Reports, recriminations, and realism

... A welcome to new subscribers, and related

Okay folks, I’ve had a piece of mine republished on an absolutely enormous substack—

Joshua Hoffman

’s Future of Jewish.

And, because of the time zone differences (Josh published the piece while I was asleep), I’ve woken up to an absolute binfire of messages, restacks, and subscriptions. This (emergency) post is in lieu of

Lorenzo Warby

’s next piece, which will now be published on Sunday.

First off, welcome to all the new people. Since so many of you came via Josh, I should tell you a bit about the genesis of the piece you’ve just read, and point you to another piece you may find valuable.

As you’ll notice if you poke around this substack a bit, the two of us write on a very wide assortment of topics, but with a strong commitment to detailed, costed, and workable policy development.

This is because we both have backgrounds in what—in the UK & Australia—is called “wonk-world”. Unlike Brits, however, Australians are very, very good at policy wonkery. I still work at a think-tank (Liberty Fund), while Lorenzo used to work for one. I live outside London (in the “Home Counties”), while Lorenzo lives in Melbourne. If you’re here from the US or Israel, you’ll find the time zones pretty misaligned (as I did this morning).

I only got sidetracked into writing about settler-colonial ideology due to an accident: I read a book while I was consulting in Australia for a month (October last year). That book was Adam Kirsch’s On Settler-Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice. While a very handy primer—and what I’m about to say is no criticism of what is a good book—because he’s not Australian, he doesn’t get the extent to which the ideological nonsense used to excuse and sometimes justify what happened on October 7th was made up out of whole cloth by Australian academics. He’s a bit baffled by all the Australians (as you will see when you read his book) but doesn’t go any further.

Yes, those Australians liberally garnished their theory with quotations from Francophone and Arab authors who go back to the sixties and occasionally even the fifties, but they did not make the same arguments. The claims they did make, however, made it much easier—at least in theory—to stigmatise European-descent Jews who immigrated to Mandate Palestine and modern Israel.

To that end, I wrote two pieces where I used Kirsch’s book as a jumping-off point, the one you’ve just read at Future of Jewish and this one, for Law & Liberty, the legally focussed magazine Liberty Fund owns. I should also note that the Future of Jewish piece was originally published in The Australian, Australia’s national daily, a paper I’ve been writing for off-and-on since 1993.

One (very thoughtful) comment on my Future of Jewish piece came from

Albert Cory

:

I’ve been to Oz three times. I have to say the Aborigines’ claims seem, on the face of it, stronger than the Palestinians, since they’d been there for 40,000 years or so.

That said: the settlers are not going to go away, like the French did in Algeria. So it’s kinda like having a father who was abusive in your childhood: what can he possibly do to make it right? Endless self-flagellation isn’t helpful.

The point he makes about the 40K years of Aboriginal pre-history? I addressed it for Liberty Fund:

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.

Australians notice this sort of thing because it is distinctively Australian bullshit, suggesting (as it does) that serious historical complexities can be resolved by what amounts to litigation over property disputes. It’s finders keepers elevated to the level of public policy. As anyone who has ever had a sibling, or more than one child, or been a teacher knows—this simply will not work.

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.

If you want to explore Not On Your Team But Always Fair, this piece—about me doing something close to an ideological 180, but not in the way you expect—is my most popular bit of writing. Lorenzo’s most popular piece is on how cancel culture crippled the US Democrats, and how much of that behaviour is female-coded (for perfectly explicable evolutionary reasons).

I’d also recommend my recommendations—which are small in number. Highlights of late include this piece from

Katy Barnett

(a profound meditation on the dangers of taking victims too seriously) and this wonderful bit of humour from

Gareth Roberts

(forms part of an ongoing series on what Gareth calls “Middle Class Holes: the 50 Most Awful Middle Class People in Britain”).

If you stick around, you’ll also become familiar with this beautiful cat. Chilli is a 16-year-old dilute tortoiseshell British Shorthair—so, albeit a long way down the line, a descendant of the ships’ cats Julius Caesar introduced to Britannia in the First Century BC—and has the greenest eyes I’ve seen on any cat.