simply blabber on about the same old Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. 

Settler Colonial Theory 

Settler Colonial Theory (STC) emerged in universities as a way to widen the discussion on colonialism. What it aims to do is identify places where colonialism left settler populations outside the heartland. This is of course, unlike the Great Replacement Theory, a very real phenomenon with plenty of examples. Indeed, far too many.  Was Alexander the Great a “settler colonialist”? He built plenty of cities around his empire and moved Greeks there to rule over the native population, and even named a bunch of them after himself. How about the Arab conquests and the rise of Islam? Are they examples of settler colonialism? Were the Ottoman Turks settler colonialists when they defeated Constantinople and eventually renamed it Istanbul?  But also these examples are random. The origin of settler colonialism is perhaps when homo sapiens moved into the territory of the Neanderthals and wiped out the Neanderthals.

In other words, this is history itself, it is what it means to be human, to colonize, to settle.  Perhaps this is why the narrative is so powerful. This may be our original sin. Lost in the oceans of time, yet gnawing at our conscience, we are in a place we do not belong. That is, if we are not on the Ethiopian savannah, collecting fruits and hunting animals with our superior running stamina, tool grabbing fingers and our bare hands. Indeed, that which purports to explain everything has a strong tendency to explain nothing. 

Yet SCT as taught in universities seems to randomly apply to Europeans from the Age of Discovery onward. More specifically, we usually seem to be talking about a movement based on 19th Century industrial colonial empires with their origin being Europe. You can see why. If you want to talk about the most brutal of empires, things got an awful lot worse when you went from death by spear to the industrial levels of death that the European empires could provide, notwithstanding Gengis Khan and his stellar effort in this field.

Even so, it is confusing. Now of course settler colonial communities of the 19th century do have some things in common, because during the same age the same ideas spread. For the 19th century this meant that many concepts were being born, both colonialism, nationalism and racism were being formulated, along with nearly every other phenomenon and ideology that was to shape the industrial age. For example, the difference between colonialism, empire and nationalism had yet to be hashed out. President Wilson had yet to make the assertion that all peoples had their right to self-determination. Many wars would be fought over this distinction, where empires would fight national movements and nations would be carved from empires. What constitutes a settler colony is again unclear. In the 19th century, we have both true settler colonies like Algeria and Australia, directly controlled by mother empires, and independent nations controlled by people who were descended from Europeans, like the USA or Argentina.  

On the other side you have the colonized. The colonized also have very little in common. What do the Muslim Arabs of Algeria have to in common with natives of French Polynesia? Only the contact with the French. Again, these colonized people live there in the first place because of wars, displacement, their own power bases and empires. The Aztecs were the people in Mexico when Cortez arrived, but if the Spanish had arrived two hundred years earlier there would be other people living there. So, who are the “real” indigenous people of the valley of Mexico? And will they please stand up. Land acknowledgements suffer from this problem, they are pointing at a specific snapshot at a time and a place where the native people had been at the point of European arrival.   

This is where the ideology behind it comes in. The ideology is indistinguishable from Rousseau’s idea of the Noble Savage. For SCT to work, you need to have a starting point—a time when the true, native, pure people were pushed out by the bad, wicked colonial settlers. Now this is precisely what the great replacement theorists are saying. Just as Great Replacement Theory fantasizes about a golden past of racial purity, SCT waxes lyrical on a pre-colonial utopia. Both theories pit the pure people against the invaders. They create a point in the mythical past where the supposedly good, pure, decent people clash with the alien hordes.

It is Make America Great Again seen from two different angles. When was America great? Is it in the 1930s or the 1950s when it was dominated by people with European ancestry or was it in the early 1500s before Europeans even came over and started calling it America? When were people strong, tough, brave and free? When did they have true honor and pride? Please. Enough with the caricatures. These are not real people—they are figments of fantasies. A modern fabrication in the tradition of the noble white worker on Nazi posters or the noble “any color” worker of Stalin’s party propaganda. If a modern view is to mean anything, surely we must move past this nonsense.

Also, now is better than then. Now we have dentists, water purification and high-speed internet. A bit of gratitude never hurt anyone. 

Israel as the prime Settler Colonial State 

While most colonies, as discussed, are unlike each other, there is a case to be made for French power in Algeria being related to French power in Polynesia, obviously there is the same type of colonial administration. The same type of colonial official speaking French and eating smelly cheeses. You can even make the case that it was not unrelated to German power in SW Africa, or British power in India and so on. But even here, Israel is different. Not only was the colonial power in the Mandate of Palestine Britain, not Israel, but the whole trajectory was different, both for the region and Israel specifically.  

For the region, the majority Arab and Muslim Middle East, majority Christian Europe and the Jews have an intertwined history that goes back to the dawn of these religions and beyond, to the beginning of civilization itself. Alas, this does not mean that Middle Easterners understand Europeans or vice versa, but interaction has never stopped. There is nothing like that with the interaction Europeans and indigenous people in America, Australia, or sub-Saharan Africa. When Europeans came to the Americas, they were a civilization of the modern age confronting civilizations with Bronze Age technology. With Guns, Germs, and Steel, as Jared Diamond would have put it, they could outmatch anything encountered in the New World, let alone places with Stone Age technology like Australia.  

For Israel specifically, the reason for it coming into being are vastly different than the French colonists in Algeria, known as the Pied Noir. Jews have a deep, documented historical connection to the land and continuous presence there. The Jews also have no colonial heartland. For Israel, there is no equivalent to France in Algeria that tied the French in France to the French Pied Noir in Algeria. Two things follow from this. Firstly, the Jews did not go because the colonial powers ordered them, to the contrary, the vast majority came fleeing the hostile forces of the colonial powers, the Nazi Empire, the Russian Empire and so on (as well as non-colonial powers such as the countries of the Middle East). Indeed, the British connection to the creation of the state of Israel was a rickety thing, sometimes for and sometimes against Jewish sovereignty. Secondly, and most importantly of all, there is no going back. There is nowhere that will take in the millions of Jews the enemies of Israel want to push out. For better or worse, the Jews are stuck there. For the record, Zionism is a national, not a colonial project. 

The idea that chat GPT gives us that SCT is “focused on systemic injustice” gives the impression that it is just giving some helpful corrections. But we don’t need SCT to explain the worst crimes of imperialism. In the Congo Free State, we are fine with explaining all the brutality with greed, power, racism and technological superiority. For its proponents, it does have one great advantage, you can tie all these different phenomena together, and they are all tied to Israel, the “settler colonial state”. But what on Earth does the Congo Free State or the transatlantic slave trade have to do with Israel? That the protagonists came from Europe? Really? Is this the level of the best and the brightest? White bad, brown good. Erm… OK.  

So, what is the goal? Chat GPT also ignores the brutal aim of all of this with regard to Israel. It is a sleight of hand. For countries like Australia, Canada and the USA, the most visible usage of SCT outside academia is that of land acknowledgements.

Is this really what Israel is being asked to do? Can we end the conflict once and for all if we put up some signs where depopulated Arab villages used to stand? That would be fabulous! A “signs for peace” deal? Amazing. Hell, make statues in each ruined village and adorn them with Palestinian flags. Whatever. I’m all in. Would finally put an end to the violence? Would Israel be able to live with no more wars? More importantly, would any Israeli leader really turn this kind of deal down? Some might but the clever ones would not. Sadly, this is not what is meant how SCT is applied in the case of Israel. Rather, its proponents talk about Israel as if it is French Algeria—as if applying enough violence will force the Jews to go “back home.”, pretending as if there was some homeland other than Israel that existed. Indeed, SCT is very hard to separate from an endorsement of violent resistance to the Jewish state until it disappears along with its inhabitants. 

Applying SCT to Israel is not simply misguided. It goes full circle with the “Jews will not replace us” crowd. What is a pro-Palestine march if not this? The nasty Jews will not replace the true, pure, honorable and brave rightful owners of the land, the bereaved Palestinians. 

Conclusion: A Pseudoscientific Mincemeat  

The Great Replacement Theory looks at a conspiracy that is not there. SCT describes, well, history writ large. This is more or less where their differences end. Both Great Replacement Theory and SCT cherry-pick a single data point—demographic change—and claim that it explains entire civilizations and entire nations.  

If I am right and that both of them are pseudoscience, we can compare to other pseudoscience. Take skull measuring. Now the skull measuring community may well show us that they have data points, that European skulls were smaller or larger than African skulls. Aha! We have a data point. But this was not the promise. The promise was that this would explain something about actual societies. It did not. It explained nothing. Racism was the underlying assumption and it was wrong. Hey! That’s just like trying to tie a Jewish cabal to immigration or Israel to the Kongo Free State. It’s untrue, not related and it explains nothing.  

That doesn’t mean these ideas are inconsequential. Millions of people—led by both the neck-tattoo community and the scruffy-beard community—now believe they have seen the light. The real problem to be solved is actually… wait for it… The Jewish Problem. 

Bravo! Revamped ideas about Jews controlling the world, now that seems to be just the ticket for a better and brighter future.