#exploitative colonialism

[lazzerot]

I relate to your enjoyment of seeing code-switching represented on a TV show so I decided I do want to reblog this since I like the overall message of your post. Originally I did just wanna let it slide, but I can't reblog this in good conscience without commenting on one of your tags:

I don't think The Expanse as a whole is that much about settler-colonialism as it is about exploitative colonialism and in turn about imperialism in general. Granted, I haven't finished reading Babylon's Ashes yet as I'm writing this post, so maybe the Laconia plot is very settler-colonialist and I'm talking out of my ass here. If that's the case I apologize. But if it's not I just want to say this: In the Expanse canon Ganymede, Io or Ceres weren't settled by any living organism known to humans before humans gained the technology necessary to expand from earth out into the SOL system and colonized it. It's just plain "old" colonialism, which is impossible to have back on earth since every imperial expanding superpower in history colonized parts of earth that were already settled by other people. I get that from an US-American perspective "settler colonialism" is a big buzz word, but not every piece of literature is meant to be read as a metaphor for the US. In a way The Expanse's main message is one of anti-imperialism.

One of the things that i really really love about the expanse is the attention it pays to the language the characters speak. Obviously for practicality reasons the belters have to speak mostly english but the little bits of belter creole we get here and there are so distinct and feel so lived in, and i love that the show just. Refuses to translate them. You just kind of pick up the dialect over time.

I also really love the care that was put into the characters accents. Like i dont know if ive ever watched a show where a character audibly code switches like Naomi Nagata does. When we meet her she's speaking pretty standard English but when she's back with other belters her accent comes on pretty strong. Which is so cool! I feel like the only time we see characters with more than one accent is when one of them is fake because theyre like. In disguise or pretending to be someone else. Its really cool to see a character who just talks differently in different situations and it makes the whole world feel so grounded and real even tho obviously theyre like. In space.

[kropotkindersurprise]

Michael Parenti on the extraction of wealth from the so-called Third World by Western Capitalism. [video]

[alwaysbewoke]

[philosophybits]

Colonialism almost never exploits the entire country. It is content with extracting natural resources and exporting them to the metropolitan industries thereby enabling a specific sector to grow relatively wealthy, while the rest of the colony continues, or rather sinks, into underdevelopment and poverty.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

[hussyknee]

(alt included in all images)

Another thread by Senator Ben Ray Luján here.

A book on the subject (haven't read it myself):

One of the sources in another one of Alisa's furiously impassioned twitter threads have been debunked, so I didn't include that. But she claims that her own family was caught in the fallout zone when her mother was a baby, which eventually led to her and large numbers of her community developing cancer. It's human for that kind of grief to be caught up in inaccuracies. People are already being ghastly and racist to Hispanos and Indigenous people criticizing the hype for the movie. They're not attacking Oppenheimer for being Jewish, they're criticising the erasure of the human cost of these bombs and the continued valorisation of the U.S military's actions in World War II as some kind of moral saviourism.

While Oppenheimer himself believed that the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally justified (they had planned to drop them on Germany except they surrendered before they could), he also felt had blood on his hands and regretted his role as the "Father of the Atomic Bomb". He spent the rest of his career vehemently opposing further development of thermonuclear weapons and the hydrogen bomb accurately predicting the concept of mutually assured destruction. This eventually made him a victim of Senator McCarthy's Red Scare and his clearance was revoked. I haven't seen the movie (Christopher Nolan is the kind of casual white racist I avoid on principle) but people who have seen it say that it doesn't glorify nuclear weapons and depicts the man himself with the complex moral nuance that seems to be accurately reflective of his real life.

The backlash to Indigenous and Hispanos people's criticisms and to people pointing out that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocides is also frustrating because...both world wars were a clash of genocidal empires. The reason they were world wars is because the countries colonized by Japan, China, the European powers and the US were all dragged into it, whether they wanted to or not. Jews were one of the many colonized peoples that suffered in that time, who were left to die by everyone until they could be used to frame the Allied powers as moral saviours, establishing a revisionist nostalgia for heroism that powers the US military industrial complex to this day.

As early as May 1942, and again in June, the BBC reported the mass murder of Polish Jews by the Nazis. Although both US President, Franklin Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, warned the Germans that they would be held to account after the war, privately they agreed to prioritise and to turn their attention and efforts to winning the war. Therefore, all pleas to the Allies to destroy the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau were ignored. The Allies argued that not only would such an operation shift the focus away from winning the war, but it could provoke even worse treatment of the Jews. In June 1944 the Americans had aerial photographs of the Auschwitz complex. The Allies bombed a nearby factory in August, but the gas chambers, crematoria and train tracks used to transport Jewish civilians to their deaths were not targeted.

(Source)

Uncritical consumption of World War II media is the reinforcement of imperialist propaganda, more so when one group of colonized people is used to silence other colonized peoples. Pitting white Jewry against BIPOC is to do the work of white supremacy for imperialist colonizers, and victimizes Jews of colour twice over.

Edit: friends, there's been some doubt cast on the veracity of Alisa's claims. The human cost to the Hispanos population caught downwind of the nuclear tests is very real, as was land seizure without adequate compensation. However, there's no record I can yet find about Los Alamos killing livestock and Hispanos being forced to work for Los Alamos without PPE. There is a separate issue about human testing in the development of said PPE that's not covered here. I'm turning off reblogs until I can find out more. Meanwhile, here's another more legitimate article you can boost instead:

[nando161mando]

Everything is messed up..

[mahoganygold213]

[one-world-many-stories]

blog introduction + about me

In recent years, the dehumanization of refugees and immigrants has become impossible to ignore.

In the United States, families fleeing unimaginable horrors such as war or immense oppression have been met not with safety, but with completely cruelty. In a country that prides itself on being the "land of the free", nonetheless. Rather than being taken to shelter and safety, children are torn from their parents at the border, locked in cages, and referred to as “unaccompanied alien minors,” as if their humanity was secondary to their immigration status. Political leaders have continuously fed into the hatred, calling immigrants “animals” and describing them as a “national security threat.” In recent months, President elect Donald Trump described Haitian refugees as "They're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs." These words, repeated again and again, have justified policies that treated these families as less than human, as though their suffering didn’t matter.

In Europe, it is no different. Refugees escaping war and persecution find themselves trapped in refugee camps like Moria, where the conditions were so poor that one humanitarian aid worker called it “a place of sheer hopelessness.” Politicians didn’t hold back their disdain. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, called refugees “Muslim invaders,” while others described their boats as carrying “human meat.” When we hear words like that, it’s no surprise that so many people turned a blind eye to what was happening. Refugees were left to drown in the Mediterranean or sit for years in squalid camps, waiting for help that never comes.

What makes all of this even more devastating is how refugees and immigrants are so often reduced to numbers, and thus dehumanized even further. The stories of who they are—what they’ve endured, what they’ve lost—are rarely told. Instead, we hear statistics: thousands detained, hundreds drowned, millions displaced. But behind each number is a human being. A mother clutching her child as they cross a river in the dead of night. A teenager leaving behind everything they know for a chance to live without fear. A father who would do anything to provide a better life for his family. Their stories matter, but we rarely hear them. After all, it's easier to ignore suffering when it doesn’t have a face.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

It is this reason that has inspired me to create a Tumblr blog that addresses this problem. Through seeing and learning about these people that we've so often reduced into numbers, we can fully understand their troubles. And by welcoming them with empathy and kindness rather than cruelty and oppression, we can treat them as the humans that they are.

My goal for blog posts is to do a mix of informative readings, as well as present the stories of real life refugees and immigrants through interviews. As I begin to post, I encourage others to submit their own stories and photos.

For a little bit about me: my name is Dania and I am a student at the University of Indianapolis, studying International Relations. While I was blessed with being born an American citizen, I am Iraqi and my parents are refugees who fled the country following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I have seen first hand how countries and livelihoods are destroyed, so people face no choice but to flee, even if their home is beautiful and beloved to them. I hope to one day use my degree for a career in International Development and transform third-world countries into beautiful, livable places. Because, in the words of the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire, "Nobody leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark."

[lyss-butterscotch]

The Solstice Priests talk about karma

[audhdnight]

Thinking about parallels between Israel and the US and how our cops are trained by their military programs. How the police violence is learned from their disgusting military policies. How we gave them so much money and they are now known as one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the whole world. With one of the most technologically sophisticated defense systems in the world.

Also thinking about the parallels between US veterans and Israeli holocaust survivors.

Israel talks some big shit about how they HAVE to exist because look how Jews were treated and they need a place all their own, just look at these poor holocaust survivors they need us!!! Except when you actually look, you find that most of the holocaust survivors in Israel are living in poverty, homeless, unable to afford food so they’re picking up literal scraps off the ground after markets end for the day. Israel wants you to think they’re doing this for the holocaust victims, but they’re not actually helping those survivors at all.

Like how in the US we have tons of programming about needing new soldiers, about thanking service members for our freedom, about celebrating holidays that uplift veterans and wars and political leaders. But the actual veteran population is largely neglected. They’re homeless, living in poverty, living with crippling medical debt because of injuries received in the field, or any number of other things. Programs set up to supposedly help them (like Wounded Warrior) are total scams that don’t help anyone.

Our governments use these people as scapegoats and toss them to the side like trash once no one is looking. It’s easy to say “how can you hate the military? look at what our veterans won for us!” while pushing a veteran out onto the street and using that money to pay more cops. It’s easy to say “we need a place for holocaust victims to feel safe!” while refusing to pay for the healthcare these people desperately need and instead funneling money into paying people to come live in Israel so you can grow your population and continue colonizing.

Colonialist governments will never adequately care for the people they supposedly represent. It is an ideal built entirely on greed, and a government built on greed will never fork over the money to actually make positive change in the world. All they care about is power and money and land, more and more and more. They don’t give a shit about us.

[local-redhead-bookworm]

If you somehow managed to watch any of Mobile Suit Gundam and think it was apolitical, I am going to tape your eyes open and force you to rewatch it

[divorceblogger]

The Vampire Armand, Anne Rice // Nona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

[alwaysbewoke]

[hussyknee]

[nando161mando]

1 in 5 seniors is working. Fuck this system and the politicians who prop up its dying corpse.

[mahoganygold213]