Macdara has recently argued that settler colonists are ontologically reduced, and he thinks the point is worth expanding upon. And just as settlers themselves link every trivial detail of their experience to the larger-scale picture, that is, their status as invaders and occupiers, your correspondent will similarly zoom between the small details of everyday life in the colonies, and the major crimes of Imperialism.

It is not hard to see that settlers thrive in adopting an extraordinary and unconvincing claim to victimhood. Naturally they do so in order to negate and therefore justify the violence they commit. But likely they are also aware of their ontological indistinction, their incompletion. Doubtless it is a horrible position to be in, but it would be a mistake to sympathise with them, as against the actual victims of Settler Colonialism.

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First let us take a look at perhaps the most successful settler colonial enterprise in history, the United Settlers of America. Your correspondent has been listening to a US-based supernatural podcast, in which an extraordinary number of the contributors ascribe their mysterious experiences to Native tradition, neither described nor understood; it is sufficient for something unusual to occur—something odd sighted in the wilderness, some strange occurrence in the home—for these people to be reminded feverishly of their status as other-than-native. These settlers find themselves all of a sudden on stolen land, land in which something might, unbeknownst to them, have been buried, or—worse—have been merely hiding, ready to step out onto the lawns of a neighbourhood otherwise unmarred by anything original, new or distinct. A neighbourhood whose name, Maple Drive, or Evergreen Meadows, aspires to meaninglessness, to the fostering of an existence in which everything is calibrated not to disturb, in which even thought itself need not take place, except the thinking necessary to decide whether one will take one’s eggs over easy or sunny side up…

Sometimes these sorry creatures are found pleading with Native acquaintances to come and do something to their house to clear it of its malign visitants. And these dignified acquaintances duly turn up and do something that they are not inclined afterwards to explain, and everything is set aright again for these people who are in fact themselves Ghosts in this vast continent that they have attempted to empty of life. It is they who haunt the landscape, who are stuck in the past and are not fully present; they are not where or who they are. 

These people can no longer be from the land whence they came, the experience of being a settler having turned them into something else. The sins have accumulated, more than the colonist can bear while remaining a full human subject. Their violence has erased them, leaving them all the more keen to insist on their status as owners of the land beneath them.