#Black Settlers in the west

[ausetkmt]

https://x.com/GRE8TBLACKSHARK/status/1701210980087136399?s=20

The Blue family, Sacramento

Les Robinson had to leave a family cookout to compose himself. A cousin told him to look up an ancestor on his phone — Daniel Blue. Robinson had never heard of him, but a search revealed the longtime pastor in the Sacramento area, who was integral to the region’s Black community. Robinson learned that his great-great-grandfather was brought to Sacramento in 1849 as an enslaved man from Kentucky by John Daugherty, the son of his enslaver.

Blue, 53 at the time, worked as a gold miner and discovered enough gold to buy his freedom and become an entrepreneur, opening a dry cleaners and starting a church in his home and later a stand-alone structure. That church — St. Andrews AME Church — was founded in 1850, and it remains the West Coast’s oldest continuous African Methodist Episcopal congregation. Blue also started a school for Black, Latino, Asian American and Native American children.

And he bought property. Lots of it — 60 acres, according to Robinson, including nine blocks in Sacramento, California’s capital, documents show.

On that property today, Robinson said, stands the California Railroad Museum, the Amtrak Station, Sacramento RailYard, the courthouse and the Sacramento County jail. 

“I’ve been told that it was taken because the railroad needed that land to complete the transcontinental connection,” Robinson said. “So he basically was booted out.”

And burned out, as intimidation by whites who did not welcome freed Blacks turned violent. Part of the school was burned down and rebuilt before eventually it closed years later. Blue’s house was burned in 1869. There was a failed attempt to burn down the church, too, Robinson said. 

Mitchell said the seizing of property — by citizens, law enforcement or the government — comes with an additional injustice beyond stunting generational wealth: It destroys culture and history.

“Whether you’re talking about Harlem or southwest Georgia, there’s often an erasure of important culture and history,” Mitchell said.

Much of what Robinson and others in his family have discovered is documented in newspaper articles and other periodicals, which makes it frustrating for Robinson that he cannot locate deeds or ownership documentation. They have not yet presented their findings to state or local officials yet, preferring to do more research and hear what the reparations task force has to say about seized land. But they are clear about what happened.

“It was obviously taken,” Robinson said. “He was a smart man. He wouldn’t give away 60-plus acres of land.” Robinson is working on a book about his ancestor that sums up what having the land returned to him and his family would mean. Yes, he wants the land for its financial value, but also for its sentimental value. Robinson, who founded a church in 1999, said the revelations about his ancestor resonate in a tangible way. Looking back and seeing what his ancestor accomplished, “I see parallels in our life — even not having ever known him,” he said. “When I found him, I met him — and we have the same spirit. I am doing what he would want me to do.”

The Burgess family, Coloma, California

It was “exhausting” for Jon Burgess when he learned that an ancestor had been the hangman in the 1800s in Coloma, a small community about 55 miles northeast of Sacramento, where his family lineage traces.

“That’s not something you want to see, and it floored me for two days,” Burgess said.

Using eminent domain, the city seized much of the 420 acres, Burgess said. Much of the land he wants to reclaim is Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park in Coloma. 

Burgess has testified before the California reparations task force, posted short videos on Instagram about his family findings to educate followers and connected with Gov. Gavin Newsom about the subject. “I’m just trying to get people to empathize with the fact that we had an inheritance that was supposed to remain in our family for years per those deeds. And yet it was stripped away,” he said.

Burgess possesses the deed to the land, documentation he believes that when it is properly reviewed will stand up in court, particularly because there is no record of his ancestor’s selling the land, he said.

“If we didn’t have the deed, it would just be another story,” said Burgess, a firefighter. “But we do. And the deeds can certainly tell a very different story.”

What’s next for reparations

The story for all these families is unfinished. They hope their gathered documentation will yield a result similar to that of Bruce’s Beach in Southern California, where Los Angeles County seized land in Manhattan Beach purchased in 1912 by a Black couple, Charles and Willa Bruce. White residents led a petition to have their resort for Black people condemned in 1927 and turned into a park. It was returned to the Bruce family last year. The family sold it back to the county for $20 million.

The cases are not parallel to that of Bruce’s Beach, but it elicits hope for these descendants, especially as California considers reparations in such an aggressive manner.

Burgess’ case has been acknowledged by the California task force as similarly valid to that of Bruce’s Beach, and may be included in its final report and list of recommendations, which will be issued to the Legislature at the end of June.

“Land and property are things that my pioneer ancestors did not sell or take for granted, because they knew the value, coming from slave plantations’ making others wealthy for generations — all behind land,” Burgess said. “Generational wealth means my family and descendants would have the same if not more than the Bogle family, Veercamp family, Gallagher family, Del Monte family and a host of others who came here with nothing prior to 1870 and were left to prosper — but also allowed equal protection by the laws.”

[runalongprincevaliant]

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[headspace-hotel]

My mamaw has the book right now so I won't be able to read it for a little bit but my mom read The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan which is about the Dust Bowl and it puts in perspective all the environmental books I was reading from the 1940's and 1950's and the sense of agitation and intensity in them.

Everyone is like yeah yeah the dust bowl we've all heard of it, but the Dust Bowl was apocalyptic. The USA practically eliminated the bison—we are talking thousands of square miles of land littered with bones, enormous pyramids of skulls—and committed genocide against their caretakers, and then settlers ripped up the prairie grasses (which protected meters of top soil) with plows

And what happened was, half the country became in engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and reduced visibility to a few feet. Even indoor environments were full of deep drifts of dirt. When it rained, it rained mud instead of water. In ENGLAND the snow was RED because of DIRT. People died from pneumonia because they were breathing the dirt into their lungs.

Even before mom started reading this book, I was reading American books about the environment from the mid 20th century, and they are animated with the zeal and terror of people who have realized that human mismanagement could make the USA literally uninhabitable. I realized, "Oh. This is right after the Dust Bowl." cause of how they talk about erosion, and I realized just how formative the Dust Bowl was in terms of environmental policy.

Reading about various wildlife species, I realized also how utterly apocalyptic the conditions of the past were for animals. Deer were almost eliminated from my state. Deer.

Why do we have the Migratory Bird Treaty Act? Because just about every large bird species almost went extinct from uncontrolled commercial hunting. We almost had no swans, no cranes, no egrets, no storks. We lost the passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets, but we could have lost Basically Everything.

So many of the ill-conceived decisions to introduce species to this continent are easily explained by how apocalyptic this period of time was. Why did we think it was a good idea to introduce Kudzu? Because in the 1950's, erosion sparked a visceral apprehension of CERTAIN DOOM, and logging had made the whole southeast start washing away! Why were so many exotic antelopes introduced to Texas? Because every native large animal was almost wiped out!

From my other readings on the subject (Changes in the Land by William Cronon is a good one) devastating environmental destruction started just about as soon as Europeans started controlling the land, and I am guessing that if you examined the timeline of environmental disaster alongside the migrations west, it would support the argument that settlers started pushing west more and more rapidly because of land degradation and environmental disaster.

I wish this was commoner knowledge, getting to where we are now has been a journey. Environmental history doesn't start in 1970's.

It is not the case that things have steadily gotten worse over time and recently are becoming extremely bad, rather, different parts of the environment have become both better and worse in steps forward and backward, and many seemingly unremarkable things around us were earned by a vicious fight, which we can learn from and continue...

[shehzadi]

so israel simultaneously bombed: an ambulance convoy going to the rafah egypt-palestine border that was transporting the most severely injured, the main entrance to al-shifa hospital, the vicinity of al-quds hospital and the indonesian hospital. in doing so, they’ve martyred at least dozens of people, with the numbers still climbing, only to then bomb the osama bin zaid UNRWA school barely an hour later, and the scenes coming out of there are literally those of children blown to pieces. they are unrecognisable as humans. may Allah accept them all as martyrs. and if that wasn’t enough, al-shifa, which is now completely overwhelmed with martyrs’ bodies and even more injured people than before since it’s sheltering and treating those from 1. the ambulance bombing and 2. the entrance bombing, is now totally blacked out. no more light or electricity.

while all this was happening in ghazzah, israeli settlers, aided by the israeli military, were/have been continuously forcing palestinians from their land in the west bank by burning their land and shooting palestinians.

this is only what has happened today (03.11.23) in a period of about 2-3 hours. remember, this has been the last 75 years for palestinians.

[esyra]

Killing 1300+ Jews in barbaric ways does not make you the good guys. Israel retaliating is Hamas’ fault. Hamas surrendering would mean peace. Israel surrendering would have more dead Jews. But i guess that’s the end goal.

No, we're always the barbaric terrorists. Israel is the good guy for killing 9,000+ Gazans the past 25 days, and trapping 1,000+ under the rubble which will definitely turn out dead if they ever get the proper equipment to lift it off them. Israel is the good guy for killing Shireen Abu Akleh. Israel is the good guy for killing Ahmed Erekat. Israel is the good guy for killing Nadim Nuwarah and Mohammed Salameh. Israel is the good guy for opening fire on 2,400 protesters and killing 52. Israel is the good guy for holding over 1,000 Palestinians as "administrative detainees," meaning they are held indefinitely without charges.

In fact, Israel has been the good guy ever since they got the British to help them colonize Palestine and get rid of the Arabs, as they admitted to wanting it themselves. After all, as Winston Churchill said himself, the colonization of Palestine was righteous because as the Red Indians of America, and the black people of Australia, "a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."

Palestinians, be it on Gaza or the West Bank, can never retaliate or defend themselves. We're to either die and be violated quietly or we are terrorists which will be gleefully eradicated with the help of every colony-based State in the world. Otherwise, we'll disturb the comfortable privilege your racism and religious intolerance ensures.

When Hamas didn't existed the occupation began and the British violently suppressed anyone who opposed. When Hamas didn't exist the Nakba happened. When Hamas didn't exist the Deir Yassin massacre happened. But, you know, that one's fine because it happened after Israel had made Palestine agree to a peace pact, and they would never act unfairly so the brutal murder of over 100 Palestinians is obviously being misunderstood. Hamas doesn't operate in the West Bank, but they're still expelled from their homes, brutalized and murdered. Since October 7, West Bank had 115 killed, more than 2,000 injured and nearly 1,000 others forcibly displaced from their homes because of violence and intimidation by Israeli forces and settlers. They'll bomb mosques with exit points created to save people from settlers' violence, then claim they were used for terrorism. Proof? They don't need it. They'll bomb first then ask questions later.

Do people who blindly defend Israel do anything other than victimize yourselves? Do you even read any actual Israeli news that said the IDF "shell[ed] houses on their occupants," because they're too incompetent to do anything other than bombing everything? Do you ever wonder why the people Israel swears were burned and beheaded always came from reports from houses absolutely destroyed by what could only be shelling? Do you ever hear testimonies from survivors of the massacre saying IDF shoot at their own civilians? Do you ever read about past al-Qassam attacks and noticed they've never had mass casualties because IDF never responded like this? Do you even know what al-Qassam is or do you live to regurgitate whatever you're fed and being spoon-fed your information?

If Hamas' militia surrenders, Gaza will be wiped out and Gazans — those who are not murdered — will be exiled into Egypt's Sinai. That's the end goal since 1948, and that's what you're defending. But who cares? Arab blood is cheaper and racism is always fashionable.

[saddayfordemocracy]

How the Watermelon Became a Symbol of Palestinian Solidarity

The use of the watermelon as a Palestinian symbol is not new. It first emerged after the Six-day War in 1967, when Israel seized control of the West Bank and Gaza, and annexed East Jerusalem. At the time, the Israeli government made public displays of the Palestinian flag a criminal offense in Gaza and the West Bank. 

To circumvent the ban, Palestinians began using the watermelon because, when cut open, the fruit bears the national colors of the Palestinian flag—red, black, white, and green.  

The Israeli government didn't just crack down on the flag. Artist Sliman Mansour told The National in 2021 that Israeli officials in 1980 shut down an exhibition at 79 Gallery in Ramallah featuring his work and others, including Nabil Anani and Issam Badrl. “They told us that painting the Palestinian flag was forbidden, but also the colors were forbidden. So Issam said, ‘What if I were to make a flower of red, green, black and white?’, to which the officer replied angrily, ‘It will be confiscated. Even if you paint a watermelon, it will be confiscated,’” Mansour told the outlet.

Israel lifted the ban on the Palestinian flag in 1993, as part of the Oslo Accords, which entailed mutual recognition by Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization and were the first formal agreements to try to resolve the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The flag was accepted as representing the Palestinian Authority, which would administer Gaza and the West Bank.

In the wake of the accords, the New York Times nodded to the role of watermelon as a stand-in symbol during the flag ban. “In the Gaza Strip, where young men were once arrested for carrying sliced watermelons—thus displaying the red, black and green Palestinian colors—soldiers stand by, blasé, as processions march by waving the once-banned flag,” wrote Times journalist John Kifner.

In 2007, just after the Second Intifada, artist Khaled Hourani created The Story of the Watermelon for a book entitled Subjective Atlas of Palestine. In 2013, he isolated one print and named it The Colours of the Palestinian Flag, which has since been seen by people across the globe.

The use of the watermelon as a symbol resurged in 2021, following an Israeli court ruling that Palestinian families based in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem would be evicted from their homes to make way for settlers.

The watermelon symbol today:

In January, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir gave police the power to confiscate Palestinian flags. This was later followed by a June vote on a bill to ban people from displaying the flag at state-funded institutions, including universities. (The bill passed preliminary approval but the government later collapsed.)

In June, Zazim, an Arab-Israeli community organization, launched a campaign to protest against the ensuing arrests and confiscation of flags. Images of watermelons were plastered on to 16 taxis operating in Tel Aviv, with the accompanying text reading, “This is not a Palestinian flag.”

“Our message to the government is clear: we will always find a way to circumvent any absurd ban and we will not stop fighting for freedom of expression and democracy,” said Zazim director Raluca Ganea. 

Amal Saad, a Palestinian from Haifa who worked on the Zazim campaign, told Al-Jazeera they had a clear message: “If you want to stop us, we’ll find another way to express ourselves.”

Words courtesy of BY ARMANI SYED / TIME

[jewreallythinkthat]

One of the reasons I think there has been such a breakdown between the "progressive" left and the Jewish community is actually something that I've watched before fostered in left wing spaces for well over a decade and that is looking for offence.

When someone says something antisemitic, that does not mean they are an antisemite. I remember when the BLM marches took place, people rightly pointed out that there is a lot of unconscious bias against PoC and that being called out for eating something you didn't realise was problematic does not mean you are actually racist, just that you need to think a bit more when talking about a subject which in many cases, doesn't affect you as such. The same principle should apply to antisemitism.

If I say someone has said something antisemitic, their first reaction (on the left wing - because the right will proudly nod that yes, it was antisemitic) is often "you're calling me an antisemite and trying to silence me, Zionist". This is not true. What I am saying is that you are saying something that is discriminatory, invoked blood libel, accused Jews of ruling the world etc etc. I fully believe most people do not realise they are doing this. The point of dog whistles is that you are not supposed to recognise them, that's how they propagate. Anti-jewish racism is one of the oldest forms of hatred and it stretches back multiple millennia so it makes sense that it's literally inside the common vernacular. That doesn't mean everyone using it is an antisemite.

Instead of immidiately jumping to the defensive, I wish people would take a moment to ask, in good faith, "why would a Jewish person find this antisemitic?" Take the opportunity to learn, to better themself. Do not assume every Jew is trying to silence you - assuming the worst every time of Jewish people is a type of antisemitism so please try and put yourself in their shoes and maybe even ask them to explain so you can do better in the future.

Just a general overview, here's a couple of ones to look out for (a non exhaustive list).

1. Replace the word "Zionist" in what has Ben said with "Jew". If it sounds like something leeched out of Nazi Germanh or the Soviet Union, it's probably going to be antisemitism.

2. Saying you don't think any country should exist but focusing exclusively on the destruction of Israel. The only thing that makes Israel unique is that it's a Jewish majority country. So why is that the only county you actively want to get rid of?

2.1 Holding Israel to a higher standard than any other country is antisemitic as laid out above in point 2.

3. Assuming the worst of Jews and Israel every time is antisemitism. It's no different to assuming Black people are always out to get you or all Muslims are terrorists. If it's racist to do this to one minority group, it is racist to do it to any.

4. Tokenizing extremists in a community (Ben Gvir and the West Bank settlers on the right wing in Israel, the Neturi Karta by the progressive left when discussing I/P) is racist. If you only listen to Jews who prove your point, you are actively excluding the majority of a community so you can beat them down, this is racist.

I don't like calling people antisemitic because most people are not actually that, what they are is uneducated on antisemetism because the majority of that education is not being done by Jews - let alone Jews who represent the majority of the community.

But if you refuse to talk to Jews in good faith when they try to explain why what you have said is antisemitic, you are running the risk of moving from "ignorant user of antisemetic language" to "antisemite" (also a note, ignorant not meaning stupid but rather that you do not know something).

[probablyasocialecologist]

Since the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip started, I have been reviewing British media and its everyday items, such as the newspaper, phone, posters, and TV channels that seep into the public’s consciousness. Without the critical tools and education to puncture through their framing, we become complicit and easily intimidated. Some media outlets have gone as far as spreading misinformation, which surely would have been considered a hate crime in other contexts. Both the Daily Telegraph and The Times chose this misinformation as the headline for their October 11th issues. Although some (not all!) of those newspapers have already retracted their original false claims, the damage has already been done.   The Guardian chose to adorn its main headline for October 12th with the words ‘Israelis suspended between fear, grief and foreboding.’ The Daily Mail selected ‘The King Calls Them Terrorists, Why Can’t the BBC?’ Marching to the same beat, the Daily Telegraph opted to plaster the Royals’ condemnation of Hamas on its front pages. Survey the pages of the newspapers, and the stories eliciting support and empathy for Israel abound, making it clear who the perpetrators are and that vengeance against them is justified. Meanwhile, the Palestinians are only evoked through the register of terrorism and violence. Even those headlines, which are shy in their coverage of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, intentionally omit the perpetrators: the Israeli army and state. They are designed to neglect the root and cause of the violence: Israeli settler colonialism. By settler colonialism, we mean the gradual transfer of European Jews to the land of Palestine, the coercive displacement and dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian population, and the imposition of a coordinated and sustainable system that turns this displacement into a continuous process.  Western media relies on racial, gendered, and colonial tropes to describe the atrocities in Palestine. It instrumentalizes white female faces to elicit support for Israel. Such a tactic simultaneously serves racism, patriarchy, and colonialism. It relies on notions of white female ‘innocence’ and ‘victimhood’ to justify the continuous erasure of Palestine. In a headline by the Daily Telegraph about a British IDF female soldier, below, we are shown a smiling white female soldier wearing military attire and a keffiyeh on her head. Neither the photograph nor the article questions why a British citizen is justified in enlisting in a settler army elsewhere, let alone the same army that is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip. To the contrary, the article frames such enlisting as voluntary and dignified. These strategies bring to mind 9/11, Laura Bush, and the weaponization of white feminism in the service of imperialist and colonial expansion. Black and Brown feminist scholars and activists, including Lila Abu Lughod, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde amongst others, have long debunked and punctured through such strategies. It is this same white feminism that has been utilized by the media and governments to justify the intensification of Israeli brutality against the Palestinian residents of Gaza. 

[mariacallous]

If there was a pro-Palestinian movement that wanted to capitalise on the disgust at the destruction of Gaza, it would be moving now to demand a compromise peace.

Western and Arab governments should use every sanction to enforce the removal of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, it would say. They are designed to so change the demography of the West Bank that a Palestinian state becomes an impossibility.

 Since Netanyahu came back to power in a coalition with the far right,  mobs have wrecked Huwara and other Palestinian villages.  It is not too fanciful to imagine a future when ethnic cleansers will run riot.

Western governments have already made tentative and, from the point of view of any robust and principled supporter of Palestine, wholly inadequate gestures. They have issued sanctions on groups that fund extremism, and left it there.

But instead of the global left demanding that the world begins to lay the groundwork for compromise, it insists on war, and a war to the death at that.

I could moralise about left ignorance. I could say its position that Israel is a settler colonial state is at best a half-truth which fails to acknowledge that its population is made up of the descendants of refugees from Arab nationalism and European fascism.

Let me for once avoid preachiness, however, and say that from the practical point of view, the global left has adopted a disastrous position.

It’s worse than a crime, it’s a blunder.

In any war to the death, Israel will win. It has nuclear weapons and a population under arms

Those who urge the abolition of Israel by chanting “from the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free” or by demanding that the descendants of Palestinians refugees have a right to return to swamp the Jewish state may think they are being principled. But they are playing into the hands of the Israeli right.

Netanyahu tells the West that he has no partners for peace. By supporting the programme of Hamas and Iran, the global left is proving him right.

When Iran attacks, the Israeli right can say completely accurately that its enemies want to wipe Israel from the map. And look what happens then. Not just Western countries but Arab states like Jordan defend Israel.

Two can play at the game of demanding total victory, and one side has all the advantages.

As the charter of the hard-line rightist Likud party put it, in  language which sounds familiar: “Between the Sea and the River Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

If I were Palestinian, I could imagine myself wanting Israel gone. But the hope of total victory has been a disaster. In 1948, 1967 and 1973 the Arab states tried to wipe Israel off the map and succeeded only in strengthening it.

There is still a great deal of argument about what Hamas thought would happen when its terrorists attacked Israel in October. One theory holds that Hamas was possessed with the same delusion that misled the Bolsheviks in 1917, and hoped to ignite a general uprising.

The Arab masses failed to rise up on Hamas’s behalf and Iran made it clear it was not prepared to engage in more than token warfare with Israel.

Once again, an attempt to wipe out Israel has brought harm to Palestinian civilians.

If you doubt me on the dangers of going for a purist, maximal strategy and demanding total victory, listen to a true leftist, Norman Finkelstein.

There was a time when I admired his attacks on the “Holocaust Industry” and Jews who exploited Nazism to help Israel.

But after my own experiences of left antisemitism, I became suspicious of an argument which, when taken to extreme, was used to maintain the pretence that anti-Jewish racism did not exist, or barely existed, and that accusations of antisemitism were log rolling by cunning Jews seeking to exploit the compassion of naïve gentiles.

The parallels with anti-black racists who claim their opponents are merely “playing the race card” were too obvious to labour.

No such qualms held Finkelstein back. He helped build the anti-Israel movement in the US, and you might have thought his comrades would have listened to him.

He gave a speech at the student sit-in at Columbia university saying they should not chant for the abolition of Israel and for a Palestine “from the river to the sea”.

If you leave “wriggle room for misinterpretation,” he said, your enemies will exploit it.

The speech was a faintly embarrassing performance. Finkelstein is an old man now, and he rambled down many rhetorical cul-de-sac​s. At the end the students just laughed at him and began chanting “from the river to the sea/ Palestine will be free”.

A part of the explanation for their disastrous flight to the extremes lies in the appeal of ​Manichaeism.

People want to feel wholly virtuous and by necessity want to believe their enemies are wholly evil. In these circumstances, only the co​mplete destruction of evil from the river to the sea will suffice. It’s simply not enough to say that Israel must merely withdraw from the occupied territories. Satan and all his works must be renounced.

You might object that some protestors say they want to replace Israel with a sweet, multicultural liberal democracy. But this is progressive thinking at its woozy wishful-thinking worst: an argument made in clear bad faith.

If they were serious, they would damn Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Iran who want to create an Islamic state. But it is not just that they do not criticise radical Islam, they barely acknowledge its existence. If you listen to the speeches at the rallies and sit-ins, Hamas and its ultra-reactionary blood-stained ideology are simply not mentioned.

The effort is self-defeating. By going to the extremes, a protest movement has a Manichean appeal but it plays into the hands of its enemies.

The “evaporation theory of protest” explains the phenomenon. When the Gaza war ends, and let us hope that it ends soon, most of the protestors will drift away and get on with their lives.

As they evaporate, all that is left will be a residue composed of the most committed and the most extreme.

They will carry on campaigning when the cause is all but forgotten. When Palestine and Israel are no longer in the news, they will still be there.

And when the next war begins in Israel/Palestine – and I am afraid that there will be a next one – they will organise the protests, write the extreme slogans and set the maximalist demands.

This is why the far left dictates the terms of left-wing protests, and why those protests fail.

Or to put it another way, this is why Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party and then lost every election he fought

I could be wrong. Perhaps the global wave of protest will bring change for the better. I hope it does. But I fear that, as so often, Palestinian people will be worse off than they were before.​

[bixels]

could her (rainbow dash's) name be central american, but her family had to move north due to colonization? or something of the sort.

That's a pretty big stretch to make (not one I'm completely unwilling to make, though), but I also wanna give myself the space to write stories about/moments concerning her Native American identity, especially in a 1920s Midwest setting. While Tulli and I aren't giving heavy focus to the American politics/discourse of the time, we do wanna include elements of them in the characters (Thea is based off black intellectuals and educators of the Harlem Renaissance, for example).

Also worth noting that in the infamously racist and pro-colonialist MLP episode of Wild West settlers vs. indigenous American-stand ins, RD allies herself with the indigenous American-stand ins.

[fatehbaz]

Just in case, some might enjoy. Had to organize some notes.

These are just some of the newer texts that had been promoted in the past few years at the online home of the American Association of Geographers. At: [aag dot org/new-books-for-geographers/]

Tried to narrow down selections to focus on Indigenous, Black, anticolonial, Latin American, oceanic/archipelagic geographies; imaginaries and environmental perception; mobility, borders, carceral/abolition geography; literary and musical ecologies.

---

New stuff, early 2024:

A Caribbean Poetics of Spirit (Hannah Regis, University of the West Indies Press, 2024)

Constructing Worlds Otherwise: Societies in Movement and Anticolonial Paths in Latin America (Raúl Zibechi and translator George Ygarza Quispe, AK Press, 2024)

Fluid Geographies: Water, Science, and Settler Colonialism in New Mexico (K. Maria D. Lane, University of Chicago Press, 2024)

Hydrofeminist Thinking With Oceans: Political and Scholarly Possibilities (Tarara Shefer, Vivienne Bozalek, and Nike Romano, Routledge, 2024)

Making the Literary-Geographical World of Sherlock Holmes: The Game Is Afoot (David McLaughlin, University of Chicago Press, 2025)

Mapping Middle-earth: Environmental and Political Narratives in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Cartographies (Anahit Behrooz, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024)

Midlife Geographies: Changing Lifecourses across Generations, Spaces and Time (Aija Lulle, Bristol University Press, 2024)

Society Despite the State: Reimagining Geographies of Order (Anthony Ince and Geronimo Barrera de la Torre, Pluto Press, 2024)

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New stuff, 2023:

The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Camilla Hawthorne and Jovan Scott Lewis, Duke University Press, 2023)

Activist Feminist Geographies (Edited by Kate Boyer, Latoya Eaves and Jennifer Fluri, Bristol University Press, 2023)

The Silences of Dispossession: Agrarian Change and Indigenous Politics in Argentina (Mercedes Biocca, Pluto Press, 2023)

The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Dueterte (Vicente L. Rafael, Duke University Press, 2022)

Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908 (İlkay Yılmaz, Syracuse University Press, 2023)

The Practice of Collective Escape (Helen Traill, Bristol University Press, 2023)

Maps of Sorrow: Migration and Music in the Construction of Precolonial AfroAsia (Sumangala Damodaran and Ari Sitas, Columbia University Press, 2023)

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New stuff, late 2022:

B.H. Roberts, Moral Geography, and the Making of a Modern Racist (Clyde R. Forsberg, Jr.and Phillip Gordon Mackintosh, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022)

Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure and the Making of German Southwest Africa (Martin Kalb, Berghahn Books, 2022)

Sentient Ecologies: Xenophobic Imaginaries of Landscape (Edited by Alexandra Coțofană and Hikmet Kuran, Berghahn Books 2022)

Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884–1905 (Matthew Unangst, University of Toronto Press, 2022)

The Geographies of African American Short Fiction (Kenton Rambsy, University of Mississippi Press, 2022)

Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (Ruth Rogaski, University of Chicago Press, 2022)

Punishing Places: The Geography of Mass Imprisonment (Jessica T. Simes, University of California Press, 2021)

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New stuff, early 2022:

Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-fatness as Anti-Blackness (Da’Shaun Harrison, 2021)

Coercive Geographies: Historicizing Mobility, Labor and Confinement (Edited by Johan Heinsen, Martin Bak Jørgensen, and Martin Ottovay Jørgensen, Haymarket Books, 2021)

Confederate Exodus: Social and Environmental Forces in the Migration of U.S. Southerners to Brazil (Alan Marcus, University of Nebraska Press, 2021)

Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place (Palgrave, 2021)

Krakow: An Ecobiography (Edited by Adam Izdebski & Rafał Szmytka, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021)

Open Hand, Closed Fist: Practices of Undocumented Organizing in a Hostile State (Kathryn Abrams, University of California Press, 2022)

Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India (Jessica Namakkal, 2021)

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New stuff, 2020 and 2021:

Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom (Amanda Smith, Liverpool University Press, 2021)

Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (Edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Joanna Page, 2020)

Reconstructing public housing: Liverpool’s hidden history of collective alternatives (Matt Thompson, University of Liverpool Press, 2020)

The (Un)governable City: Productive Failure in the Making of Colonial Delhi, 1858–1911 (Raghav Kishore, 2020)

Multispecies Households in the Saian Mountains: Ecology at the Russia-Mongolia Border (Edited by Alex Oehler and Anna Varfolomeeva, 2020)

Urban Mountain Beings: History, Indigeneity, and Geographies of Time in Quito, Ecuador (Kathleen S. Fine-Dare, 2019)

City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856 (Marcus P. Nevius, University of Georgia Press, 2020)

[runalongprincevaliant]

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Enemy of the Sun

[zatdummesmadchen]

I completely support Israel being held accountable for its crimes against humanity, but we also can’t ignore that Indonesia has been violently occupying West Papua - a region more than twice the size of occupied Palestine - for the past 55 years, and has murdered 500,000 indigenous West Papuans in the process. Indonesian soldiers routinely burn indigenous villages to the ground, pose with the bodies of murdered Papuan civilians, and actively prevent journalists from reporting on the genocide. West Papuans often refer to their homeland as “Indonesia’s Palestine.”

There's nothing to add. I agree. I am not trying to imply that all of the countries supporting Palestine don't have their own interests or agendas or that they are perfect in any way. Such as China or, say, Iran. Not everything is black and white, and there are definitely multiple geopolitical reasons for their actions or stand.

There are definitely many biases when it comes to geopolitical situations and blatant hypocrisy.

I completely understand and do sympathise with the West Papuans.

Undoubtedly, the situation is awful and has been going on for years. Basic research shows plenty of results of the brutal Indonesian occupation and brutality against the people.

《 Here is this website I found which might be helpful to gain some insight, feel free to drop more and I will add it to the post. 》

The West Papua Genocide Monitor

Welcome to the Awareness Campaign page for West Papua genocide. You have come to the right place if you are looking for information about West Papua genocide. - the introduction. Very good information.

The situation is indeed very similar to Palestine, with some mentions of settler colonialism in some of the articles. Hence the name is fitting I suppose. Hypocrisy runs high in politics and history, no doubt.

Countries such as Turkey and Egypt come to mind, its very telling. They probably put out statements to pacify the outrage and the anger of their own citizens since it would and should threaten their power otherwise.

This includes several Arab governments such as Jordan (there are huge protests daily)

The information about it is easy to find although I think a much more educated blog would do well in explaining the situation.

[starlightomatic]

Settlers had a pogrom against Palestinians last night, in the town of Huwara in Nablus.

"Dozens of Israeli settlers rampaged violently for hours in the West Bank town of Huwara on Sunday evening, setting fire to Palestinian homes and cars, hours after two Israeli brothers were shot dead in a terror attack there.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said one man was shot dead by Israeli fire during the riots in the town of Za’tara, south of Huwara and close to the settlement of Kfar Tapuah. The Palestinian Red Crescent medical service said two other people were shot and wounded, a third person was stabbed and a fourth was beaten with an iron bar. Some 95 others were being treated for tear gas inhalation." -- TOI

[tamamita]

world politics and international conflicts should never be boiled down to "good guys" and "bad guys". This is the real world; it's complex and multi-faceted in ways that can't be reduced into pure black and white. You can say "the fight for Palestinian freedom from genocide is good" (objectively true, apartheid states should be dismantled) but ignoring all nuance regarding the parties at play will only lead to malformed understanding of how these situations arise. It will make you more susceptible to propaganda and propaganda isn't good even when it comes from the people you agree with.

Interestingly enough, we all know at the end that an Islamic emirate is the least desirable form of government, considering that a lot of Palestinians are secular. Hamas operates in Gaza and of course, it's easier to recruit when you're the're the only resistance group that's actively putting up a fight against the settler colonial entity. Yes, Hamas is better than the IOF in the context of occupier vs the occupied. But the Palestinian people, with all their strength and might, will come together and form the nation which they desire, but I doubt that an Islamic emirate will be one if we consider the people from the West Bank.

We will see.

[communistkenobi]

im an undergrad student who was thinking about specializing in studying fascist movements in North America for my masters and ive really enjoyed reading your book commentary - you connect things that I'm not always aware of in ways that are really comprehensive and appreciate

Do you know of any researchers who are moving things on the topic right now (most of the books ive read are around 20+ years old, unfortunately)?

(sorry if any of this is unclear/grammatically incorrect/weirdly worded - I'm super sick rn)

thank you! I'm really glad to hear that :)

For contemporary writing, I'm currently working through some of Alberto Toscano's work - he has a really interesting article from 2021 on fascism from a Black radical/Marxist perspective where he summarizes various historical analyses of fascism from Black (particularly US) thinkers and activists. One thing I especially appreciate is that he complicates Aime Cesaire's formulation of fascism (i.e., "european colonialism come home") as incomplete when applied to settler colonial contexts, especially the United States - one of Cesaire's articulations of fascism is that (to paraphrase) "one fine day, the prisons begin to fill up, the Gestapo gets busy" and so on, and Toscano, working through Angela Davis and George Jackson, responds with (again I'm paraphrasing) "the prisons are already full! The Gestapo is already here!" etc. Toscano also has a new book that just came out in 2023 called Late Fascism, which explicitly addresses the current moment. I only have a physical copy of that so I can't share a pdf unfortunately, and I still need to get around to reading it lol.

These are also a couple random articles I found insightful:

Carnut (2022). Marxist Critical Systematic Review on Neo-Fascism and International Capital: Diffuse Networks, Capitalist Decadence and Culture War - does what it says on the tin

Daggett (2018). Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire - talks about car culture as a site of modern reactionary political movements, links climate denialism with (proto-)fascist movements

Parmigiani (2021). Magic and politics: Conspirituality and COVID-19 - this one does not mention fascism explicitly, but imo the intersection between new age spirituality, anti-vaccine sentiment, and qanon/q-adjacent conspiracies are pretty important to understanding contemporary fascist social movements, so I'd still recommend reading this

Finally, this isn't an article but I found this recorded lecture about the history of Qanon pretty interesting. I don't think the author gives particularly insightful answers on how to solve the problem of far right conspiracies in the Q&A portion but I found it to be a helpful summary

Otherwise I've been focusing a lot on decolonial scholarship more so than fascist scholarship - this is again guided by Cesaire's argument that Europe/The West broadly is inherently fascist. These works aren't contemporary, but you can look at this post for some of the readings I linked on decolonial scholarship if you want to go that route. Those are serving me more for theoretical frameworks to guide contemporary analysis, not analysis of contemporary events directly

also idk if I need to put this disclaimer, but just in case this leaves my blog: this isn't a full throated defense of/apology for everything in these articles, I'm not claiming they're sufficient to understanding the present moment, these are just some of the things I've been reading recently and have found helpful in some way or another. a lot of contemporary work I have read (much of which isn't linked here because I don't think its very good/do not have it on hand) focuses on populism and authoritarianism as central analytical terminology, which i think does a lot of work to exceptionalize and mystify fascism as a historical and political process/project originating from European colonialism & Western imperialism, but these terms are endemic to the field so you have to contend with them no matter what

good luck with your studies!