this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
1167 points (90.6% liked)
Memes
45718 readers
789 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I mean, the US sucks, but they don't just support settler colonial states for its own sake. They support Israel because it's strategically useful to have a US friendly state in the middle east that's small enough that they will basically do what we say (unlike Saudi Arabia). Also a significant portion of Republicans in congress think that Israel/Palestine being controlled by Jews is a necessary precondition for the Rapture. The US is more indifferent to the genocide of the Palestinians than anything, which imo is just as bad, but it's important to look at the material causes for things instead of just saying "these two countries have similar ideologies so they'll be allies".
All of that is true AND they have an ideological solidarity. Think of it like this: If there was a genuine landback movement and the Illegal Occupation of Palestine was seen as what it is, then people are going to start looking at the Americas and noticing similarities. For a country that was built on the same settler colonial genocide, claims to be democratic when it's clear they're not, and subjugation of minorities. Oops.
Every square inch of land on earth has "changed hands" so to speak, multiple times by multiple peoples, mostly non-peacfully. How far back does a "land back movement" plan to go? The only fair option would be to DNA test bones from before the last glacial maximum and find descendents with the highest genome similarly and reshuffle all existing populations back based on their earliest ancestors. Or move all humans back to Africa and leave the rest of the world to the native wildlife. Or is it just the US and Canada because they were the most recent? Will we include Mexico and make them give the country back to the Aztec, or do they get a pass because Spain isn't considered as bad as those pesky Brits? Do we try and find populations of tribes conquered and replaced by the Aztec?
Do we have the authority to freeze all national borders as they are right now in perpetuity to preserve national and racial identities? Are you in favor of the world going to war against Russia to prevent colonial genocide against Ukraine? What do we do with the current peoples existing on their lands now? Do we break every country on earth up into ethnic tribal lands, or City-States? European colonialism of Africa and the Americas was broadly terrible at the time with many lasting issues, but it's not exactly unique in human history, so I am honestly curious what the end goals look like.
Chief, I'm not reading whatever genocide denial you're about to write after this. We're talking about a genocide so big and widespread that it not only put the holocaust to shame, but was literally the thing that directly inspired the nazis to do it.
Not sure where you get genocide denial out of what amounts to "humans have been genociding each other since the Homo genus common ancestor split off". I am asking if anyone actually expects any country on earth to decide that decades, or more likely centuries, in their past they conquered the land they now claim from another people group and now we feel bad about what our ancestors did so we are giving the country back to the most direct descendants of that group.
Are there actual expectations that the US is actually going to give everything or anything east of the Mississippi back to the native tribes, and/or Texas back to Mexico? Do we expect Canada to give BC back to their indigenous tribes? Obviously current relations with both groups need to be fixed because there are ongoing issues, nor should we celebrate the atrocities that happened during any of the colonial movements.
The Americas are also different from the colonialization of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East because the colonists moved there and stayed there instead of setting up exploitation of resources to send back, thus allowing "decolonizing" of those places to happen. And then decolonizing caused further problems by the colonizers drawing borders on their way out. This isn't to advocate that they stayed colonies, nor do I think these places would have peacefully self-assembled into their own countries if Europe had just dropped everything and left. Human nature would have still had different land and resource wars happen as the native populations filled back in the power gaps.
Genocide is still as bad now as it was then, and even less acceptable because of our modern and "enlightened" morals. This applies to all ongoing genocides and ethnic cleansing attempts. I'm saying the cat is out of the bag on this though, and no government realistically fears any land back movement causing them to support any other country's existence.
👋
Ah, yes, I understand. I did sadly expect there to be nothing articulable backing up this nebulous land back idea beyond apparently a general "US (or maybe just people of European descent in general) bad, and so we must somehow undo centuries of colonization by just giving some undefined land back to undefined people, which is totally possible because sovereign countries voluntarily give up their territory all the time". I thank you for the enlightening discourse on this topic.
They aren't denying any genocide.