They insist on their unformed cognitive abilities, making a show of being stuck in the gap between cause and effect, demonstrating their existence in a continual now in which the past cannot be linked to anything taking place, or anything to be anticipated. So anticolonial violence is described as an explosion of inexplicable hatred and rage on the part of the Natives, a refusal to recognise the rights of the Coloniser—or rather as being explicable only inasmuch as anything can be explained by the base nature of the Natives. 

For the present writer, being opposed to anticolonial violence is akin to being opposed to gravity: what you think about it is of no import; there is a law at work. This is because the present writer understands causality. But for the people of Now, the imperative to forget the past even means forgetting their own past, or we could say especially forgetting their own past. They are stranded, they are on this land, it must be theirs, the others must be their enemy. Perhaps it has always been like this, but it certainly is now, and now, and now.

Living in an ahistorical present while raiding what they will of History, real or imagined: the burden of this contradictory operation gives rise to the symptom of unknowing, of keeping themselves curtailed. They must protect themselves somehow, not only from the Natives, that is obvious, and easily done, but from the relentlessness of Fact, from intellectual activity, from ethical engagement, from common sense. So we hear that North America was empty when the settlers arrived, that Palestine was peopled only by interlopers until the settlers returned, that Ireland became Britain by virtue of hosting people whose ancestors, for whatever reason or bouquet of reasons, had left Britain.

But while hiding from Fact in general, the single great Fact of settlement is admitted. This one truth, that settlers exist, is for them transhistorical, which is to say, it must remain true even in the future. So despite the monstrous achievements of Settler Colonialism, which has involved the movement of millions of people in the past, with the greatest of violence, it is not thinkable that settlers themselves may be moved. This is true even of Palestine, where the zionist shadow state was forced into existence within living memory, and even in the case of Ireland, where the settlers are quite small in number, and do not have far to move to go back to their country of origin. Wherever they are, they are here; whenever they are here, they are here now.