#It's settler colonialism all the way down

[artificialcaracal]

I have to say that I heavily disagree with this take. the very formulation of racial hierarchy in the united states colonies was for the explicit purpose of dividing the working class. While the U.S. colonies were extracting wealth through colonial expansion, the distribution of this wealth was primarily to the land-owning upper class. however, to serve the ever-growing need for labor during colonial expansion, there was also a vast working class consisting of imported indentured servants signed to labor contracts meant to pay off their passage to the colonies, who upon reaching the end of their contracted terms, would be released to join their fellow poor workers. At this point both black and white laborers would congregate freely amongst themselves, and fearing the possibility of a mass insurrection, the land-owning bourgeois population needed a way to prevent working people from effectively mobilizing. This is why the u.s. colonies began offering small plots of land to white indentured servants at the end of their contracts and pivoted to the use of imported african slave labor.

african slaves, having had their entire lives upended, and no support networks to turn to in the colonies, were much easier to keep socially separate from even other free blacks. other poor white settlers were then given the role of overseeing this new labor force. quashing slave insurrections, hunting down and returning runaway slaves, preventing interracial gatherings, all to facilitate the hyper-exploitation of african slaves and their descendants. racism and chattel slavery did not simply spontaneously appear in the U.S. colonies. it was deliberately carried out and enforced by bourgeois interests. it was presented as "beneficial" to the african slaves who needed to be enslaved and kept in line "for their own good", and provided working class whites a population that it was acceptable to scapegoat and brutalize instead of the bougeois themselves. to claim the enslavement and subordination of african slaves was not a part of a fascist movement and a fascist state is to deny the material realities it was enacted in. it's to deny that there was ever a crisis of labor of in the u.s. colonies to begin with, and ignores the ways in which it was addressed in 1776 and is continuing to be addressed today.

is it not fascism when african slaves are denied their humanity, when members of their community are split apart and sold at the whims of their owners? is it not a fascist movement taking hold when former slaves in the southern states were immediately made second class citizens at the end of military reconstruction? is it not a fascist state when black people are killed by members of law enforcement without penalty? is it not a fascist movement taking hold when white supremacist organizations like the klu klux klan terrorize black communities, and are later celebrated in widely distributed films like "Birth of a Nation"? is it not a fascist movement taking hold when statues of confederate states leaders are constructed by white supremacist organizations to "celebrate their heritage"? is it not a fascist state when japanese citizens are systemically dispossessed and locked up in camps due simply due to their heritage? is it not a fascist state when the government willing, knowingly, allows millions to die from aids because it's hurting queer people the most? is it not a fascist state when leftist movements are actively monitored and destabilized, and their leaders killed by federal organizations because they pose a threat to bourgeois interests?

I suppose it doesn't count then. Because there's never been a serious economic failure or threat to capitalism in the u.s., and there's never been a leftist movement of any kind here either, and it doesn't count when it happens to immigrants, or people of color, or indigenous people, or queer people. it just never counts then. maybe when some cishet white people are the victims of state violence we can finally say that there's a fascist movement in the u.s. granted at that point, they might not be considered white, or cis, or het, or people at that point. maybe when state violence systematically happens to real usamerican people, whatever that will mean in the future, it'll count.

Any analysis of fascism that posits the USA in 1776 as a fascist state is one where 'fascism' is just an edgier way to say 'capitalism' - what capitalism isn't fascist, in this view; and what's the purpose of the term in that case?

Fascism is a specific formulation of capitalism which emerges when the capitalist system is in extreme crisis (specifically a crisis of entrenched fixed capital devastating the rate of profit). It is characterised by the extension of imperial methods to the population of imperial core itself - an autocannibalism when all other sources of profit have dried up - and the mobilisation of the petty-bourgeoisie. It explicitly borrows the methods of settler-colonialism to apply not only to its colonies, but also to itself. Fascism is not simply 'when genocide happens' - capitalism under liberal-democracy carries out genocide just as well.

In this regard it is essentially appropriate to say that fascism has been superfluous in the USA - a fascist movement has historically never been able to seriously gain ground in the USA because the needs of fascism are already met by straightforward settler-colonialism. There has been no deep crisis to spur on fascism, and no need to divide the populace and expropriate some portion of it, because the USA already has an exploitative and expropriative relationship with its internal colonies. This arrangement is not fascist, it is straightforwardly colonial.

There can only be a real fascist movement and fascist state in the USA if two conditions are met: 1) the settler state can no longer wring enough profit out of the exploitation of the indigenous and black peoples; and, 2) serious economic failure and crisis threatens the existence of capitalism, by inspiring popular revolt and communist organisation.

[soup-mother]

desperately need to forcibly beat the terra nullius out of how people on this website talk about Australia. you fucking cannot be saying shit like "oh everyone lives on the coast because it's the only habitable bit" in full seriousness.

doubly so for how everyone acts like indigenous tasmanians don't exist anymore. even fucking UNESCO said that shit for like 40 years and only got rid of it recently.

[irhabiya]

regarding the attempts to take down mohammed ayesh's campaign by zionists on the false claim that his campaign is fraudulent, i've spoken to him directly over the past few months. we've exchanged voice notes, i've heard the sound of drones in the background in his notes, he's sent me videos from where he'd been taking shelter explaining his situation in real time, he's shown me his process of verifying campaigns and has explained to me how hesitant he felt about making a campaign for to support his younger brother when he feels that there are many more gazans in need of all the support that they can get. he's been nothing but respectful and understanding since i've started talking to him.

if any of you zionist pigs really gave a fuck about supposed scams, i have ample evidence via our text and voice messages with him to prove he's really been working on the ground in gaza to verify countless campaigns. but obviously that's not what you racist pieces of shit are actually trying to do here, as if proudly endorsing a genocide isn't enough for you repulsive cunts, you're actively trying to murder palestinians in any way that you can, be that by propagandizing on behalf of a fascist settler colonial state or literally trying to cut off any source of income palestinians can rely on. go to hell.

[arabian-batboy]

If a war between Iran and Israel really will emerge it will not just be Iranians who will suffer, but every country in the region will be somewhat involved, which includes some nations that are already declared as one of the poorest, most war-torn and starved nations in the world. All of whom all be completely unprotected while Israel wreak havoc on their citizens (excluding those who live in puppet-states aligned with the US) with full-support and funding from the US and other Western superpowers to ensure that no matter happens, their influence and interests in the Middle East will not be lost and they'e willing to sacrifice the lives of as many non-Israeli civilians as they want to in order to achieve their goal.

This is one of the reasons they implanted this cancerous tumor called Israel in our region, to act as military base that cause instability and state-sponsored terrorism in the area so that it would be easier for them to exploit these failed-states that surround it and the best part is? All they have to do to maintain this military base is give them a couple billions and some weapons yearly so that those blood-lust Zionist settlers can do all the dirty work for them, that's NOTHING compared to the costs and casualties of other wars that had the US be directly involved in like Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan (off the record; but that's exactly why they're using Saudi Arabia to indirectly destroy Yemen, they learned their lesson, its always better to use a proxy.)

If a war breaks out? The US will not be in any real danger, because they're half-way across the world and all the fighting will be in West Asia and North Africa, far away from them. No American building is in danger of being destroyed, no American city is under the threat of being bombed, the average American citizen will not be in any danger and can just continue living their life like normal, hence why they're always the first ones to start making those WW3 memes, because they're not the ones in danger of dying.

This is precisely why the US's imperialism in the Middle East hasn't slowed down in decades, because they do not suffer any negative consequences from it. All the destruction and casualties they cause is inflicted solely on the native people and the native people only, for the US, they only have things to gain from these wars, whether it was stolen resources or more instability that will further their control and influence in the area.

The US, like every single oppressive empire in history, will not suddenly grow a conscious over-night and immediately halt all their wrongdoings simply because they don't want the innocent people in other countries to suffer anymore. The only way to stop their imperialism is to have them believe that its not worth it anymore, to have the cons of being involved in our region out-weight the pros.

Because at the moment if the only cons here are "innocent Muslims will die"? Then those motherfucking colonizers will NOT stop, they will only stop once it reaches a point where its also the colonizers who are dying alongside the native population and the first step for that to happen is to dismantle this giant settler-colony built square in the middle of our region and forcing these Western Superpowers to choose between continuously spending trillions of dollars to maintain their interests directly or to fucking leave us alone already and save those trillions for something else.

[headspace-hotel]

okay. so.

i'm reading this book The Origins of the Modern World by Robert Marks

and even from the beginning i was getting this weird feeling from it. I'm always really wary of books that are broad overviews of history that claim to explore big theory-of-everything explanations for very broad phenomena, because history is unbelievably complex and there is so much disagreement between historians about everything.

But anyway I come to this section (in the first chapter)

This writer's opinion is that the Americas seemed so abundant when English settlers first arrived because the Native Americans had been mostly killed, and as a result, the wildlife increased greatly in numbers and forests overtook the farms, creating what appeared to be a natural paradise.

I'm immediately suspicious of this paragraph because arguing that the mass death of Native Americans was good for nature seems really contradictory to the research I've explored, on top of being just...disgusting.

But it doesn't sound right in regards to how ecosystems work either. If populations of animals had recently exploded after millennia of being limited by a major predator, it would cause the plants to be overwhelmed by the herbivore populations. The land would be stripped barren and eroded, and soon the animals would be weak and starving.

So I thought to myself, huh, a citation. I will look at the citation and see what it says.

It's a book called Changes in the Land by William Cronon, who seems to be one of the most important and respected guys in his field. I thought, I have to find this book. So I did, I found the book, and spent like an hour reading through it.

And what I discovered, is that Cronon's book directly contradicts what Marks says in the paragraph that cites Cronon?!

So basically this entire book, Changes in the Land, is a detailed exploration of how the arrival of English settlers, the decline of Native American populations, and the slow transition to European farming and land use practices caused increasing degradation to the ecosystem, beginning very early on in colonization.

Changes in the Land quotes a great array of documents from the colonial period where settlers observed the soil becoming depleted, animals disappearing, and the climate itself becoming more hostile even in the 1600's. It's actually a really fascinating book.

Cronon tells us that Native Americans created lush and abundant conditions for wild animals by causing a "mosaic" of habitats, with different areas representing various stages of ecological succession. With this great diversity in habitats, and lots of transitional "edges" between them, the prosperity of the animal life was maximized. This was intentional, and really a type of farming.

The book essentially explains how European settlers couldn't recognize Native American life ways as "agriculture," they thought the land was just supernaturally abundant all by itself because of its inherent nature, and yet almost immediately after settlers came, the abundance of the land degraded and vanished. The settlers cut down vast amounts of trees, which caused erosion, which destroyed the river and stream ecosystems and starved the soil of nutrients. Destruction of forest caused less rain, and more extreme temperatures. It became a vicious cycle where the settlers had to abuse the land more and more just to survive.

The spiral pulled in Native American communities too, forcing them to turn to more exploitative means of survival like the fur trade, (which depleted the beaver population, which caused the decline of beaver ponds, which harmed the whole forest). It describes how the changing ecosystems left Native Americans with no choice but to turn to European practices for survival, which in turn depleted the land even further.

Even I was surprised to learn just how early on environmental disaster set in, and the incredible extent of it. English farming practices literally reshaped the map of New Haven between the 17th and 18th centuries:

To return to Marks, though...Marks' statement in the excerpt, where he says the "abundance" of animals continued throughout the 19th century, is blatantly false according to the source HE CITES.

Deer were becoming scarce in New England by the 1690's. It was so bad by 1718 that deer hunting was forbidden for 3 years at that time, and by 1800, deer were almost extirpated from New England. The book explains on another page that wild turkeys became so rare that a farmer's manual from the time said their domesticated turkeys were from Turkey—settlers had no opportunity to see a wild turkey and no idea they existed.

Marks is supporting his statement using a source entirely dedicated to contradicting the exact thing he's saying! It's unbelievable.

How does this happen? Did Marks just have his own opinion and insert a famous book that seemed to be on the subject as support, without reading it?

I'm thinking now of all the times I've read a book and seen a citation on a statement and unconsciously thought "oh, well it seems there is evidence, so it must be reliable" when actually, something like this was happening. The array of ways misinformation can be propagated and never be found out is terrifying.

[notaplaceofhonour]

it’s october 7th. you hear about the attack by seeing people you followed glorifying the terrorist attack—a massacre, a pogrom—as victory & justified resistance, glorifying a terrorist group that was founded with the explicit intent to kill your entire people

you make a post in which you make it clear you support palestinians and oppose the ways israel has wronged them, explaining that the terrorist group is still not good. you know you will probably get some flacc from the pro-Hamas side, but naively underestimate how much.

you get thousands of notifications on that one post, the majority of them hateful comments.

some of the response is positive. multiple messages thank you for the post, expressing bafflement that it’s controversial.

a few Israelis are upset at the loaded language in your post, but explain their problems with it civilly. you called Israel “apartheid”. they ask you what apartheid laws Israel has. you admit you honestly don’t know.

your inbox is flooded with anonymous hate from anti-Israel leftists.

over the course of a few weeks you have received hundreds of death threats, a dozen rape threats. people accuse you of being pro-genocide. you’re a literal Nazi. you’re racist, you thirst for the blood of Palestinians. you’re brainwashed by propaganda, a shill for The Zionist Entity. a few of the hate messages are from literal Neo-Nazis; the overwhelming majority are from leftists, many of them queer.

you are considering suicide.

you see footage of the october 7th attacks. you see footage of the bombings in gaza. you see footage of a Jewish man being murdered at an anti-Israel rally.

a popular creator you follow posts in support of an antisemitic hate group that masquerades as a Jewish organization. this organization regularly posts blood libel and other antisemitic rhetoric, works with groups that are even more explicitly antisemitic, including celebrating October 7th, holocaust inversion, blood libel, “Khazar theory” and others. more than one of the orgs they work with is pro-Putin.

your former roommate liked the post.

graffiti appears on a street you frequent that says “#freepalestine” and “end settler colonialism”

the boyfriend of the friend you spent most of the summer with makes his first post about the war. it’s a reposted comic that mocks and downplays the october 7th attack.

you doubt he’ll be receptive to criticism. he’s shared leftist memes about “monied elites” pulling all the strings and evangelicals being modern day “pharisees” in the past, and getting him to understand why that was antisemitic was like herding cats. you try anyway.

another of his Jewish friends also pushes back. he smugly dismisses her, tells her she’s falling for Zionist propaganda and uses several antisemitic tropes. you go off on him. he just deletes your comment.

you give up. you’re done. you block him.

you see anti-Israel posters and billboards around town

you mention what happened with the guy you went off on to his girlfriend—the friend you’ve grown very close to, who you’ve been listening to as she unburdens her fears for the future and complains about her bf’s BS over the last year. she doesn’t respond to you.

a friend of a friend shares posts tokenizing fringe groups that spread blood libel and have collaborated with holocaust deniers. you know they don’t know what you know, so you explain what those groups are. they seem somewhat receptive, apologize, and take it down

the next day they share several more posts that dip into antisemitic tropes. you mention this to your mutual friend, that you’re worried about them being radicalized. you’re not sure how receptive they’ll be to continued criticism

you have a confrontation with the foaf. in the meantime they’ve shared even more antisemitic posts. they say they didn’t mean to cause you distress but instead of stopping they effectively block you.

the “end settler colonialism” vandalism has been counter-vandalized with the words “commie propaganda” in place of “settler colonialism”. you don’t know if this is an improvement.

a month passes. the friend whose bf you went off on still hasn’t spoken to you. you see she shared a post defending an SJP chapter that posted Nazi cartoon caricatures of Jews repurposed in “Anti-Zionist” memes. you unfriend her on all social media platforms but you can’t bring yourself to block her number.

you see a friend of someone whose couch you surfed when you were homeless harassing Jewish celebrities with “Free Palestine” comments. you block them.

you’ve lost count of how many people you’ve unfollowed or blocked, or who’ve blocked you. friends, content creators.

when a friend takes an unusually long time to respond you worry if it’s because of your posts about antisemitism.

most of the podcasts, youtube channels, and other content creators you regularly engaged with no longer feel safe. you wonder who will be next

a couple friends wish you a happy hanukkah. you don’t celebrate much aside from lighting the hanukkiah and making some latkes.

you see posts about a destroyed chabad menorah, antisemitic comments on Jewish celebrities’ Hanukkah posts.

your neighborhood is covered in pro-Palestine & anti-Israel posters. some are seemingly innocuous, some are JVP “not in our name” posters. some call for intifada. “globalize the intifada” “Zionists fuck off!” “solidarity means attack!”

a man kills himself shouting “free palestine”. you learn about his suicide by seeing posts from several popular accounts you followed glorifying it.

you follow a bunch of jewish accounts on social media and commiserate with them about everything happening

your jewish friends post screenshots of the dead man’s antisemitic, pro-Hamas views. you look at his reddit and find even more horrific shit: anti-Ukraine posts. mocking Zelensky. “elites” are “lizard people”; the only named individual he calls a lizard person is Jewish. you start to notice a pattern: a lot of the people he dislikes just so happen to be jews.

several people you know share a post glorifying this man’s suicide. most are acquaintances, one is someone incredibly important to you.

you wonder how they would respond to your suicide.

you tell the close friend that shared this post how it scares you. you show them the receipts of the man’s antisemitism. their response is a single sentence. they didn’t know about the antisemitism.

they don’t apologize.

you notice none of your irl friends, even your closest ones, interact with your posts about antisemitism. you are able to vent to a couple friends, but no one has reach out to you

you try not to read into it. you try not to take it personally.

you haven’t slept well in months. you’ve always been an insomniac but not like this. you’re not sleeping until 4am, 6am, even 9am. even when you get to bed at a decent hour and get a full night’s rest it takes you hours to get out of bed.

a few weeks go by. the friend with the single sentence response shares a post saying they’re excited and proud to join a group to help palestinians. you’re excited and proud for them.

a couple days later, they share a post about a fundraiser to help a palestinian family get out of gaza. you note to yourself this is a much more effective & less concerning form of activism than the pro-suicidal antisemite post.

your friend shares another post about the fundraiser. it’s a joint post between their group and another group.

you open the other group’s page

the page is just a wall of signs from rallies. you swipe through one after another: “from the river to the sea”, “by any means necessary”, justifying/denying the atrocities of october 7th, calling for violent revolution. anything done in the name of resistance can’t be terrorism, all Israelis are terrorists. Jews aren’t indigenous; they’re white colonizers. holocaust inversion. other vile, thinly veiled violent rhetoric

you feel sick to your stomach imagining talking to your friend about it.

you already feel like you’re burdening the few friends you can talk to about this. you already feel like you think about it too much, talk about it too much. but you can’t not think about it; it affects every aspect of your life.

you’ve filtered out relevant keywords on more than one social media site to avoid the worst of it. some still manages to leak through.

there isn’t a single friend you regularly interact with that you don’t fear the moment when they will switch from listening to your concerns to seeing you as the evil zionist or indoctrinated hasbaranik they’ve been warned about.

it’s not an irrational fear. it keeps happening. you knew it would then, and you were powerless to do anything about it before, and you continue to be as it happens again and again.

you don’t know what to do about any of it.

[drdemonprince]

I don't know if it is because of my intense autistic burnout or because I intellectualize my emotions, but I talk to other leftists and activists who are autistic and they share about being in tears for hours, unable to eat, etc., because of the ongoing genocide. I just feel such shame that I am not having these reactions. I can intellectually feel upset, I feel angry almost all the time that all these things are happening, I try to engage in what action I can. But when I reach inside I don't feel this physical revulsion, mostly just nothing, an emptiness that is just there unless I actively think and prompt knowing I am angered and outraged. And this isn't much different than how I feel empathy interpersonally. I have had crying fits and meltdowns and been unable to eat because of my own personal problems at times. But I wonder if it's because I'm just privileged and protected by genocidal fascist colonialism and I need to wake the fuck up to the fact that I'm just selfish bitch.

You're not a selfish bitch. I am much the same way. I simply do not have emotions about most events in the world. That doesn't prevent me from taking actions that align with my values to oppose settler colonialism and genocide. In fact, I often find it easier to think clearly about the issues that I care about and take action when I am not weighed down by intense overpowering emotions.

I sometimes feel like other people must be lying about how emotionally distressed they are by these events, and that they must think being bereft proves what a good person they are and how seriously they take it. The loud performing of despair and sorrow can even annoy me because it feels so false and pointless and obnoxiously self involved.

Intellectually though I KNOW that isn't right, at least not for everyone. Lots of people just are genuinely saddened by the ongoing genocide to the extent that they cannot even function. It is just very hard for me to wrap my brain around because I do not experience such emotions. I do not place any pressure on myself to feel any particular thing, because my emotions are not a reflection of who I am. My behavior is.

Despair is not moral. A person crying and lying catatonic on the floor unable to eat does not do SHIT to help starving Palestinians. Me feeling deeply numb to the images of death and destruction that I see every day does nothing to harm them either.

What matters is how we ACT. And I do care about fighting the genocide. And I show that with my actions. And so do many of the people who are bereft too. but not because they are bereft.

Suffering isn't moral. That christianity brain talking. (which can influence a person be they christian or not). There is no good put into the world by you crying and denying yourself things and being in pain. That's a highly self involved, symbolic understanding of morality we've all been conditioned into believing. But it is nonsense. Emotions have no impact on the external world. Thoughts and prayers have no impact on the external world.

We dont have to feel any emotion about the genocide, we need to ACT.

So please stop beating yourself up for not beating yourself up more. It is of no value to the cause.

[psychotrenny]

I really do think this is the end for Israel. The beginning of the end at least. They're essentially a relic of an earlier time, a time when, through a complex confluence of factors, the military power of Europe was so far beyond the rest of the world that it could openly keep the world in shackles. The Imperial powers of Europe could do as they wished and respond to any resistance with overwhelming violence that, no matter how costly in money or lives or how many years it took, would eventually force open resistance to come to a (temporary) end. You saw exceptions of course, such as Ethiopia's successful repulsion of Italian invaders in the 1890s (although even that victory is somewhat undercut but Italy's more successful invasion about 40 years later), but in the majority of cases even the most brave and intelligent of resistance fighters would see themselves worn down and defeated. Just off the top of my head you have figures like Samori Toure, Omar al-Mukhtar, Samuel Maharero; all inflicted numerous defeats on their European Imperialist enemies but in the end couldn't overcome the sheer force that was arrayed against them.

Of course such supremacy was never absolute even at it's apex, and this height was so very short lived. Resistance never fully stopped; outbursts of violence were frequent and various forms of passive resistance like migration, tax evasion and industrial slowdown were ubiquitous. Resistance movements learned from past failures, acquired the weapons of modern war and soon proved a credible threat to the Imperialist forces that by the middle of the 20th century had exhausted themselves through in-fighting. Whether evicted through direct violence or choosing to leave under the inevitable threat of it, the European powers largely ended their direct domination over the colonised world. That's not to say Imperialism was over, far from it, but it mostly took on subtler forms; more soft power with only the occasional resort to hard. Imperial domination is now more than ever exerted through various local proxies and the broader forces that keep them in check as direct subjugation just isn't especially viable.

In the parts of the world without substantial settler populations this withdrawal was accomplished smoothly enough; most of the Europeans present either left without a fuss or found some sort of niche under the new order of things. But the liberation of colonies with large settler populations was a longer and bloodier process; just compare the French withdrawal from Indochina to that from Algeria or the fate of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). A large number of Europeans were heavily entrenched in these colonies and had both their material wealth and sense of pride tied to the maintenance of white supremacy. Many politicians back in Europe were less willing to abandon such settler colonies, while with or without support from back home the colonists engaged in their own bloody wars of oppression against indigenous people.

But in the end they all fell. Algeria, Rhodesia, Angola, South Africa, the list goes on. Even as these places continue to suffer under the yoke of less direct Imperialism they can take pride knowing that the scourge of direct setter subjugation was defeated. Exploiting people is one thing; there are many ways you can accomplish this without the exploited truly catching on. But the sort of violence it takes to brazenly steal control of a people's land, settle yourself on it while keeping the original inhabitants as second class citizens is going to engender the fiercest resistance no matter what. The only remotely stable settler colonies are those where the indigenous peoples were already decimated by disease before being subjected to centuries of genocidal policies, reducing their current population to a small minority of the nation. And even then the survives continue to resist fiercely. In places where the settlers remained the minority there was simply no chance of such regimes surviving for long.

Israel as a state is among the last of its kind, and I see no reason why it shouldn't meet the fate of all other such colonies. The way I see it the end of Israel is inevitable. The only question is just how much bloodshed and suffering it'll take. The struggle has been ongoing for so very long. I truly hope that we're seeing the final stages of it, but I suppose only time can tell. All I know for sure is that from from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free

[grendel-menz]

What are your opinions on "cottage core"?

Hmmm… I dislike it. I do think most of the people interacting with the aesthetic don’t reflect or know how fantasies like that function and what they’re rooted in.

When you look at past settler colonial projects, the promise of beautiful land and a simple, free life were used to market (there’s probably a better way to phrase this, and better people who have) the project of it all. I feel its modern rendition still does in many ways.

There is no simple, easy, and pretty farm life of flowers and fields and bread unless there’s exploited labor, and I also don’t like the idea of people thinking about ‘untouched’ land as a thing that exists beyond white fantasy. Someone has to put in the hours of consistently pulling weeds and cleaning coups and the thousand other things those sort of lifestyles require, and it looks very very different from what cottagecore promises - unless there’s someone faceless and unspoken doing all that labor while those girls in their tea party dresses and sun hats frolic around day after day. In the woods and on the farm you get some beautiful moments, but they don’t look like that unless your simply visiting or distant from the dirt.

This also just might be personal bias from my experience of going from farm to college, but I do feel some of the people who lean heavily into the aesthetic have a deep distaste for the people actually living in the rural areas they want to homestead. If you want to live with the chickens you’ve named and the goats you’ve bottle babied you’ll eventually have to talk to someone broke with an accent. Rural poverty and how the people living in it are perceived, especially in the US, is a huge issue and something I could talk about for days tbh.

I’ve got to go to work but idk! If there’s other questions about this sort of thing I’m down to answer, I’m a talker at the end of the day. This also isn’t meant to rain on parades, just telling how it see it!

[sepublic]

The core to Belos’ character is that he’s everything wrong with the United States of America. Why else is he a Puritan, a group of racist settlers who helped found the U.S. and contributed to the genocide of the Native Americans? Why else does he dress up like a Founding Father when not in papal robes, with a ponytail resembling a powdered wig?

Luz thinking he’s a great explorer, only to find out Philip is just an entitled asshole who takes credit from others to make himself look better, is a play on people IRL finding out that people like Christopher Columbus and Thomas Edison were assholes who stood on the shoulders of others. It’s a play on white mediocrity and how white guys do the bare minimum and expect to be praised.

Belos is a bigot whose entire motive and goals are based on genocide-level bigotry, and he refuses to unlearn any beliefs; Being a historical Puritan he is 100% racist and misogynistic and unlike Caleb, didn’t take the chance to grow out of it. He wants to believe he’s born special and better than everyone else, and that’s why he buys into white supremacy. The modern cop is the descendant of the witch hunter.

There is an explicit connection between the colonial genocide of Native Americans and Belos’ genocide of witches and demons, down to imposing a Christian misunderstanding of the local religion. He feels entitled to their magic but does none of the work to understand, nor does he cultivate a sustainable relationship with the land the way indigenous people do, hence consuming palismen.

He coined the term Savage Ages, with Savage having racist connotations. His fantasy is the Monster Hunter, the idea that it’s okay to dehumanize anything and even anyone that’s different to kill them. He believes in the Evil Races trope which is of course inherently racist. Belos treats Luz like his White Man’s Burden, a brown child who needs a White Savior to civilize (just as the U.S. kidnapped Native American children to assimilate), and then tries to kill Luz when she doesn’t go along instead of just. Leaving Luz alone or dragging her into the human realm with him anyway.

Belos makes exceptions to his religion when convenient, allowing himself to use magic but then demonizing those who do, just as homophobic Christians and Republicans do. Think of all the anti-gay politicians who are caught being gay; They’re not repressed victims, just hypocrites who think they’re entitled to special treatment. Philip didn’t rat on Caleb for hanging out with a witch for the reasons Pro-Lifers let loved ones have abortions; Caleb was important to him, and he’s not one of the witches Philip planned to murder. And even then he still killed Caleb for ‘crossing a line’!

The Puritans and other groups informed the Alt-Right in the U.S., as well as Evangelicals who rage about how something as innocuous as Pokemon is a Satanic influence (Yes this happened; The Conformatorium doesn’t seem so unrealistic after all, and remember that Dana’s father gave her a copy of Pokémon Red before he died that she latched onto). But like the Televangelist, Belos indulges in material wealth and glory via the glamour of Catholicism, because he’s not even consistent to Puritan values either.

He’s Trump, he’s Elon Musk, he’s Ron DeSantis. He’s the incel/mass shooter who fell down the pipeline, who feels cheated out of the promises of a white supremacist society and takes it out on minorities but not other white guys, because he thinks the system’s idea is fine it just isn’t working as it should, at least he’s better than those guys. He calls others NPCs because he wants to believe he’s born special and better and chosen.

Belos’ reaction to Caleb being with Evelyn was undeniably motivated by racial disgust at his brother for committing miscegenation and making Philip related to a savage in the process, it’s why he never brings it up because of the scandalous shame of it all. Belos hates those witches more than he ever loved Caleb, Caleb was never his priority or he’d have changed his mind; It had far less to do with ‘codependency’ and far more to do with white supremacy, perhaps Philip wouldn’t have minded Caleb settling with a human white woman. The issue being not Caleb leaving him but who Caleb left him for.

Belos thinks taming a wilderness and murdering its natives makes him a tough man because he’s insecure. He has a sniveling victim complex that can’t comprehend why minorities would dislike him, except that they’re mean. Belos epitomizes the U.S.’s racial and colonial violence, its white supremacy, and its global police narrative that decides the existence of another, independent world is an inherent threat to his own.

The conflict between Philip and Caleb was over racism, and so it’s black and white because racism is always wrong. Making it ‘nuanced’ would take away from the fact that the motives for real life racism are inherently nonsensical and insincere; Caleb wasn’t selfish for living with another culture on its terms, instead of staying in the racism village (The Gravesfield statues corroborate Philip being an adult when he arrived in the Demon Realm, according to the memory portraits; Caleb waited until Philip was an adult before leaving). Philip was not a weird kid, he was adhering to his social norms with games about how anyone different or actually weird should die, and he wanted to do this, he’s a Conformatorium prude like all the rest and let his fear of Evelyn justify and evolve into violence.

Even if he was weird, Belos isn’t telling other people they should fit in for their sake, he’s telling them they should just die (Unlike himself, because he’s ‘special’); It’s what he admits to the Collector in the finale about not bothering teaching them anything, just wiping them out. Belos uses magic only to kill magic and discards it out of disgust when he’s about to leave, but makes an exception for the life of the non-human he’s become.

And the choice for the villain to be a genuine Puritan makes sense, because this is a show about weirdoes, so who’s designating them as such and why? Luz has a conflict with the IRL system since the first scene and Belos symbolizes the system, his Puritan ideology marked the foundation for it and the U.S. Belos killing Caleb is just the cherry on top of his actual motives and what his character was always about, that’s why his death scene isn’t him lamenting about Caleb or how lonely he is, it’s him being racist and demanding special treatment for his race. A racist white man feels no guilt for the witches and demons he murdered, just his white brother and clones; He still keeps killing them too btw.

Deeming someone a lost cause and killing them instead of working to rehabilitate is un-Christian, because Belos is not secretly bound by his religion, he picks and chooses. His guilt is not Catholic, he is the Protestant belief in his own superiority. Belos isn’t just a Nazi, he’s an American racist, he’s the KKK; He’s a condemnation of American Values and Exceptionalism, and lowkey I think that’s part of the reason why Family-Friendly Disney canned TOH, because Belos is a condemnation of a major consumer base. Disney being more progressive than other companies means jackshit because it’s performative and the bar is in hell.

[jewish-sideblog]

"Both indigenous and colonizers" CAN PEOPLE STOP TALKING ABOUT SHIT THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND PLEASE

This wave of antisemitism and bullshit about "indigenous vs colonizer" makes me so scared as an indigenous person in the US of what will happen when Land Back movements do result in actual sovereignty restoration and then tribes do what people do and disagree over land and resources, like we were doing for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Will we be reduced down to colonizers too??

It feels like Westerners, especially USAmericans, have such a black and white idea of what it means to be indigenous and what it means to be a colonizer/settler (because those terms are always conflated) and it makes me so angry and frustrated to see people apply those standards and lines thinking not just to complex sovereignty movements in their own countries but also to incredibly complex conflicts and wars happening on the other side of the world.

The damage I've seen done to sovereignty movements here in the US alone, people going around claiming that we want all "settlers" to go back to Europe or that we're going to start massacring people, has been horrible and the fact that it's all just to justify antisemitism makes me sick.

Genuinely. They're blocked now, but that same person said something to the effect of "Would an Iranian praying in a Mosque built on the ashes of a former synagogue be decolonization?"

And that was the point at which I was like. Ok. It seems like most people genuinely don't actually know what the terms "colonization", "colonizer" and "coloniality" mean. Obviously, that wouldn't be decolonization, because the Jews never colonized Iran. Emigration and colonization aren't the same fucking thing!

I used to have so much faith in my generation. I thought we were critical thinkers, capable of flexibility and engagement with new ideas. But I'm realizing now that we're basically just rebranded boomers. Back in the day, anybody you disagreed with was labelled as a "Communist". It didn't actually fucking matter if they were communist sympathizers, Soviet sympathizers, or even if they were remotely allied with socialist ideals. You could just call them a "Communist" and be done with it, without even understanding what that term means.

It's the same shit today. Instead of a HUAC witch hunt targeting communists, it's a social witch hunt targeting "colonizers" and "Zionists". I am terrified that the moment indigenous rights movements in the Americas and Oceania start making practical strides in Land Back, regaining rightful control over the ways your own land is used, you'll all be labelled as "colonizers" or "imperialists" or whatever the bad buzz word of the month turns out to be.

People simply can't wrap their heads around the idea that indigenous decolonization doesn't have the end goal of ethnically cleansing non-native people from the Americas. And it's because they're so absorbed in colonial thinking. They can't even fucking imagine what sovereignty could look like beyond an authoritarian structure based on control and violence. It's the same with Israel and Palestine-- they think that Jewish sovereignty must look like complete Jewish control to the detriment of Arabs, and they think Palestinian sovereignty must look like total Arab control to the detriment of Jews. The idea that a shared state or a two-state solution is "racist" stems from that false dichotomy.

Establishing an ideological binary of violence that pits "indigenous" against "colonizer", "native" against "settler", and "us" against "them" with no room for cooperation or collaboration is the core of colonialism. Because the core of colonialism is the idea that only one group can have true power at a time. And that's just not the way the world has to work.

[scamallach-1]

When fellow “US” settlers tell each other that they wanna learn about indigenous decolonial land back here on this land but then spend time making an issue about their time, saying they don’t really have time to educate themselves, my autistic ass is at a loss. Cus I’m stumped. You say you want to learn and then when provided with resources your regular response is that you don’t have time? I see it constantly, this excuse. In comment sections when people ask questions and then claim they don’t have time to read the answer; in my own circle when my fellows blab about things they don’t know and then when presented with correct answers and sources, they get quiet and say they just haven’t had time to look into it (yet that doesn’t quiet their mouths on shit they don’t know). We settlers need to ask ourselves right now what we are willing to change for the greater good. If you make a bed from selfishness then expect to sleep in it, I think.

I can’t make other people work decolonial edu into their schedules, I can only send them the resources directly from where I myself am learning about decolonization: the First Nations educators and historians and scholars and Black New Afrikan educators, historians and scholars. If you want to learn about this stuff - and you must - I think it does require making the sacrifices in your daily life necessary for you to be able to do that. Settler-colonialism has us in a chokehold so we need to be more than what it ‘allows’ in order to unlearn it!

I don’t know what other settlers want me to say? Do they want me to be wishy-washy with them about it? Say that whole “if you have time, please consider, sometime…” No, i am not gonna say that because I believe that is bullshit and nothing will get done with that passive attitude.

I do think we working class/poverty class/disabled settlers need to help each other be able to prioritize this education NOW. The indigenous and Black educators we learn from also have jobs, also have children they need to care for, have personal responsibilities and important things to do - and have active genocides against their people. They believe full-heartedly in working toward decolonial land back because of course they do. This is their lives, and not just individual by individual. They’re working for their people’s liberation in the face of settler-colonial genocides!

And so when we look at our work and school and family schedules - as settlers, no different in status than the “Israeli” settler occupying Palestine - and we prioritize our own overwhelm when we are asked to make the fucking space and take the fucking time for this imperative education, so we can be ready accomplices to decolonial action in the coming years, you gotta know how fucked up that is. We should no longer snap into this typical self-serving behavior!

No, I’m not going to say anything less than what I believe is factual, based on the edu ive so far learned from the indigenous and Black liberationists who are telling us, with their radical perspective and wisdom, what we need to do and how we should go about it, even as potential settler accomplices. Prioritize decolonial edu. Make fucking room.

We settlers should all help each other to accomplish this. Plenty of settlers like me with learning disabilities are out there trying to encourage others and make it easier for people to read the histories and theories. People break this information down for you so you can learn it in different ways (audiobook recordings, forum discussions, infographics that take a couple min to read, key histories in “less than 6 minutes”, YouTube interviews and discussions, podcast discussions, free book banks with PDFs, free articles). We have different ways of learning and in different stretches of time available - I really think what matters is that you work to get it done regardless of daily constraint. Show some solidarity. Working class settlers are not the center of the oppressed under settler-colonialism. We are the settler-colonialism. We must actually work to dismantle it by following FN leadership.

The idea that anything liberating and meaningful just falls into someone’s hands is a white supremacist lie.

What I wish is that in my circle at least, fellow settlers would say “I want to learn this but it’s hard and I need help, will you help me?” — to which I would do all I can in order to ensure they can learn. I have more time than others do because I work only part time due to my disability - but that is time I have to give to discuss, share, read-to others (I have dyslexia but I will fucking READ TO YOU because I know how hard it can be!) The point here is, if you begin your edu, you won’t be alone. Reach for support to make it happen and there will be people who will take the endeavor seriously with you.

But you have to be committed to learning this going forward. You have to actually want to begin learning about decolonial land back.

[doberbutts]

just a random guy w no stake in this but yr guy also fully regurgitated israel’s/zionist lies abt the “””misfired rocket””” hitting the hospital as if there isn’t documented evidence of israel admitting to - wanting to do that - doing that - expressing joy at the fact that they did that. the israeli govt spent days saying they were gonna bomb a hospital, bombed a hospital, /said they bombed the hospital/, and then changed their story to “misfired rocket” among other things (not a single hamas rocket is capable of that kind of destruction…) when they got flack for it. and Avi has yet to retract that statement despite it being another blatant lie from the israeli govt.

& obv this is much smaller but when pointed out that what ngaiman said that was zionist (“israel has the right to exist”, which he reconfirmed was still his stance), avi doubled down on that…not being zionism. and said ppl only call gaiman a zionist bc he’s jewish (which.. sure some ppl do, but the claim that a settler colonial state (or any state, tbh) has an inherent “right” to exist, and specifically that Israel has a “right” to exist, is literally zionism. which avi seems to think is not.)

i don’t think he’s a zionist himself but he certainly repeating a lot of zionist bs uncritically

I literally just got an article this morning talking about the forensics going on regarding the hospital bombing, from CNN, citing multiple sources saying the same thing; that it was a misfired rocket originating from somewhere in Gaza and probably not intentional, with all parties with munitions denying that it was theirs despite the firing of rockets nearby from all of said parties. No shrapnel or casings have yet been recovered and until that is recovered there is no way to know for sure where the device was made or where it came from.

So unless you are leaning on the antisemitic claim that Jews control the media, either all of CNN's sources are wrong including the Palestinian ones, or he's literally just repeating what multiple sources have been saying as of this morning.

Also conveniently you're leaving out that he's also stated that it doesn't matter where the device came from, the targetting of hospitals and other civilian centers is abhorrent and an immediate ceasefire needed to be called the moment it happened. Weird how he's not praising it, he's stating what the forensic team on site is reporting, and he's stating that no matter who is at fault they shouldn't be involving peaceful civilians.

As for whether or not Israel should exist... where exactly do you want the Israelis to go? A significant number of them were born there, with ancestors that originated there, as Arabic people living alongside Palestinians. They do have just as much right to be there as Palestinians because they have common ancestry with Palestinians. Those that came from elsewhere largely were forcibly expelled as an act of genocide- "going back where (they) came from" means going back to somewhere that's made it plain they are not welcome and they'll be killed on sight. They went to Israel because they were told that was the only correct choice for them.

Also I think it is incredibly dicey to be wielding "Jews are inherent outsiders that need to go back where they came from" because that is an antisemitic statement that has echoed across history ANDDDDD I think it's uhhhh incredibly hilarious as afronative to hear fucking Americans saying this when we're on stolen land ourselves with a government that is still trying to wipe out the few indigenous people we have left and sweep its continued atrocities under the rug.

What's that saying about glass houses and stones? If you're on American soil and you're not indigenous, how about you go back where you came from? Oh? You were born here? You have a family history here? You have deep ties to the area and can't just uproot your entire life? It's a little more complicated than just getting on a plane back to Europe or Asia or Africa? Hmm. Interesting. Don't you know that makes you complicit in genocide? No no no, it doesn't matter that your family was fleeing genocide yourselves, or that your ancestors were forced to come here, or that you personally took no part in the ongoing political war being waged against the dwindling number of Natives we have left. You don't belong here. You need to be forcibly detained and expelled. Maybe even kept in a cage for a while until we figure out what to do with you.

Whoop. But that's the silent part you're not saying. You can call it Zionist if you want. But I think people need to think a little more critically about the actual logistics of what caused this problem in the first place, before firing off about it. Especially not when a lot of these talking points are at their heart incredibly antisemitic.

[tamamita]

why do people on the left consider media talking about women and gay people's oppression in non western countries as propaganda? I understand why you would consider it imperialist propaganda but at the same time it feels a bit disregarding of people's experiences. Like I saw a sign that had "we'll get our Iran back" and I mean it is true that gay people and women are oppressed in Iran, so why do people disregard these?

I'll make it simple for you

Look at Israel and how they assume they're the bastion of LGBTQ rights in the middle east, all the while they're currently upholding an apartheid, settler colonial system, which also works as a military outpost for the US imperialist machine. This is called pinkwashing, because it disregards the life of people in order to uphold this ostensible notion of liberal democratic values. True liberty should be secured for all, not for one exclusive group.

The same could happen to Iran in that if the Shah, who was a brutal despot himself, took back power, he would enable the imperialists to secure power in the middle east, and ultimately exploit the global south. People don't disregard these issues, but you can't talk about these issues in good faith while the west manufactures consent on a constant basis all with the interest of vesting power and throwing sanctions at them for the sake of control, despite the fact that they fostered this "threat"

The more you alienate these groups, the less they're going to accept you. Economic growth would allow for progressive groups to develop and thrive, but not through imperialist ambitions, which will only contribute to a greater hostility towards the west and whatever values they may hold. And whenever there is a nation that introduces these rights, they're often overthrown by US-backed elements. In fact Iran was a progressive nation at first. Mohammed Mossadegh was an elected PM who nationlized the oil industry, but was ultimately overthrown, because the Brits wanted the oil, and so they asked the CIA to help them out by overthrowing him. They installed a pupper leader and everything went down from there, do you understand why the Islamic revolution turned out they way it did?

[pseudoquiddity]

Here is my radical "The Nocturnal Ending is Bad for the Kin" take because I feel the need to write it down.

As I see it, the Diurnal and Nocturnal ending are equally as bad/good for the people of the Kin (to modify the statement I just made above). It's Artemy's miserable job to choose which part of the Kin is "most" Kin to him, based on his lived experiences the past two weeks.

Oyun and several other NPCs state multiple times that the Kin are a single-headed beast. If you kill the worms in the Termitary, Artemy can also believe that the Kin are a hivemind. If this is what you and/or your Artemy believes, then so be it, but there is evidence to the contrary. Aspity has a different take on this, Isidor has a different take on this, you can have a different take on this, and you're all undeniably Kin. The Kin members you meet in Aspity's place asking for her advice all come to her with different problems representational of the factions the Kin are splitting into. Should they rebel violently? Should they learn Russian? Is there a point passing down their values when their values have no purpose in this settler society? Var, too, "looks" Kin but claims he isn't. But the Worms attack you and help you "as one" in the Abattoir. Taya believes they're all fingers on a hand and inseparable. There is no "alone." So which is it? Well, Artemy, you choose ...

The "Kin hivemind" is an objectively fantastical concept that may or may not exist in the Kin, the same way that massive aurochs maybe did, maybe didn't roam the Earth at one point.

During the plague, massive numbers of the Kin die. In the Termitary, for one, but also people on the street. We know this is because they're "too individualistic." They're too integrated into the town and have strayed too far. It's a kind of internal diaspora. Artemy, who leaves the town and is himself half Kin, and so grapples with whether he has the right to make massive decisions for the Kin or not, whether he's really Kin enough, is like these people. These people have never left the town but they have left behind part of their Kin identity. These are the "average" people, people who aren't fantastical, who need to work jobs to feed their families, who make mistakes and, like Artemy, struggle to fit in a world that at its convenience, sees them as a member of the town or not.

During the Nocturnal ending, the members of the internal Kin diaspora will probably die to the plague. They never had the chance to prove themselves, like Artemy did, that they're still connected to the Earth. What's preserved is the fantastical. Murky, Grace, Taya and Clara get to live because they are also partly embedded in the idea that they are pieces of a whole, and they're also little miracles themselves with their latent abilities tied to the Earth.

So, here, Artemy makes the decision that to him, the Kin is miracles; it's all of the myths he heard, they're a hivemind, they're magical, they're suprahuman. There's no room for the mundane, disconnected members of the Kin, who are long-since discarded victims.

In the Diurnal ending, the miracles die. In the Diurnal ending, to this Artemy, the Kin are the everyday people who are caught up in this settler colonialism system like he is. There are no more strange Worms, or Herb Brides, but there is a little steppe encampment outside the town for anyone who considers themself Kin and that might be good enough for Artemy. This ending, though, is a deeply conservative one where things won't change. Conditions will modernize as Vlad improves quality of life for the workers, but members of the Kin who join him again and decide to live in the town will drift farther away from their heritage, further churned up in the system.

So, it really is an impossible decision ... for Artemy to not quite feel like he belongs himself, who is passably European but is also interpreted as Kin when people want to mark him an outcast, and then he ultimately has to sever one aspect of the Kin forever. And neither decision is "good," but he has to make it, so neither decision is "bad," too. Ultimately, like the Bachelor, in the Haruspex's P2 ending, the "system" wins. For the Bachelor, it's a new oligarchical system spearheaded by the willfully corrupt Kains, and for Artemy, it's the system he struggles with since day one when he was hunted in the streets.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Some scholars and activists are calling for a decolonized state for all of those between the river and the sea.  However, this would necessitate that Zionists relinquish their ideology of ethnic supremacy. This is hardly a new or radical position, such an entity was suggested by the Arab states as a counter-proposal to the 1947 partition plan. Naturally, this was rejected by the Zionists. That we barely ever hear about the offers that the Yishuv/Israel rejected should be an indicator of the nature of mainstream discussions on Palestine and the silencing of Palestinian voices. The Palestinian Liberation Organization also called for establishing a secular, democratic unitary state for all its citizens. Naturally, none of these proposals included genocide, ethnic cleansing or mass murder. These anxieties are not unique to Jewish Israelis, settlers in many different colonies throughout history have echoed these same sentiments. If we were to take a look at the narrative surrounding anti-Apartheid South Africa activism and boycotts, we would find eerily similar projections and arguments. For example, In an article for the Globe and Mail under the title “The good side of white South Africa” Kenneth Walker argued that ending the Apartheid system and giving everyone an equal vote would be a “a recipe for slaughter in South Africa”. Others, such as Shingler, echoed similar claims, saying that anti-racist activists were actually not interested in ending Apartheid as a policy, but in South Africa as a society. Others came out to claim these activists were actually motivated by “anti-white racism”, fueled by “Black imperialism”. Political comics displayed a giant soviet bear, bearing down on South Africa declaring “We shall drive South Africa into the Sea!” Sound familiar?

[...]

Regardless of your ideological leanings, the reality is that we are already living under a de facto one-state reality. Israeli politicians proudly boast about never allowing a Palestinian state to materialize. Israeli school books already erase the green line. Israel already rules the lives of everyone there. Palestinians calling for the dissolution of this naked colonialism is legitimate and just.