#american genocide

[motziedapul]

In case you're wondering how responsible the US is for every murdered child, aid worker, and civilian in Palestine, it's 70%.

It's as much an American genocide as an Israeli one.

[briteredoctober]

For everyone who keeps saying “wHaT aBoUt ThE hOsTaGeS?!?! ReLeAsE tHe HoStAgEs!!1!”

[wilwheaton]

The true history of Mount Rushmore is appalling. In a nation that is awash in the blood of innocent humans who were murdered by colonizers, that refuses to reckon with its white supremacist history, Mount Rushmore stands out as a glaring example of the cruelty and violence of America’s brutality.

“The Lakota considered the carving of the four presidents' faces on what was once Six Grandfathers, a defacement of their sacred site, especially as "those four people had a lot to do with destroying our people's land base," Douville said. Indeed, Washington waged war against Native American tribes, Jefferson was considered the architect of policies that would result in the removal of Native Americans from their lands, Lincoln ordered the execution of 38 Dakota Native American rebels, the largest mass execution in American history, and Roosevelt systematically removed Native Americans from their lands.”

“We found the monument had a dark history of ties to the KKK, an illegal war, and the violent suppression of the Native American Lakota (also known as Sioux) people. We looked at each claim in the meme, starting with the history of the region before Mount Rushmore was built, followed by an investigation into its creation and alleged KKK funding.“

If you don’t know the truth about this monument to hate and genocide, please look into it, and encourage others to do the same.

[lyledebeast]

My Sins Return to Visit Me: Atrocities, Whiteness, and Cosmic Justice in The Patriot

As he watches over the body of his slain son just before The Patriot's final battle, Benjamin Martin confides to his friend, Harry Burwell, that he believes Gabriel's death is some kind of divine repayment for his past wrongs: "I have long feared that my sins would return to visit me, and the cost is more than I can bear." This line also appears at the very beginning of the film, replacing scenes that were filmed but not included in any released edition featuring Martin's actions at Fort Wilderness during the French and Indian War years prior. We hear it in a voice over as Martin closes the trunk lid on his Cherokee tomahawk. Not only is he haunted by his past, but this representation of the American Revolution is haunted by the Cherokee people in spite of writer Rob Rodat and director Rolad Emmerich's attempts to erase them. Although the narrative brushes Martin's words here off as simple grief, I would argue that this reading of his past is more historically honest than the one the film's ending suggests.

In a broad sense, this film appropriates Native identity for the Patriots in the same way Benjamin Martin appropriated that tomahawk. In The Patriot's logic, these men defeated the British because they were fighting to protect their homes and families, they knew the terrain well from a lifetime spent living on it, and they made use of guerilla tactics to gain an advantage over stronger forces. Meanwhile, the British, personified by Colonel Tavington, are brutal colonizers motivated only by greed. It is not hard to see how including Native characters would trouble this interpretation. Only one scene in the film features any, scouts who drop off the single survivor of Benjamin Martin's massacre in the woods at Colonel Tavington's camp. Apart from this, the only onscreen representation the Cherokees have is Martin's tomahawk, and the film only tells their story through the lens of his memories.

Ironically, presenting the Patriots as "native" ends up meaning Tavington's treatment of them bears striking resemblance to historical Patriots' treatment of the Cherokees and other tribes. It is unclear how many homes Tavington has targeted in the beginning of his screentime to have earned the nickname "the Butcher" that General O'Hara informs us about, but after Cornwallis allows him to resume these tactics, he burns eight Patriot homes, killing the inhabitants before burning Pembroke Church with its congregation inside. A few years prior from 1776-1777, a period the film skips over, Patriot forces had waged war against the Cherokee nation for its support of the British crown with devastating effects. Historian Jordan Baker writes in "The Cherokee-American War from the Cherokee Perspective:"

"All along the border, American troops launched a scorched earth campaign. And with each victory the Continental forces earned, they burned Cherokee towns and took survivors prisoner. By the end of the campaign, they had destroyed over fifty Cherokee towns, including crops and livestock, and killed hundreds of Cherokee, enslaving the survivors and sending them as far off as the Caribbean."

Among Tavington's first lines in the film are orders surely similar to those Continental officers gave in the aforementioned Cherokee towns: "Fire the house and barns. Let it be known that if you harbor the enemy, you will lose your home." Even the worst excesses of Tavington's cruelty have more in common with Americans' treatment of Native peoples after the war than any British actions during it. For example,

"In March 1782, after Indian attacks upon American settlements on the western frontier, militiamen under the command of Col. David Williamson attacked the Moravian Christian Mission at Gnadenhutten. Peaceful Delaware Indians, who had converted to Christianity, were rounded up, and ninety-six Delaware Indians, men, women, and children, were bludgeoned to death."

Perhaps most ironically, Tavington's lust for the Ohio valley is a sentiment that historically belonged to his enemies. According to Jason Edwin Anderson, American land speculators, including George Washington, had designs on this region, but the Royal Proclamation of 1763 recognized Native sovereignty there and barred settlement beyond the Appalachian Mountains. As a result, expansion was a stronger motive for independence than freedom from British tyranny in the western colonies. In almost every case, Tavington's atrocities and the reasons behind them are displaced American ones. Under different circumstances, he would have been a model Patriot.

Reading The Patriot by light of the Native stories it erases makes it less a story of hardy pioneers and their effete oppressors than of one set of brutal colonizers being given a taste of their own medicine by a slightly more recently arrived brutal colonizer. However, there are a couple of crucial and related differences between Tavington's fictional atrocities and the Patriots' historical ones. First, Tavington's reach is far more restricted. General Cornwallis grants him permission to utilize brutal tactics solely in service of capturing Martin. He does not direct his other officers to coordinate with Tavington and kill as many rebels as possible. Why? In Cornwallis's words, "These colonials are our brethren." Not "These colonials will be our brethren after we win the war," which would suggest a political meaning to "brethren." That they are brethren now suggests that this brotherhood is based in something unchangeable, like race.

Even Martin concedes the humanity of British soldiers; he offers Rawlins a bounty for their gear, not their scalps. His disposal of his enemies at Fort Wilderness also evinces a more profound hatred for Native people; he sends a raft full of heads and two men alive "to tell the tale" to the French fort but baskets of eyes, tongues, and fingers to the Cherokees with no one to explain what happened. Tavington holds Whiteness in no such esteem. He murders people of color, too, shooting some Black men for refusing to give him information, but their fate pales in comparison to the one that awaits the White congregation of Pembroke Church for the same reason. What appears to make Tavington's actions so aberrant in this context, and so shocking to the film's heroes even after he does the same things numerous times, is not their brutality or that they are directed against non-combatants, but that he targets other White people.

I can't help wondering how the Cherokees would have reacted to their ally in red and green had they been present in the film to do so. I imagine very different responses. On the one hand, some might have felt apprehension about the Patriot retribution that would follow Tavington's actions stemming from their own memories of Fort Wilderness. Others, also with Fort Wilderness on their minds, may have felt that Tavington had thrown the party of the year at Pembroke Church and rudely failed to invite them. Surely some of the scouts who bring Tavington the survivor are the right age to have received Martin's baskets from Fort Wilderness as children, but they are denied the opportunity for vengeance that Martin so eagerly indulges for himself. That would have been an even more fitting means of Martin's sins returning to visit him, if that was indeed what the filmmakers were aiming for.

Instead, they retreated even further from Cherokee representation than originally intended. The extended cut features a very brief scene in which Captain Bordon informs Tavington that the Cherokee scouts have arrived, and the two officers approach two scouts who stand facing them before the camera cuts away. In the theatrical release, the scene opens on the scouts' backs as they walk through the camp, and the camera cuts to Tavington and Bordon entering the tent where the wounded private is being treated. Apparently even showing Tavington in the same frame with Cherokee men emphasizes too clearly that the British were allied to people many Patriots, Martin obviously included, viewed as subhuman.

If Martin did maintain his view of the loss Tavington visited on him as a kind of cosmic justice, it would make him a far more interesting and reflective character. It would mean he recognized, on some level, that there was a price to pay for his horrific, racially-motivated violence beyond just feeling guilty. Moreover, it would have acknowledged that American imperialism was no less greedy and destructive than British imperialism. If the film supported that reading, Martin might have died along with Tavington, or at the very least lost his ill-gotten gains. Instead, the film ends with him watching the construction of his new home in the exact spot where the former one stood with the sun beaming down on him and his family.* After ordering Wilkins to burn the church, Tavington tells him, "This will be forgotten," but here we are clearly meant to have forgotten about Martin's atrocities already. This becomes more poignant when we consider that the same Royal Proclamation of 1763 that forbad British settlement beyond the Appalachian Mountains also granted land to men who had served in the French and Indian War, including 3,000 acres to captains, the rank Benjamin Martin held. Not only did he commit similar atrocities to Tavington, but he received the very reward for them that Tavington covets, and from the same hands. For all Martin's claims to feel guilt over his past actions, his life is a brutal tactics success story, one only reinforced by the film's ending.

*Some commentors have argued that the house being rebuilt is actually Charlotte's. While I don't think that's the case, it would still support my point. Charlotte's house was the larger of the two. presumably with even more land attached. It's an upgrade!

[boymanmaletheshequel]

in the last bit of news tonite I’ll share, there have been reports of ICE agents hiding in FUCKING ICE CREAM TRUCKS and luring in Hispanic children in multiple states and snatching them. I’m crying right now, I actually can’t stand this. I feel sick, and I am more angry than I’ve ever been in my life. I hope “they” are scared of me, and that “they” are scared of what will happen when their empire inevitably collapses. Some will bend the knee, they will kiss the knife that kills them, but most will turn it around and redirect the blade into the hearts of their oppressors. I will be one of those who buries a sword in the heart of a fascist, even if I too must fall on one myself. Don’t give up, remember stories like this, and don’t ever forget them.

[errata-ad-absurdum]

It's not fascism when we do it. It's not a war crime when we do it.

The current U.S. Administration is really going with the Neville Chamberlain strategy here. And predictably the aggression expands. Except it is worse than that because they're helping Israel do this.

[enbycrip]

Been digging into things on Canadian/British, United States/British and South American/Spanish history recently and the notable thing that has come up on both - in all three cases, the European settlers were the ones actively engaging in genocide of the indigenous population. It was not the active policy of the European government.

In all three cases the European government actually passed protective legislation for the rights of indigenous subjects at the request of either indigenous people themselves travelling to Europe to make these representations, or not-entirely-awful Europeans passing on what was happening to them. They weren’t *incredible* protections in any of the three cases, but they at least recognised that indigenous people were *people* with actual basic rights. Like “not being automatically murdered or enslaved”.

But then European settlers went *batshit* at this legislation. The entire idea of “No Genocide” policies provoked enormous settler backlashes in all three cases. It was even a material, if not enormous, factor in why the US declared independence.

And the European governments in question just…rolled over. Made no real attempt to enforce this protective legislation. And it *certainly* was *not* why Britain sent in troops when the US declared independence. The Founding Fathers just viewed even the fact they had been *asked* to not murder indigenous people as an outrage.

None of this is to excuse European colonial states today of our responsibility to pay reparations and lobby for protections for indigenous people (and BIPOC in general) in our ex-colonial states. We’ve benefitted so much, especially on mass resource plundering, that reparations are a responsibility we cannot shirk.

(I just finished a biography of Charles Hapsburg and how he frittered away *massive* silver imports stolen from South America on European wars. That huge resource injection was pretty vital to the beginning of European international capitalism in the 16th-17th centuries. Before that, states just kept coming up against insufficient metals for currency, especially ones with the intermediate value of silver that let a critical mass of lower-level transactions happen.)

What it is, however, is an examination of the different ways states can be responsible for genocide, eugenics, and other crimes.

It does not need to be active policy for a state to be responsible. Even passing protective legislation doesn’t prevent a state’s responsibility if they don’t take measures to enforce that legislation, and, particularly, *if they give in to loud backlash from privileged parties who see it as an infringement of their privilege for people they are oppressing to be given some basic rights.*

I am not a proponent of “history repeats itself”. Context *always* matters, and every different situation has a different context. However, history itself provides an incredibly important and *necessary* context for situations we face now. And these facts are *incredibly* relevant to *many* situations we are currently facing.

[learningfromlosing]

Happy fourth of july its harder for me to say im american than to say im bisexual

[neverburnbooks]

Genocidal dog whistles from Donald J. Trump. This has to stop before something ugly happens. Reason 249,555 why the GOP must be destroyed.

[sweaters-and-vertigo]

this is shameful and disgusting. “pro-hamas”?? really?? that’s what anti-genocide means to them?? god i hate american politicians so much

Source

Source

[magic-can]

The deadline has passed, the scumbags voted to continue sending money to Israel. Keep protesting, keep fighting. And keep supporting verified campaigns. The Alanqar family still needs help (verified #6 here) so if you want to do something please support their campaign in any way you can: https://www.gofundme.com/f/rising-from-the-ashes-ghadas-journey-of-hope-and-resilien?utm_medium=customer&utm_source=copy_link&utm_campaign=fp_sharesheet&lang=en_US

While you are at it, please share @zinaanqar ‘s campaign (link here)

[motziedapul]

I'm not even Palestinian but I got sexual harassment from liberals who got mad that I mentioned Kamala Harris was an active participant in the genocide against Palestinians. A statement of fact, and they wanted it supressed.

I've seen so many Palestinians and Muslims in general sent the worst threats and wishes of violence by Harris supporters for saying they won't vote for the woman that's second in command to the administration that sent the bombs that killed their families.

There's no fixing this. There's no fixing those who get offended by people who don't want to vote for their family's murderer. There's no fixing someone who says "vote for the mass murderer or die" to someone who has lost friends and family in Palestine, and now Lebanon.

[briteredoctober]

Here’s every ceasefire deal and hostage exchange Hamas has offered Israel since October 7th, 2023, courtesy of BreakThrough News.

[lyledebeast]

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Kinds of Evil in The Patriot

My least controversial take on The Patriot, at least on Tumblr, is that Colonel Tavington is the best thing about the film. But what I find most interesting about Tavingtont is revealed by his juxtaposition with Benjamin Martin. This is why I do not share the view held by many that Tavington is the only good thing about the film. As I've argued elsewhere, I think it would be possible to make a very watchable film focused on Martin's internal conflict . . . if he actually had one. The Martin we do have, though, is interesting because despite Tavington obviously being a villain, and an excellent one at that, Martin's characterization is even more evil. I don't mean that his actions in the film are worse or even that his past actions are necessarily worse than Tavington's present ones. Rather, the role of Martin's actions in the tension between fiction and history that permeates the film is evil. This discussion of evil is heavily indebted to Simone Weil's famous line: "Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring" (Gravity and Grace, 1947) As concerns The Patriot, I would say fictional evil is spectacular; historical evil is mundane.

One of the most memorable moments in the film is the Green Dragoons burning Pembroke Church with its congregation locked inside. From Jason Isaacs' gleefully sinister performance as he addresses the congregation from the nave on the back of his horse to the women trapped inside crying and screaming to the flames rising against the backdrop of the dusky sky, it is a feat of theatricality. Director Roland Emmerich had the church frame rebuilt after burning it down during the first day of shooting this scene to bet better lighting, and it is stunning. It is also a complete historical fabrication, which numerous historians have pointed out. While British officers in the South Carolina campaign were notorious for their destruction of private property, there is no record of any British officer burning civilians in a church there or in any other colony. What I think a lot of people overlook, though, is that the implausibility of this action is actually referenced in this scene.

When Tavington orders Captain Wilkins to burn the church, Wilkins' response is stunned silence during which his eyes scan Tavington's face for signs that he does not mean what he says. Then he tries to argue with him: "There's no honor is this." That Wilkins knows some of the people in the church may account in part for this hesitation, but he has been serving under Tavington since before the militia was formed, and he does not seem apprehensive when he tells the civilians they have been "requested" to gather in the church. We know the Green Dragoons have burned eight militiamen's homes, killing any who resisted, but John Billings' wife and child are shot outside their house, the boy with the wooden pistol his father had given him inches from his hand (I always wonder what the Patriotic Americans who defend cops for shooting Black boys who turn out to have been armed only with cell phones make of this scene). It's possible Wilkins thought the townspeople would be safe in the church because it would prevent them from offering similar resistance. Whatever the reasons for Wilkins' hesitation, "Burn the church" is the only order Tavington ever has to repeat. Later, he assures Wilkins that "The honor is found in the ends, not the means. This'll be forgotten." Chilling words, but he is not angry that Wilkins did not obey him right away. Even he understands that this order is a significant departure from those he's given before.

Now, let's compare this scene to an earlier and much less dramatic one. While Martin is recruiting at a tavern, one of his potential militiamen, a man he clearly already knows from prior experience, asks a question: "Any bounty?" The statement is so vague the audience would not know what he is referring to were it not for Martin's reply: "No scalp bounty this time, Rollins, but I'll pay for the gear of any British soldiers you kill." The exchange is so casual you could almost miss that they are talking about trafficking in human remains. There is no sense of horror, shame, or regret on the part of either; this practice is simply part of their shared experience. No one can describe the plot of the film without mentioning the burning of Pembroke Church, but I have never seen anyone address these lines. This scene may be unimportant to the story, but I would argue it is very important to the kind of man Martin is. He did not engage in this practice once to the shock of his men; they engaged in it together often enough that it holds no more significance to them than trading rabbit pelts.

This dehumanization of Martin's enemies is also on display in his Fort Wilderness confession, and again it is glossed over by the narrative. Martin gives Gabriel a laundry list of the things he and his men did to the French and Cherokees they captured, but it took numerous viewings for me to realize how differently they treated the two groups. The French fort received a pallet of heads along with two survivors to tell the tale; the Cherokee settlement received baskets of eyes, tongues, and fingers. Both are gruesome offerings from any perspective, but it is easier to identify an acquaintance by their head, by their face that is always visible, than by a single eye or finger or a tongue. The Cherokees--including women and children, on whose behalf we are invited to be so shocked and sickened when they are White--would have faced the torture of uncertainty on top of so much evidence of torture done to others. If they cannot recognize whose parts they have, they cannot recognize whose are missing either. Shoot that scene for your film, Roland, and then tell us how bad Ben Martin feels about it after the fact.

Of course, what is most horrifying about Martin's treatment of his enemies is that it is based on historical fact. There was no fortress called Fort Wilderness in South Carolina during the French and Indian War, and there is no record as far as I'm aware of Francis Marion--or Nathaniel Greene or other figures on whom Martin is based--sending baskets of body parts to the Cherokees. However, there is ample evidence that Patriot forces carried out what we would today call a genocide against Cherokee people during the American Revolution: killing civilians, destroying crops and towns, and selling survivors into slavery. We do not see any of this in The Patriot, but the sparse details we do get in Martin and his peers' accounts of their past is enough to evoke it. Whether a given genocide happens in America, Poland, or Rwanda, dehumanization is one of the first steps.

There is a considerable amount of historical leniency in the portrayals of both Banastre Tarleton and Francis Marion in this movie. Marion did create problems for Cornwallis's army, and Tarleton's American Legion was unable to stop him. From there, though, the portrayals develop in wildly different ways. If anything about Tavington is less historically accurate than the church burning, it is how much he is despised by his fellow Redcoats owing to his actions. As I've said before, this has the unintended effect of making the British seem more ethical than the Americans, and this is doubly recognizable when the film has to invent atrocities to make Tavington sufficiently evil compared to Martin. Still, the church burning is one of my favorite scenes, the climax of Tavington's theatre queen arc. I could end the film there and be nearly completely satisfied, and sometimes I have. Nothing about Martin's evil offers this kind of spectacle, barring the scene in the woods where he takes a literal blood-bath, and that is what is so chilling about it. It's not just that Martin and his brothers in arms see genocide as being no big deal; the narrative encourages the audience to think of it that way, if indeed the audience thinks of it at all. What's important, surely, is that Colonial Americans overcame the evils of imperialism, not that they enthusiastically engaged in those evils themselves.

[nando161mando]

A perfect snapshot of America in the trending articles from 12/6/24

[whitefromthebeginning]

American Genocide