Trump tells minority Congresswomen to "go back where they came from"

[Darth Yan]

Because at this point they're a minority and ANY state that has a minority as the dominant body is going to be discriminatory regardless of whether they fit your definition of colonial states (white south africa and Israel were that way. Tutsi dominated Rwanda was that way. White Haiti was that way.) People as a rule don't like loosing power and minority governments will almost certainly take steps to ensure the majority won't threaten things. If both non natives and natives have equal rights than the non natives can easily pass laws that go against native interests. You also assume that whites are going to want to incorporate native values, and go to the trouble of learning multiple new languages (when even native tribes are having a hard time getting people to learn the language). Effie flat out ignored the fact that real people have difficulties learning new languages once they reach adulthood and said that raising that issue meant you were just too lazy or racist to bother learning.

I also find the idea that we should just ignore the implications of a nation as powerful as the United States dissolving into hundreds of smaller states to be dangerous. This isn't a single regional thing. The entire WORLD would be effected, and that's no small thing. You are being incredibly blasé about how that would effect everything.

And Broomstick was NOT rambling. She listed examples of various cultures, how things acted, and various elements of history. She was certainly more detailed than Effie was (who basically boiled down to calling Broomstick a racist and insulting people who disagreed). You barely even addressed her arguments. All you did was essentially say "things will totally work out" (in a way that oddly implied you would force native cultures to change if they didn't play ball) over and over (you worded it differently but that is what you were saying). You said "there are difficulties but they can be addressed."

I do not think the US needs to be dissolved for there to be justice. I believe that a nation can change and consider the whole idea of decolonization as saying "the us is inherently an evil nation and can never be better". That's just insulting.

PS one thing I noticed is that Straha referred to "failures" when talking about South Africa. Is that a reference to how Mandela didn't just repossess all of the land from the white farmers? South Africa is proof decolonialism CAN be done but if it is to happen the kind of absolutist stuff you and Straha want is going to create failure.

He can’t. And it feels like loomer is saying you should force native cultures to ditch the parts of their cultures that are reprehensible.

Now tell the class, is your picture of what native cultures are and what "reprehensible" parts they have based on the remembered versions from when they came into contact with colonial settlers who themselves hadn't quite decided that women were proper people who deserved education and votes, and that it was okay for one man to own another as long as his skin was a bit darker, or how they are practiced in the world today?

All cultures have dark sides. There is a lot to respect about Native cultures but they were created years ago. Inevitably there are going to be parts that haven't aged well in todays world. What I was referring to was things like not allowing outsiders to join the tribe or assimilate into it.

[loomer]

Because at this point they're a minority and ANY state that has a minority as the dominant body is going to be discriminatory regardless of whether they fit your definition of colonial states (white south africa and Israel were that way. Tutsi dominated Rwanda was that way. White Haiti was that way.)

Remind me, does my proposed outcome of decolonization create a situation analogous to Rwanda, Haiti, Apartheid South Africa, or Israel? I don't think it does, since at its core it calls for a fundamental abolition of the structures of racial and ethnic oppression that cause these issues. Is your issue that you think this is impossible? Which part of my proposed outcome - Indigenous sovereign states structured on democratic principles freely negotiated by all stakeholders, possessing a shared macroculture and strong constitutional protections for the rights of its microcultures and a parliamentary body created to safeguard these rights - do you believe must inherently create undue discrimination?

People as a rule don't like loosing power and minority governments will almost certainly take steps to ensure the majority won't threaten things. If both non natives and natives have equal rights than the non natives can easily pass laws that go against native interests.

Which part of 'strong constitutional laws' and 'a third parliamentary body to safeguard Indigenous interests' translates into 'easily pass laws that go against native interests'? Could you explain how this would occur, and how these proposed elements are insufficient to 'ensure the majority won't threaten things'?

You also assume that whites are going to want to incorporate native values, and go to the trouble of learning multiple new languages (when even native tribes are having a hard time getting people to learn the language).

You keep making the weird assumption that by Settlers I mean White people. I do not, so please - cease. In the Australian context especially nearly all non-Whites of non-Indigenous descent are in fact Settlers, with a handful of exceptions like the Kanaka blackbirds, and I fully intend my critiques of the Settler to extend to those communities (which is also why there is in fact sometimes very substantial tension here between those non-White Settlers who wish to lump the Indigenous peoples of the continent into the label of 'People of Colour'). But beyond this, sure - why shouldn't we want to? Why shouldn't the government introduce it to the curriculum as part of the process of indigenization? Why is settler laziness a reason not to pursue cultural reforms necessary to produce a juster outcome - and it's necessary even without outright dissolution as part of the decolonization agenda that Indigenous languages be restored in various forms, e.g. in place names, as an official option for government forms, signposting, primary and secondary schooling language classes (I am, incidentally, delighted to report that one of the local school districts now teaches rudimentary Bundjalung to all the kids instead of French or Italian!) etc.

Also, why on earth do you think it will be necessary for every settler to learn multiple new languages? Let's take where I live as an example. Come the Great Dissolution, most people would still speak English. Those who can't learn a new language will thus be able to get along just as fine as they did before, and only on a generational scale will it shift with the adoption of the local language as it's taught in schools alongside English and, as secondary language choices like French German or Japanese, others - it'd be pretty neat to learn Noongar in high school, for instance! The position that the Indigenous languages of the places we live ought to be made official languages as part of a multilingual system causes no great hardship - just ask the people living in Wales.

Similarly, Settlers don't have to want to - it will happen naturally over time, the same as with any other process of additive acculturation where two or more cultures interact as equals (it's this last part, inequality, that renders the whole 'oh I love the wisdom and knowledge of Native Americans so much!' nonsense problematic on the whole - a fair and even exchange is not something you'll find much objection to in my experience, except in certain very important arenas of spirituality and identity, which is why I propose the formation of a new macroculture 'shell' via the process of indigenization that surrounds and protects the 'microculture' pearls - for instance, my Masonry is part of a microculture in this model (albeit an open one)). Unless you're a firm believer in cultural segregation or static cultures I don't see why this would be objectionable or why we should take the grumbling of people who don't want to try new things all that more seriously than we do now. They can stay in their box and eat nothing but meat and three veg and nescafe instant coffee - I'll be out with a very good espresso (courtesy of our large Italo-Australian and Italian immigrant settler community), a native-flower infused cocktail, and hopefully one day a Thai-Bundjalung fusion curry dish of paddymelon in a green thai sauce with finger lime. Which I now really want to eat, which sucks since you literally cannot buy paddymelon where I live.

Effie flat out ignored the fact that real people have difficulties learning new languages once they reach adulthood and said that raising that issue meant you were just too lazy or racist to bother learning.

Am I Effie? I don't recall being Effie.

I also find the idea that we should just ignore the implications of a nation as powerful as the United States dissolving into hundreds of smaller states to be dangerous. This isn't a single regional thing. The entire WORLD would be effected, and that's no small thing. You are being incredibly blasé about how that would effect everything.

Remind me where I said we should ignore it? My position is not 'it'll be totally fine' and 'don't even worry about it, maaaan', but rather that relying on international stability to defer justice is an unconscionable and immoral position. If all that is required to defer justice is stability, then why do we draw the line at the US? We ought to extend that privilege to every state, to every corporation, to every petty strongman and crime boss who keeps a region stable. We ought to avoid pursuing any kind of social justice or reform that would cause serious disruption. Again, if this is sincerely your view, it's not really something that can be refuted - it's just something that I maintain is so totally and fundamentally immoral and unconscionable that any person who espouses it cannot claim to value justice.

And Broomstick was NOT rambling. She listed examples of various cultures, how things acted, and various elements of history. She was certainly more detailed than Effie was (who basically boiled down to calling Broomstick a racist and insulting people who disagreed). You barely even addressed her arguments.

Well, I suppose you'd know best what it looks like to barely address an argument, having quite thoroughly established your credentials in that department so far. However, the bulk of her examples are things I directly addressed, accepted, or which were actually totally irrelevant - for instance, her rather vigorous screeching about how America has adopted Indigenous food culture (it hasn't, in any case) in the context of the Bundjalung nation.

All you did was essentially say "things will totally work out" (in a way that oddly implied you would force native cultures to change if they didn't play ball) over and over (you worded it differently but that is what you were saying). You said "there are difficulties but they can be addressed."

Yes, and I've suggested ways those difficulties can be addressed. It's odd that you seem to think the difficulties cannot be addressed - why is that?

Also, I don't recall implying I would force Indigenous cultures to change. I in fact seem to recall saying the precise opposite. Let me break that position down for you as simply as I can:
1. Indigenous cultures have elements I do not believe are acceptable;
2. Settler society does not have the right or authority to govern and control those cultures, but Indigenous communities do;
3. Cultures are not static;
4. For the majority of those elements I find most unacceptable, there are also Indigenous activists who wish for them to change;
5. Therefore, settler society should not suppress unacceptable cultural elements; needed change will come from within.
There is a small sublogic here that should also be considered;
6. Restored Indigenous states may choose to put matters to a democratic/representative vote if established;
7. These matters may include the status of certain customs and practices that I do not believe are acceptable;
8. If I am a citizen of these states with franchise, I am entitled to vote;
9. Therefore, if these matters are placed into democratic processes, I may exercise my vote according to my conscience.
This, however, requires that the matters be put to parliament or a direct democratic process, and in that case I don't really see a particular issue so long as there are suitably strong constitutional protections in place to avoid the abuse of the democratic process. There is also a caveat in 2 where I maintain certain exceptions to the general policy, e.g. where the custom involves a legitimate and serious violation of the rights of others or would cause undue harm to non-consenting individuals or serious harm to consenting individuals (e.g. widow-burning, for the archetypal example of where colonial governments going 'what the fuck, stop' is, if not moral, certainly more relatable as an exercise of imperial power). I maintain these are part of a broader category that constitute a delict against the collective rights of humanity and thus revoke the unconditional freedom from interference of a sovereign state - the same way that a national campaign of genocide legitimates the use of force to stop it.


The contrary opinion actively espoused by Broomstick is in fact this:
1. Indigenous cultures have elements I do not believe are acceptable;
2. Settler society has the right and authority to govern and control those cultures;
3. Therefore, settler society should suppress the unacceptable elements;
There is then a following sublogic:
4. We are suppressing unacceptable elements of Indigenous cultures;
5. If we stop, they will return (which necessarily implies that cultures are static);
6. Therefore, we must not stop suppressing those unacceptable elements of those cultures;
7. Restoring sovereignty would require us to stop this suppression;
8. Therefore, we must not return sovereignty.

I think you will find that my argument did not and does not in fact suggest I will 'force them to change' - it in fact suggests the opposite. My role, if any, will just be as a neighbour who can be asked if they like. In this respect it is no different to when I suggest that the Sudanese laws (both North and South) around homosexuality ought to be changed. The status as an opinion is no different - I have them about all sorts of issues both foreign and domestic, personal and public, religious and secular. I have them around some of the Indigenous communities of Australia and around some of the settler communities, for instance - I don't really think some of the penalties of the customary law of the Indigenous nations of the continent are right (mostly I'm good with spearing, but I oppose death sentences in general, for instance) and I don't really think some of the penalties of the formal law of the Settler nation of the continent are right either (e.g., our consorting laws are a travesty, but I'm broadly alright with our prohibitions on violent homicide). Unless you posit that we may never form an opinion on the acceptability of another culture's customs - in which case Broomstick's logic must be violently rejected as it proposes not only that we may, but that we may violently impose that opinion - I do not think this is a particularly unusual or controversial view to hold. If you do, more power to you, but you should probably switch sides to the one that doesn't think that settler-colonial governments ought to have the authority to impose their opinions.

I do not think the US needs to be dissolved for there to be justice. I believe that a nation can change and consider the whole idea of decolonization as saying "the us is inherently an evil nation and can never be better". That's just insulting.

See, this is where you're very close to getting it and then get offended instead. Decolonization is in fact the process of that change and the creation of justice. It doesn't inherently require dissolution - and if you check you'll find Straha and I believe Effie have also agreed that full dissolution is not in fact necessary anyway - and in no way makes the claim that the US is both inherently evil and unable to improve. If it did, it wouldn't call for a process of education, reconciliation, and restoration through democracy and the deep desire to be Good, not Evil, that exists in the settler mind despite the horrific abuses of the past and present.

Decolonization is not, as you seem to think, a pessimistic statement that 'the US/Canada/Etc are evil and must burn', but rather that 'the US/Canada/Australia/Etc are founded on crimes that must be made good - and we have faith that the people living there will make good'. It is a deeply optimistic perspective that looks at what is and says 'we can do better - all of us, together, can do better. All of us, together, should do better.' If that is insulting, I don't know what to tell you.

PS one thing I noticed is that Straha referred to "failures" when talking about South Africa. Is that a reference to how Mandela didn't just repossess all of the land from the white farmers? South Africa is proof decolonialism CAN be done but if it is to happen the kind of absolutist stuff you and Straha want is going to create failure.

Am I Straha? I hope not. I can't afford New York City's rent on my stipend. I certainly can't afford it if I'm also paying for a third lot of rent so it seems rather fortunate that I am not Straha and Effie as well as myself, and therefore in no position to comment.

Now, Yan. You've left a rather large number of points unaddressed:
- Precisely where did I call Broomstick a racist? Was it when I suggested that the Bundjalung Incident was a weirdly racialized attack and asked her to clarify, or somewhere else?
- Why do you think that Indigenous peoples cannot successfully negotiate for a peaceful future, unless the argument of 'because they're a minority' was intended to address this;
- Is it your perspective that there is no difference between any kind of violent acquisition of land through time and space, since you seem to feel there is nothing distinct about settler-colonialism from other forms of violent acquisition;
- How is the collapse of the USSR and the Balkans relevant to a carefully negotiated, voluntary dissolution of the settler-colonial states following a decolonizing and indigenizatino process?;
- Where I have at any time suggested that the process of indigenization requires the 'idiotic in the extreme' abandoning of the settler's language and culture rather than its broadening and opening;
- Where I have, at any point, suggested that Indigenous people are incapable of evil, by which I will generously assume you mean violence;
- Where I have ignored history rather than suggesting that history is descriptive, not prescriptive, of human actions. As I understand those words may be confusing, this boils down to this: I think history doesn't dictate the future, and this position is not the same as ignoring history. (Indeed, there's an irony here - your example of the Saxons as genocidal colonists? Studying elements of the Germanic migrations is actually one of my side hobbies!)
- How does decolonization call for anyone to lose their fundamental rights?
- Define nativism and explain how this definition applies to a process of democratically dismantling the existing unjust power structures through indigenization and decolonization.
- Demonstrate where
1. I limit my proposal to only America and Australia as sites for decolonization;
2. I limit decolonization to 'white Australians and Americans'.
- Is it your position that humans cannot overcome tribalism, violence, and systemic oppression?;
- Demonstrate where I have made the claims that most Indigenous people live on reservations and that Indigenous peoples do not assimilate;
- Please provide proof that most - or even a small majority - of treaties are being genuinely and fairly enforced;
- Please explain why clause 5 of the argument at http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 0#p4085773 does not follow from the premises;
- Please demonstrate where I have ignored that Indigenous peoples have also carried out various crimes and genocides.

If you'd like to just concede the faulty claims you've made about my arguments, I won't mind one bit. But understand that if not, I do expect you to answer these points because when you make these claims, you make factual claims, not statements of opinion.

[Nicholas]

The requirement of intent with regards to states is not that the leaders actively wish it, but rather that the policy of the state is either expressly genocidal or cannot be carried out without creating the effect of genocide. While intent to destroy remains rather tricky, where the policy of the state cannot be attained without carrying out a genocide, it is satisfied.

This is a definition of intent not evidence that intent exists in the cases you have cited. I think it is much more probable that the cases you have cited result from the cruelty and indifference that government bureaucrats usually display when dealing with people who lack the cultural knowledge to fulfill their expectation and the power to hold them accountable. Pair that with the fact that case workers responsible for investigating abuse allegations against a poor person are going to be in a lot more trouble if they say things are fine and the child later dies then if they say the child needs to be taken away when the child is fine where he is and the disproportionate removal of indigenous children can be explained without intent. Just the government being its normal callous and incompetent self while trying to protect children.

I believe I already addressed who will negotiate it upthread, but here we go: The representatives and legal experts of all involved parties. Just like any other major governmental reform, national fusion, etc. The right to reside within the state, provided it is in compliance with the new constitutions, can be retained without a refusal to restore land and sovereignty - indeed, it is usually proposed that the right attach to citizenship and that citizenship be granted to all resident in the affected areas at the time of transition - and I challenge you to demonstrate precisely why it cannot without falling back on 'the settlers will just turn on the Indigenous peoples again'. None of this compromises the right to self government nor creates the danger of statelessness, since under the approach I propose, the process of dismantling the states involved is inherently an expression of self government and necessarily contains such negotiations as to enable safeguards against statelessness.

It appears to me that the participation of all involved parties in these negotiations violates justice as you have defined it. I will explain why below.

Again, you make an error here. You assume sovereignty attaches to the people rather than to the state, which is incorrect. The justice involved is the restoration of that sovereignty not to Indigenous people but to their nations and states.

Are you using nation and state as synonyms here? Because they aren't usually a nation is a very large group of people bound together by common culture, language and belief in their nationhood. A state is a political entity recognized as such in international law with a widely acknowledged sovereign territory. Since we have been talking about tribes until now I have no idea why you have brought either word in. If you mean nations and states as distinct from tribes can you give me some examples of what they currently are?

Now, you again make the bold claim that this sovereignty must exclude non-Indigenous voices as a foundational point of justice, but this is not the case - let's return to the purchased stolen car analogy. There is no principle of law nor justice that says to the owner that they must not decide to let me use the car after it is returned, nor ever give me a lift down the road, nor that we may not become friends, nor that - where the acquisition was innocent and unknowing - I ought to be penalized beyond the loss of the improperly acquired property. Likewise, to propose that restoration of sovereignty must prohibit the inclusion of non-Indigenous peoples within those states is not supportable by the principles of sovereignty nor of justice.

You are correct that there is no principle in law or justice that prevents the owner of the car from doing any of the things you mention, but that isn't what we are talking about here! You keep asking what prevents the owner from doing these things and I keep answering nothing. Then I say that REQUIRING the owner to do these things is an injustice and you ignore that.

I feel quite comfortable describing what I propose as a just and equitable outcome. As people have been eager to point out - yourself included - the existing Settler population is, with a few exceptions, not directly responsible for what has happened, only what will happen. Justice, then, is offended by both the propositions of allowing the existing unjust situation to stand and the creation of a new unjust situation via the punitive exclusion of the Settler, which is what you demand it must do - a position that, frankly, has less to do with justice and more to do with a very rigid way of viewing the world. This is why both myself and most decolonization theorists and advocates I've read or spoken to on the issue - including nearly all the Indigenous perspectives - do not call for ethnostates, nor for victor's justice, but genuine justice - the resolution of the unjust situation, and the creation of a new and better one.

I must again dispute that what I seek are 'minority ruled ethnostates'. What I'd personally like to see is a tripartite parliamentary system with a body set up specifically for Indigenous representation and strong constitutional and cultural safeguards against the abuse of the system by any part of the population, which I suppose at a stretch you could describe as minority ruled but certainly not an ethnostate.

I feel at this point for future clarity that I must ask you how you define justice. We may be arguing about two very different conceptions of the idea, which is unfortunately extremely common in this particular matter.

Here are the premises I believe we have agreed on regarding the current situation in North America and Australia.

1) The land and sovereignty of the indigenous peoples was illegally and unjustly stolen from them by the current governments of these states.
2) The existing indigenous tribes as heirs to the people the land and sovereignty was stolen from have a right in justice to have that land and sovereignty returned to them.
3) We can probably analogize the situation to the theft of an automobile.
4) Sovereignty includes the right to decide who lives on the land, the right to determine the rules governing property rights, the right to determine who resides on the land and the right to collect taxes.

It follows from these four points as a matter of simple logic that justice requires the stolen land and sovereignty must be returned whole and entire to the indigenous tribes.

What they do with it afterwards is up to them, they might choose to share their sovereignty with the people currently living on the land, or they might choose to install themselves as an oppressive ruling class, or they might choose to sell the land and sovereignty in return for a massive cash payment, or they might decide to confiscate everything and expel the people currently living on the land. Given human nature and the number of different groups involved I expect all these things would happen if justice defined in this way were implemented.

You say this is not what you have proposed. I believe you but then you need to either admit that what you propose is not justice or provide a better definition of justice because they one I gave above came from you and I have no obligation to improve it since I am perfectly happy to admit that my desired outcome is not justice.

Also the position that expelling the descendants of the settlers from the land they were born in is unjust is not based on the idea that the current situation is just. It is based on the idea that every person has a right to live where they were born.

Now, while it may be broadly agreeable that a person has a right to live where they were born - indeed, I don't think you'll find many people who disagree in most cases - we routinely do away with such a right. Houses are seized or sold, and the offspring born there have no innate right of return. Land is turned into highways or factories, and the people born there have no innate right of return. It is not an inviolable right, but one that can and regularly is dismissed and extinguished. But let us pretend for a moment that it isn't.

Person A lives on the land (Land A) he was born on. Person B violently seizes that land from him. Person A spends the rest of his life elsewhere (Land B, owned by Person C who is sympathetic but does not adopt Person A) as a guest, but has children. These children cannot have a right to live in Land B when their father's right was purely conditional and as a guest of good will without Person C granting them that right, unless you propose that birthright exceeds all other possible factors (for instance, Person C's right to control who lives in and on his land) as the supreme right. The only land they can have a birthright to is Land A, but they weren't born there, and meanwhile Person B's children have - a situation which you propose is sufficient to either extinguish or limit the rights of Person A's offspring purely for the fact that Person B was stronger than Person A.

This would be an absurd situation, and I'm sure you recognize that the right to inhabit an area can be passed down, so we then reach our next area of weakness in your argument: I'm not calling for expulsion except in certain fringe areas (e.g. where a border must be built, where someone lives on sacred ground, etc), so the above side show is fundamentally irrelevant. While the ownership of the land will usually have to be returned in various forms, this does not require that tenants be evicted - indeed, land ownership is regularly transferred without doing so - and people's voidable right to live where they were born does not need to be stripped to accomplish it.

First we are not talking about people in the situation you describe we are talking about states. And I would hold that by permitting the people from state A to live in state C the citizens of state C are accepting that the children of the people from state A will be citizens of state C with all the rights and duties that result from that. As they were not born in state A (which has now been renamed state B) and have not lived in state B the children of the people from state A have no right to live in state B, although they may have claims for compensation over the treatment of their parents. And yes all children born in state B are citizens of state B with all the rights and duties that result from being citizens of B.

As regards what you are calling for, if you are calling for justice as you have defined it in this thread then you are calling for the indigenous tribes to be given the authority to decide if mass evictions will happen. You may personally oppose it but your argument requires that your opinion doesn't matter.

This, again, is where the process of indigenization comes in. Restoring the sovereignty of Indigenous states - which are, again, distinct from Indigenous peoples when they have not been improperly collapsed by the seizure of that statehood - can still take place democratically, it just requires the consent of the Settler population. Hence, the call for widespread cultural change and the centring of our national heritage as the tools for doing so. In this regard, it is, well, literally no different to any other democracy other than proposed safeguards like an Indigenous representative body in parliament and the voluntary shift in culture.

Do you think indigenous states (as distinct from indigenous people) have rights?

Yes, I hear what you are calling for but you have not explained how what you are calling for is justice as you have defined justice.

Nicholas

[loomer]

The requirement of intent with regards to states is not that the leaders actively wish it, but rather that the policy of the state is either expressly genocidal or cannot be carried out without creating the effect of genocide. While intent to destroy remains rather tricky, where the policy of the state cannot be attained without carrying out a genocide, it is satisfied.

This is a definition of intent not evidence that intent exists in the cases you have cited. I think it is much more probable that the cases you have cited result from the cruelty and indifference that government bureaucrats usually display when dealing with people who lack the cultural knowledge to fulfill their expectation and the power to hold them accountable.

The reason I have given you this definition of intent - which is the correct, applicable definition of intent when analyzing state policy as opposed to your model of 'well, the leaders must actively pursue it' - is because it is necessary to understand why the cases I have cited constitute part of a genocidal policy. Said policy is inferred from the general context in which individual actions take place, and thus the intention is found in the composite of state actions and laws rather than in singular acts or individuals.

Under this definition, intent is present because it is not possible to carry out the state's policies without effecting a genocide.

Pair that with the fact that case workers responsible for investigating abuse allegations against a poor person are going to be in a lot more trouble if they say things are fine and the child later dies then if they say the child needs to be taken away when the child is fine where he is and the disproportionate removal of indigenous children can be explained without intent. Just the government being its normal callous and incompetent self while trying to protect children.

The disproportionate removal is not just because 'people be poor, yo'. It is disproportionate to precisely the same socioeconomic groups differing only by ethnicity. How do you explain this as 'just the government being callous'?

I believe I already addressed who will negotiate it upthread, but here we go: The representatives and legal experts of all involved parties. Just like any other major governmental reform, national fusion, etc. The right to reside within the state, provided it is in compliance with the new constitutions, can be retained without a refusal to restore land and sovereignty - indeed, it is usually proposed that the right attach to citizenship and that citizenship be granted to all resident in the affected areas at the time of transition - and I challenge you to demonstrate precisely why it cannot without falling back on 'the settlers will just turn on the Indigenous peoples again'. None of this compromises the right to self government nor creates the danger of statelessness, since under the approach I propose, the process of dismantling the states involved is inherently an expression of self government and necessarily contains such negotiations as to enable safeguards against statelessness.

It appears to me that the participation of all involved parties in these negotiations violates justice as you have defined it. I will explain why below.

Again, you make an error here. You assume sovereignty attaches to the people rather than to the state, which is incorrect. The justice involved is the restoration of that sovereignty not to Indigenous people but to their nations and states.

Are you using nation and state as synonyms here? Because they aren't usually a nation is a very large group of people bound together by common culture, language and belief in their nationhood. A state is a political entity recognized as such in international law with a widely acknowledged sovereign territory. Since we have been talking about tribes until now I have no idea why you have brought either word in. If you mean nations and states as distinct from tribes can you give me some examples of what they currently are?

You seem extremely confused, but let's see if I can clarify it for you.

Nation: The collective embodiment of the people as an organized community.
People: The persons themselves.
State: The, well, entity known as a state, usually corresponding to but distinct from the nation.
In our specific context, due to the collapse of Indigenous sovereignty, it is not meaningfully possible to speak of the state and the nation as distinct. This is something that will change with the restoration of sovereignty.

Thus, when I say, 'sovereignty is restored not to Indigenous people but to their nations and states', I mean the following: Sovereignty does not attach to individuals on ethnic grounds but collectively to the presently merged Indigenous nation/state, which will divide upon the return of sovereignty into a distinct nation and state arrangement. It is only when sovereignty is returned to the nations and states that they may emerge from their present collapsed state.

Also, the use of 'Tribe' is not universal and in some cases is quite offensive so you'll notice that on the whole I don't use it.

Now, you again make the bold claim that this sovereignty must exclude non-Indigenous voices as a foundational point of justice, but this is not the case - let's return to the purchased stolen car analogy. There is no principle of law nor justice that says to the owner that they must not decide to let me use the car after it is returned, nor ever give me a lift down the road, nor that we may not become friends, nor that - where the acquisition was innocent and unknowing - I ought to be penalized beyond the loss of the improperly acquired property. Likewise, to propose that restoration of sovereignty must prohibit the inclusion of non-Indigenous peoples within those states is not supportable by the principles of sovereignty nor of justice.

You are correct that there is no principle in law or justice that prevents the owner of the car from doing any of the things you mention, but that isn't what we are talking about here! You keep asking what prevents the owner from doing these things and I keep answering nothing. Then I say that REQUIRING the owner to do these things is an injustice and you ignore that.

I don't ignore it. I dispute it and think we mean different things by justice, which is why I have asked you for your definition of justice.

I feel quite comfortable describing what I propose as a just and equitable outcome. As people have been eager to point out - yourself included - the existing Settler population is, with a few exceptions, not directly responsible for what has happened, only what will happen. Justice, then, is offended by both the propositions of allowing the existing unjust situation to stand and the creation of a new unjust situation via the punitive exclusion of the Settler, which is what you demand it must do - a position that, frankly, has less to do with justice and more to do with a very rigid way of viewing the world. This is why both myself and most decolonization theorists and advocates I've read or spoken to on the issue - including nearly all the Indigenous perspectives - do not call for ethnostates, nor for victor's justice, but genuine justice - the resolution of the unjust situation, and the creation of a new and better one.

I must again dispute that what I seek are 'minority ruled ethnostates'. What I'd personally like to see is a tripartite parliamentary system with a body set up specifically for Indigenous representation and strong constitutional and cultural safeguards against the abuse of the system by any part of the population, which I suppose at a stretch you could describe as minority ruled but certainly not an ethnostate.

I feel at this point for future clarity that I must ask you how you define justice. We may be arguing about two very different conceptions of the idea, which is unfortunately extremely common in this particular matter.

Here are the premises I believe we have agreed on regarding the current situation in North America and Australia.

1) The land and sovereignty of the indigenous peoples was illegally and unjustly stolen from them by the current governments of these states.
2) The existing indigenous tribes as heirs to the people the land and sovereignty was stolen from have a right in justice to have that land and sovereignty returned to them.
3) We can probably analogize the situation to the theft of an automobile.
4) Sovereignty includes the right to decide who lives on the land, the right to determine the rules governing property rights, the right to determine who resides on the land and the right to collect taxes.

It follows from these four points as a matter of simple logic that justice requires the stolen land and sovereignty must be returned whole and entire to the indigenous tribes.

Agreeable, though I quibble on point 2. The existing Indigenous nations are not heirs, but the same people.

What they do with it afterwards is up to them, they might choose to share their sovereignty with the people currently living on the land, or they might choose to install themselves as an oppressive ruling class, or they might choose to sell the land and sovereignty in return for a massive cash payment, or they might decide to confiscate everything and expel the people currently living on the land. Given human nature and the number of different groups involved I expect all these things would happen if justice defined in this way were implemented.

You say this is not what you have proposed. I believe you but then you need to either admit that what you propose is not justice or provide a better definition of justice because they one I gave above came from you and I have no obligation to improve it since I am perfectly happy to admit that my desired outcome is not justice.

You haven't actually given my definition of justice. You seem to operate under the assumption that my definition is one that countenances the creation of injustice to amend injustice, which is incorrect. It is for this reason that my proposal consistently includes protections for those presently living within the territories to be returned - which is, I note, common in pretty much every decolonization proposal that bothers with the question of settler futurity at all.

Allow me to venture a definition of justice for the present purpose that avoids your mistake:
The state of affairs in a community in which:
1. The social happiness of this community is preserved; provided that
2. This social happiness does not rely upon the unhappiness of others; requiring that
3. The basic rights of all members of this community are recognized and respected; requiring that
4. Wrongs - being those things that trespass or violate upon the above - are put right; where
5. This righting does not itself injure the social happiness of this community; except
6. Where this injury is necessary to address a greater violation of the first three principles; and
7. No other viable alternative to address this violation exists.

My brief formulation of justice - I trust you will forgive me that I don't unload a full book on you about the construction and deconstruction of the question of justice in a post-colonial state - does not permit the creation of injustice to resolve injustice; justice is the state in which injustice does not exist. If we accept, as I do, that to render people stateless would be unjust, then the call for justice cannot involve this. Safeguards must then be put in place to ensure the basic rights of the members of that community are protected for the situation to in fact be just.

If your desired outcome is not justice, what is it?

Also the position that expelling the descendants of the settlers from the land they were born in is unjust is not based on the idea that the current situation is just. It is based on the idea that every person has a right to live where they were born.

Now, while it may be broadly agreeable that a person has a right to live where they were born - indeed, I don't think you'll find many people who disagree in most cases - we routinely do away with such a right. Houses are seized or sold, and the offspring born there have no innate right of return. Land is turned into highways or factories, and the people born there have no innate right of return. It is not an inviolable right, but one that can and regularly is dismissed and extinguished. But let us pretend for a moment that it isn't.

Person A lives on the land (Land A) he was born on. Person B violently seizes that land from him. Person A spends the rest of his life elsewhere (Land B, owned by Person C who is sympathetic but does not adopt Person A) as a guest, but has children. These children cannot have a right to live in Land B when their father's right was purely conditional and as a guest of good will without Person C granting them that right, unless you propose that birthright exceeds all other possible factors (for instance, Person C's right to control who lives in and on his land) as the supreme right. The only land they can have a birthright to is Land A, but they weren't born there, and meanwhile Person B's children have - a situation which you propose is sufficient to either extinguish or limit the rights of Person A's offspring purely for the fact that Person B was stronger than Person A.

This would be an absurd situation, and I'm sure you recognize that the right to inhabit an area can be passed down, so we then reach our next area of weakness in your argument: I'm not calling for expulsion except in certain fringe areas (e.g. where a border must be built, where someone lives on sacred ground, etc), so the above side show is fundamentally irrelevant. While the ownership of the land will usually have to be returned in various forms, this does not require that tenants be evicted - indeed, land ownership is regularly transferred without doing so - and people's voidable right to live where they were born does not need to be stripped to accomplish it.

First we are not talking about people in the situation you describe we are talking about states.

I'm sorry, didn't you begin this one with 'every person has a right to live where they were born'?

And I would hold that by permitting the people from state A to live in state C the citizens of state C are accepting that the children of the people from state A will be citizens of state C with all the rights and duties that result from that.

Why? If Person C - and we were, in fact, discussing persons so I will continue to do so. If you did not wish to discuss persons in this context you made a rather tremendous mistake in introducing the issue as a matter of personal right - does not grant the children of Person A, a guest, the right to residency, on what grounds would you propose that they should be forced to do so?

As they were not born in state A (which has now been renamed state B) and have not lived in state B the children of the people from state A have no right to live in state B, although they may have claims for compensation over the treatment of their parents.

So it is your position, then, that if I go next door, kick the neighbour out at gunpoint, and their kids are born elsewhere, all property rights they may have inherited cease to flow? A single generation of violent dispossession is sufficient in your book to erase any and all claim to land and residency?

And yes all children born in state B are citizens of state B with all the rights and duties that result from being citizens of B.

Person B's children's claim is based solely on violent and illegitimate acquisition. Is it your position that, having kicked out the neighbour at gunpoint, any children I have from that point on ought to inherit the illegitimate acquisition while the owner's children do not?

As regards what you are calling for, if you are calling for justice as you have defined it in this thread then you are calling for the indigenous tribes to be given the authority to decide if mass evictions will happen. You may personally oppose it but your argument requires that your opinion doesn't matter.

This is, as explained earlier, incorrect.

This, again, is where the process of indigenization comes in. Restoring the sovereignty of Indigenous states - which are, again, distinct from Indigenous peoples when they have not been improperly collapsed by the seizure of that statehood - can still take place democratically, it just requires the consent of the Settler population. Hence, the call for widespread cultural change and the centring of our national heritage as the tools for doing so. In this regard, it is, well, literally no different to any other democracy other than proposed safeguards like an Indigenous representative body in parliament and the voluntary shift in culture.

Do you think indigenous states (as distinct from indigenous people) have rights?

States have rights that exist independently from the personal rights of their members and citizens, yes. Do you disagree?

[Ziggy Stardust]

Thus, when I say, 'sovereignty is restored not to Indigenous people but to their nations and states', I mean the following: Sovereignty does not attach to individuals on ethnic grounds but collectively to the presently merged Indigenous nation/state, which will divide upon the return of sovereignty into a distinct nation and state arrangement. It is only when sovereignty is returned to the nations and states that they may emerge from their present collapsed state.

I'm going to have to agree with Nicholas on this one, I am finding it particularly difficult to parse what you are actually trying to say, even as someone who is already familiar with the correct definitions of the terms you're using. It sounds to me like you are taking the following stance:

1) Since indigenous peoples in the US are currently functionally "stateless" (either literally or at least practically, depending on how you consider the status of reservations), then there is no functional difference between an indigenous nation and an indigenous state (they are, as you say, "collapsed").
2) If indigenous nations and granted sovereignty, there will arise true indigenous states that are functionally distinct from the associated indigenous nation.

Is that what you are trying to say? If not, then I think you need to basically rephrase your stance to make it more clear. Even if it is what you are trying to say, the way you phrase it is a little difficult to follow. Why talk about a nation/state existing in a "collapsed" state instead of the more straightforward solution of saying they are "stateless" (or some similar alternative term to denote there is no state to speak of)? Your definition of state appears to imply sovereignty (if it doesn't, then do you consider various indigenous reservations to be states that lack sovereignty, or not-states, or something else?).

(By the way, I am finding it very interesting to read your posts in this thread, so please don't take this as an attack on your arguments, because it's not. Merely a request for clarification.)

[loomer]

Thus, when I say, 'sovereignty is restored not to Indigenous people but to their nations and states', I mean the following: Sovereignty does not attach to individuals on ethnic grounds but collectively to the presently merged Indigenous nation/state, which will divide upon the return of sovereignty into a distinct nation and state arrangement. It is only when sovereignty is returned to the nations and states that they may emerge from their present collapsed state.

I'm going to have to agree with Nicholas on this one, I am finding it particularly difficult to parse what you are actually trying to say, even as someone who is already familiar with the correct definitions of the terms you're using. It sounds to me like you are taking the following stance:

1) Since indigenous peoples in the US are currently functionally "stateless" (either literally or at least practically, depending on how you consider the status of reservations), then there is no functional difference between an indigenous nation and an indigenous state (they are, as you say, "collapsed").
2) If indigenous nations and granted sovereignty, there will arise true indigenous states that are functionally distinct from the associated indigenous nation.

Is that what you are trying to say? If not, then I think you need to basically rephrase your stance to make it more clear. Even if it is what you are trying to say, the way you phrase it is a little difficult to follow. Why talk about a nation/state existing in a "collapsed" state instead of the more straightforward solution of saying they are "stateless" (or some similar alternative term to denote there is no state to speak of)? Your definition of state appears to imply sovereignty (if it doesn't, then do you consider various indigenous reservations to be states that lack sovereignty, or not-states, or something else?).

(By the way, I am finding it very interesting to read your posts in this thread, so please don't take this as an attack on your arguments, because it's not. Merely a request for clarification.)

You've nearly got it down but part 1 isn't quite what I mean, and in fairness I definitely could be more precise - last night's message was written up in the haze of a fever caught during my engagement. Let's see if this formulation is clearer:

Indigenous states at the present time largely exist in a collapsed state (that is collapsed as in superimposed and condensed, not failed or stateless, which is where I think your summary at 1 went astray) where the nation and the state are defacto identical and, to a very large degree, also inseperable from the ethnicity that comprises that nation as its membership is constituted almost entirely by inheritance (with some exceptions here and there). It is this state of collapse that renders the terminology particularly ambiguous even by the standards of nation/state/country terminology since we can use one term to refer to the others accurately now, but not upon the shift to restored statehood. The statehood component is essentially purely notional, as the actual capabilities of states have been largely removed, but this notional statehood must still be acknowledged as in the majority of cases Indigenous states did not sign treaties sufficient to in fact end its existence and this is why I speak of restoring it rather than granting it/creating it.

Upon the restoration of sovereignty, this notional statehood will transform into full statehood with all the corresponding rights and duties of a state contained within the customary international law. So that's your 2 coming in, which is an accurate summation. At that point, it becomes possible again to view the state, the nation, and the ethnicity as distinct but related entities (for instance, when we speak of England we speak of the following all at once: the state, its territory, the national community (by which I mean those broad national communities that encompass many others and that we think of as synonymous with the broader population of a state - e.g. the 'Australian', the 'Indian', the 'Italian' - labels that become distressingly easily used for nationalistic purposes but which nonetheless are useful demonyms and conceptual arrangements around shared macrocultures), the subnational and regional communities that exist within that national community (microcultures - the term applies regardless of size, which is admittedly a weakness; e.g. Scouse speakers, British Indians, Travellers, the Cornish, immigrant communities, etc, in the English example), and the ethnic groups that comprise those national and subnational communities (often with substantial overlap and simultaneous membership in more than one ethnic group and subnational community - e.g. British Indians in England are English, British Indian, potentially part of a sub-subnational community of regional and ethnic identity (e.g. Bengali, Punjabi) depending on if they retain and maintain that identity, and potentially still other groups depending on marriage ties etc) they're all closely related but not synonymous) and thereby 'expand' or 'unpack' the presently collapsed statehood-nationhood-ethnicity triad of Indigenous states.

The territorial construction of these unpacked states is based largely on what was at the time of improper seizure. Thus the boundaries of said states derive from the historical extent of the currently synonymous nations and states, but at the moment of transition, they cease to be synonymous with one another; the nation-state-people births the state and thereby the nation and the people cease to be collapsed into it. This is also the reason I speak of the states as being of multi-ethnic composition rather than ethnostates - it is the territory and law that is to be reconstituted along the lines of the Indigenous nations with the rightful claim (subject to whatever changes the new constitutional drafters find necessary in the process of restoration, creation, and modernization necessary to create the new/restored states), rather than the ethnic demographics of the state, which will remain largely unchanged (barring substantial voluntary migration - which is entirely possible, either due to a return of people to the restored states or due to people preferring to live elsewhere for whatever reason.)

Thus when I say that sovereignty does not attach to the Indigenous people but to their nations and states, I refer quite specifically to it attaching to first the existing nations and then to the restored/de novo states they birth and that are constructed along the lines of the Indigenous nation's historical territorial claims (except where by negotiation it is agreed that the construction should be otherwise; e.g. if Group A agrees that Group B may retain partial possession of the northern half of Group A's traditional lands where they were forcibly resettled on whatever grounds the two find agreeable) rather than to Indigenous people on an ethnic basis. The goal of this process is to decollapse the current forced superimposition of nation-state-people, which the restoration of land and sovereignty enables more effectively than any other process.

Hopefully that's a bit clearer. I think it also highlights why here and there I ask people for definitions - 'collapsed' can, as we've seen in Ziggy's reading versus my intended reading, mean very different things with quite different connotations.

[Elheru Aran]

Minor question: how do the terms 'nation' and 'state' attach to migratory tribes like (IIRC) many of the Plains people such as the Sioux, who didn't really have fixed homes, and who tended to exist as loose affiliations of fairly independent familial groups rather than a single heterogenous mass of people under the same flag?

No argumentativeness here, just curious how that works... (and also don't really have the time/inclination to read through twenty pages if it's already been mentioned but if it has, a link would be nice)

[loomer]

Minor question: how do the terms 'nation' and 'state' attach to migratory tribes like (IIRC) many of the Plains people such as the Sioux, who didn't really have fixed homes, and who tended to exist as loose affiliations of fairly independent familial groups rather than a single heterogenous mass of people under the same flag?

No argumentativeness here, just curious how that works... (and also don't really have the time/inclination to read through twenty pages if it's already been mentioned but if it has, a link would be nice)

I don't think it has come up and it's out of my area of specialty, but I'll try and tackle it and if someone who knows better on this front wants to chime in, that'd be great.

First, regarding fixed homes: Nation is more flexible than state in that it doesn't require a fixed territorial demarcation, so nation works fine - the shared cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and historical ties of those nations is sufficient to meet the criteria for such in the absence of fixed territory. I also don't think there'd really be an issue applying the state label either if the other criteria of statehood are met, as my understanding is that while the lifestyle was customarily migratory and habituated to cyclical inhabitance, it still took place within a reasonably consistent range of territories and there's nothing in statehood in and of itself that requires fixed locations, though the convenience of them is very helpful for one of the other criterion. If I'm mistaken and said tribal nations in the Americas went wherever without any particular patterns then please let me know - I'm mostly familiar with cyclical inhabitation in European history and pre-invasion Australian history where that wasn't the case.

Second, regarding the loose affiliation element: This is actually where there's a legitimate case to be made that the label of statehood isn't quite applicable, though nation remains unimpeded as it isn't tied to a particular level of unity provided that there's sufficient ties between the independent groups, clans, bands, etc. Statehood however, as commonly formulated, requires a certain degree of centralization and, though I think the word is loaded and highly eurocentric, 'sophistication' of legal structures to be applicable. I'll quote Kelsen here - Pure Theory of Law to be exact - as I think his is the best summation of that older formulation:
"To be a state, the legal order must have the character of an organization in the narrower and specific sense of this word, that is, it must establish organs who, in the manner of division of labor, create and apply the norms that constitute the legal order; it must display a certain degree of centralization. The state is a relatively centralized legal order."
Kelsen goes on and on about the division of labour element elsewhere but basically, there have to be specific offices (hereditary, appointed, doesn't matter) and bodies (preferably formal) that create, interpret, enforce, and apply law and other state functions (taxation, the military, etc) for it to constitute one, which cuts to the heart of the traditional Western model of statehood. So the loose affiliation and lack of centralization can be an issue in terms of a retroactive application of statehood to Indigenous communities that lacked such bodies. Personally I think such definitions are a little too restrictive but they're very well entrenched so there's not much hope of shifting them, nor would it necessarily be that conceptually helpful to do so.

However, I don't think it's worth being caught up in when discussing the restoration of sovereignty. I don't see very many models that call for a complete decentralization again - the division of political labour might be changed and adjusted but is generally agreed on as a pretty good idea, so most of the restored/de novo states (depending on if, by the Kelsenian formulation, one genuinely existed previously or is being invoked as a convenient tool for discourse's sake) would satisfy this criterion without difficulty.

[Elheru Aran]

[snip for length]

I don't think it has come up and it's out of my area of specialty, but I'll try and tackle it and if someone who knows better on this front wants to chime in, that'd be great.
[snip for length]
"To be a state, the legal order must have the character of an organization in the narrower and specific sense of this word, that is, it must establish organs who, in the manner of division of labor, create and apply the norms that constitute the legal order; it must display a certain degree of centralization. The state is a relatively centralized legal order."
Kelsen goes on and on about the division of labour element elsewhere but basically, there have to be specific offices (hereditary, appointed, doesn't matter) and bodies (preferably formal) that create, interpret, enforce, and apply law and other state functions (taxation, the military, etc) for it to constitute one, which cuts to the heart of the traditional Western model of statehood. So the loose affiliation and lack of centralization can be an issue in terms of a retroactive application of statehood to Indigenous communities that lacked such bodies. Personally I think such definitions are a little too restrictive but they're very well entrenched so there's not much hope of shifting them, nor would it necessarily be that conceptually helpful to do so.

However, I don't think it's worth being caught up in when discussing the restoration of sovereignty. I don't see very many models that call for a complete decentralization again - the division of political labour might be changed and adjusted but is generally agreed on as a pretty good idea, so most of the restored/de novo states (depending on if, by the Kelsenian formulation, one genuinely existed previously or is being invoked as a convenient tool for discourse's sake) would satisfy this criterion without difficulty.

Thanks for elaborating.

My main issue, I suppose, is that I'm not sure I understand how a Western style nation-state would interact with such a 'loose affiliation' type of... population? national group?

Let's take, say, a First Nations tribe (it's not an area of study of mine, so I'm just gonna wing a vague generic description here to make an example). They might assemble in a great gathering periodically to observe certain events, or various familial units might come together for trade, battle and so forth, but for the most part they exist in disparate familial units, clans, what have you. Each familial unit has its own leader and elders. There might be some leadership of the entire tribe, but for the most part this is extraordinary-circumstances stuff, and these leaders are more elected than hereditary. These familial units typically move back and forth across a large span of territory, following natural movements of food sources across the year.

So... how exactly does this 'nation' of loosely affiliated migratory units conduct foreign relations with other more conventional (in a Western sense anyway) nations? I don't mind if you use an Australian Indigenous example, I'm a tad more familiar with North American First Nations but not by much more.

[loomer]

[snip for length]

I don't think it has come up and it's out of my area of specialty, but I'll try and tackle it and if someone who knows better on this front wants to chime in, that'd be great.
[snip for length]
"To be a state, the legal order must have the character of an organization in the narrower and specific sense of this word, that is, it must establish organs who, in the manner of division of labor, create and apply the norms that constitute the legal order; it must display a certain degree of centralization. The state is a relatively centralized legal order."
Kelsen goes on and on about the division of labour element elsewhere but basically, there have to be specific offices (hereditary, appointed, doesn't matter) and bodies (preferably formal) that create, interpret, enforce, and apply law and other state functions (taxation, the military, etc) for it to constitute one, which cuts to the heart of the traditional Western model of statehood. So the loose affiliation and lack of centralization can be an issue in terms of a retroactive application of statehood to Indigenous communities that lacked such bodies. Personally I think such definitions are a little too restrictive but they're very well entrenched so there's not much hope of shifting them, nor would it necessarily be that conceptually helpful to do so.

However, I don't think it's worth being caught up in when discussing the restoration of sovereignty. I don't see very many models that call for a complete decentralization again - the division of political labour might be changed and adjusted but is generally agreed on as a pretty good idea, so most of the restored/de novo states (depending on if, by the Kelsenian formulation, one genuinely existed previously or is being invoked as a convenient tool for discourse's sake) would satisfy this criterion without difficulty.

Thanks for elaborating.

My main issue, I suppose, is that I'm not sure I understand how a Western style nation-state would interact with such a 'loose affiliation' type of... population? national group?

Let's take, say, a First Nations tribe (it's not an area of study of mine, so I'm just gonna wing a vague generic description here to make an example). They might assemble in a great gathering periodically to observe certain events, or various familial units might come together for trade, battle and so forth, but for the most part they exist in disparate familial units, clans, what have you. Each familial unit has its own leader and elders. There might be some leadership of the entire tribe, but for the most part this is extraordinary-circumstances stuff, and these leaders are more elected than hereditary. These familial units typically move back and forth across a large span of territory, following natural movements of food sources across the year.

So... how exactly does this 'nation' of loosely affiliated migratory units conduct foreign relations with other more conventional (in a Western sense anyway) nations? I don't mind if you use an Australian Indigenous example, I'm a tad more familiar with North American First Nations but not by much more.

I think this is something of a moot point in what's usually considered in the scope of decolonization and restoration movements, which are basically Westphalian-esque states structured along the lines of people's current existence with elements of traditional culture returning where possible, appropriate, and desired. So rather than a return to a cyclical inhabitance model without fixed economic, political, and legal structures outside of the family group/clan/etc, you'd still have a centralized government, though perhaps one with allowances for people to pursue that life without undue legal hardship where desired and possible. There's a few primitivist movements but they're very much on the fringe and most instead prefer to take the tack of indigenizing and reforming what is rather than undoing it - sometimes grudgingly (as it'd be impossible to sustain present populations in many areas otherwise, even of just Indigenous people) and sometimes very enthusiastically.

How it'd actually work would be interesting but is probably something best discussed elsewhere. I suspect it might actually be something that wouldn't have been possible a hundred years ago but is possible now thanks to the massive boon of widespread near-instant communications enabling widely disparate groups to retain a consistent shared central polity for the purposes of a state despite general decentralization, but it's more of a hypothetical worldbuilding exercise than anything to do with decolonization and the restoration of Indigenous statehood and sovereignty.

[loomer]

Edit: Quote is not edit. Whoops.

[Elheru Aran]

That's fair, yeah. Obviously modern versions of indigenous nations are a long way away from how they used to be, having essentially been forced to adopt Western patterns of social organization. If they were treated more like genuine nations rather than protectorates, and more of their lands were restored, I can see them relaxing foreign models within the bounds of what their current population understands and acknowledges, while still retaining enough elements in order to interface successfully with the outside nations around them.

At this point there's obviously not much to do about the past aside from deploring it, but the question does arise of how an newly independent Native state would work with other nations if its... model? is so dramatically different from how other countries do business.

Perhaps Mongolia might serve as an example, or has it been too Westernized? I understand that a reasonable percentage of the Mongol population is still migratory, but it's not like I know much about that country other than Wikipedia...

[loomer]

That's fair, yeah. Obviously modern versions of indigenous nations are a long way away from how they used to be, having essentially been forced to adopt Western patterns of social organization. If they were treated more like genuine nations rather than protectorates, and more of their lands were restored, I can see them relaxing foreign models within the bounds of what their current population understands and acknowledges, while still retaining enough elements in order to interface successfully with the outside nations around them.

At this point there's obviously not much to do about the past aside from deploring it, but the question does arise of how an newly independent Native state would work with other nations if its... model? is so dramatically different from how other countries do business.

Perhaps Mongolia might serve as an example, or has it been too Westernized? I understand that a reasonable percentage of the Mongol population is still migratory, but it's not like I know much about that country other than Wikipedia...

I don't think the model is really that dramatically different in most cases. I'm really not familiar with any proposals for decolonization (well, ones that aren't really out on the fringe anyway) that suggest doing away with many of the current structures of government, even if they might undergo substantial reform - they usually call for democratic government, either direct or representative, with codified legal systems, cohesive economic policies, and recognizable models of government to the existing Westphalian-esque statehood model that incorporate various forms of Indigenous tradition and custom without shifting entirely into what once was. So you might see, for instance, an Indigenous state forming that maintains a parliamentary representative democracy alongside a broadly socialist conception of economic and social policy infused with various customary practices as the closest match, rather than a reversion to non-State dynamics and a deliberate destruction of all Western influence. So the model of statehood is still relatable even if it's different. Over time there might be a bigger shift but by then it'll just be evolution and the difference will be easy enough to keep up with.

[Nicholas]

The requirement of intent with regards to states is not that the leaders actively wish it, but rather that the policy of the state is either expressly genocidal or cannot be carried out without creating the effect of genocide. While intent to destroy remains rather tricky, where the policy of the state cannot be attained without carrying out a genocide, it is satisfied.

This is a definition of intent not evidence that intent exists in the cases you have cited. I think it is much more probable that the cases you have cited result from the cruelty and indifference that government bureaucrats usually display when dealing with people who lack the cultural knowledge to fulfill their expectation and the power to hold them accountable.

The reason I have given you this definition of intent - which is the correct, applicable definition of intent when analyzing state policy as opposed to your model of 'well, the leaders must actively pursue it' - is because it is necessary to understand why the cases I have cited constitute part of a genocidal policy. Said policy is inferred from the general context in which individual actions take place, and thus the intention is found in the composite of state actions and laws rather than in singular acts or individuals.

Under this definition, intent is present because it is not possible to carry out the state's policies without effecting a genocide.

Yes, if the state's policies are goals require the state to commit genocide then the state is engaged in genocide.

Pair that with the fact that case workers responsible for investigating abuse allegations against a poor person are going to be in a lot more trouble if they say things are fine and the child later dies then if they say the child needs to be taken away when the child is fine where he is and the disproportionate removal of indigenous children can be explained without intent. Just the government being its normal callous and incompetent self while trying to protect children.

The disproportionate removal is not just because 'people be poor, yo'. It is disproportionate to precisely the same socioeconomic groups differing only by ethnicity. How do you explain this as 'just the government being callous'?

I can think of at least three plausible ways to explain this, however, verifying that any one of them or even several of them in combination is what is actually going on would be very difficult for a scholar in Australia who has made studying this there life's work. It is impossible for me from halfway around the world in my free time.

The discussion of genocide is giving me a headache and I feel confused so I want to summarize what I believe you are saying, please let me know if I have understood you correctly. I believe you are saying that the State of Australia is engaging in genocide against its indigenous population by removing disproportionate numbers of indigenous children from their homes. It claims to be doing so as part of a program to protect children from abuse and neglect, which is a legitimate function of government, but the disproportionate application of these laws constitutes genocide even though the disproportionate application is a consequence of a poorly understood set of institutional and cultural factors not state policy. Is that correct?

You seem extremely confused, but let's see if I can clarify it for you.

Nation: The collective embodiment of the people as an organized community.
People: The persons themselves.
State: The, well, entity known as a state, usually corresponding to but distinct from the nation.
In our specific context, due to the collapse of Indigenous sovereignty, it is not meaningfully possible to speak of the state and the nation as distinct. This is something that will change with the restoration of sovereignty.

Thus, when I say, 'sovereignty is restored not to Indigenous people but to their nations and states', I mean the following: Sovereignty does not attach to individuals on ethnic grounds but collectively to the presently merged Indigenous nation/state, which will divide upon the return of sovereignty into a distinct nation and state arrangement. It is only when sovereignty is returned to the nations and states that they may emerge from their present collapsed state.

Also, the use of 'Tribe' is not universal and in some cases is quite offensive so you'll notice that on the whole I don't use it.

Regarding "tribe" thanks I will avoid it in the future.

Regarding states I disagree. The state is a legal fiction which has no independent reality, like a corporation. It exists only in as far as society chooses to treat it as existing. It has only the rights society chooses to give to it or which it uses as extensions of its citizens rights. The state's ability to own property is an example of the first and the state's right to defend itself (an extension of its citizens' right to self defense) is an example of the second. As a result when the state is not acknowledged it immediately ceases to be. Therefor it cannot exist in a collapsed state and it has no right to be restored. The restoration of indigenous states can be a good means for bring more justice for indigenous peoples but it is not an end in itself.

I don't ignore it. I dispute it and think we mean different things by justice, which is why I have asked you for your definition of justice.

Failing to respond to something is ignoring it. If you want to dispute a point you need to say so.

You haven't actually given my definition of justice. You seem to operate under the assumption that my definition is one that countenances the creation of injustice to amend injustice, which is incorrect. It is for this reason that my proposal consistently includes protections for those presently living within the territories to be returned - which is, I note, common in pretty much every decolonization proposal that bothers with the question of settler futurity at all.

Allow me to venture a definition of justice for the present purpose that avoids your mistake:
The state of affairs in a community in which:
1. The social happiness of this community is preserved; provided that
2. This social happiness does not rely upon the unhappiness of others; requiring that
3. The basic rights of all members of this community are recognized and respected; requiring that
4. Wrongs - being those things that trespass or violate upon the above - are put right; where
5. This righting does not itself injure the social happiness of this community; except
6. Where this injury is necessary to address a greater violation of the first three principles; and
7. No other viable alternative to address this violation exists.

My brief formulation of justice - I trust you will forgive me that I don't unload a full book on you about the construction and deconstruction of the question of justice in a post-colonial state - does not permit the creation of injustice to resolve injustice; justice is the state in which injustice does not exist. If we accept, as I do, that to render people stateless would be unjust, then the call for justice cannot involve this. Safeguards must then be put in place to ensure the basic rights of the members of that community are protected for the situation to in fact be just.

If your desired outcome is not justice, what is it?

I'm not going to give you a definition of justice because I am inclined to think of justice as something that needs to be evaluated in each particular situation and something which in this world is often contradictory and therefor impossible. The discussion of historical land ownership is in fact one of those areas. Every inch of land on the planet has multiple people with the right to claim ownership in justice, they can't all be granted it so whatever is done will be unjust.

As regards your definition of justice, thank you for not giving me a book on the subject. I have difficulty following what exactly you mean but at this level of abstraction I don't have a problem with what I understand. I do think this definition of justice represents a concession on your part since while this definition of justice does reconcile with the concrete proposals you have made it implies restrictions on the rights of indigenous people's to have their land returned and thus directly contradicts what you have said about justice earlier. I am happy with that since my dislike for the conflict between how you were defining justice and the concrete proposals you were making was one of the major motivations for my posting.

Now, while it may be broadly agreeable that a person has a right to live where they were born - indeed, I don't think you'll find many people who disagree in most cases - we routinely do away with such a right. Houses are seized or sold, and the offspring born there have no innate right of return. Land is turned into highways or factories, and the people born there have no innate right of return. It is not an inviolable right, but one that can and regularly is dismissed and extinguished. But let us pretend for a moment that it isn't.

Person A lives on the land (Land A) he was born on. Person B violently seizes that land from him. Person A spends the rest of his life elsewhere (Land B, owned by Person C who is sympathetic but does not adopt Person A) as a guest, but has children. These children cannot have a right to live in Land B when their father's right was purely conditional and as a guest of good will without Person C granting them that right, unless you propose that birthright exceeds all other possible factors (for instance, Person C's right to control who lives in and on his land) as the supreme right. The only land they can have a birthright to is Land A, but they weren't born there, and meanwhile Person B's children have - a situation which you propose is sufficient to either extinguish or limit the rights of Person A's offspring purely for the fact that Person B was stronger than Person A.

This would be an absurd situation, and I'm sure you recognize that the right to inhabit an area can be passed down, so we then reach our next area of weakness in your argument: I'm not calling for expulsion except in certain fringe areas (e.g. where a border must be built, where someone lives on sacred ground, etc), so the above side show is fundamentally irrelevant. While the ownership of the land will usually have to be returned in various forms, this does not require that tenants be evicted - indeed, land ownership is regularly transferred without doing so - and people's voidable right to live where they were born does not need to be stripped to accomplish it.

First we are not talking about people in the situation you describe we are talking about states.

I'm sorry, didn't you begin this one with 'every person has a right to live where they were born'?.

Yes, I did and I spoke carelessly and imprecisely in doing so. I assumed that the comment made no sense on any scale other then the state and therefor failed to express myself clearly. I am sorry for the confusion. What I meant to say but didn't properly express are two closely related claims.

1) Every person has a right to live in the state in which they were born.
2) Because creating a hereditary class of people without the right to participate in governing the state is wrong every person has a right to citizenship in the state in which they were born.

Why? If Person C - and we were, in fact, discussing persons so I will continue to do so. If you did not wish to discuss persons in this context you made a rather tremendous mistake in introducing the issue as a matter of personal right - does not grant the children of Person A, a guest, the right to residency, on what grounds would you propose that they should be forced to do so?

If granting the children of person A, a guest, citizenship is the desired policy of the majority of the citizens of state C then the person C we are speaking about should be forced to do so on the grounds that a democratically adopted policy is morally binding on all citizens of state C.

If granting the children of person A, a guest, citizenship is not the desired policy of the majority of the citizens of state C then they can avoid doing so by limiting the states of guests too a few months at a time and refusing to permit women who are likely to give birth while visiting as guests permission of visit. Please note, guest implies a short visit, while the timing isn't quite right for this situation Benjamin Franklin's famous aphorism applies here, "guests like fish begin to stink after three days."

If the citizens of state C desire to prevent the children of long term residents from becoming citizens of state C there is no ethical way for them to do so. Preventing those children from becoming citizens violates their human rights by preventing them from participating in the government of their home.

As they were not born in state A (which has now been renamed state B) and have not lived in state B the children of the people from state A have no right to live in state B, although they may have claims for compensation over the treatment of their parents.

So it is your position, then, that if I go next door, kick the neighbour out at gunpoint, and their kids are born elsewhere, all property rights they may have inherited cease to flow? A single generation of violent dispossession is sufficient in your book to erase any and all claim to land and residency?

And yes all children born in state B are citizens of state B with all the rights and duties that result from being citizens of B.

Person B's children's claim is based solely on violent and illegitimate acquisition. Is it your position that, having kicked out the neighbour at gunpoint, any children I have from that point on ought to inherit the illegitimate acquisition while the owner's children do not?

The analogies you use are properly resolved in accordance with the laws of the state in which the incidents you describe occur. All else being equal it seems reasonable to assume that those laws reflect the citizens of that state's view of justice.

As regards conquest or ethnic cleansing, yes the children of the aggressors who acquired the land via theft and murder do inherit the land as legitimate owners. To say otherwise is to say that their residence in the only home they have ever now is illegitimate and thus to say that they ought to be expelled from their home. In other words to deny the legitimacy of their inheritence is to say that because of what their parents or grandparents or even great-great-great-great-grandparents did ethnically cleansing them if fine.

I would not say that the victims claims are completely extinguished after one generation but I would say that their claim to the land is significantly weaker then the claim of the people actually living there.

States have rights that exist independently from the personal rights of their members and citizens, yes. Do you disagree?

Yes I do disagree, as I explained above.

Nicholas

[Elfdart]

So Trump wants "The Squad" to leave the US, but just connived with Natanyahu to bar Omar and Tlaib from leaving the country.

[loomer]

This is a definition of intent not evidence that intent exists in the cases you have cited. I think it is much more probable that the cases you have cited result from the cruelty and indifference that government bureaucrats usually display when dealing with people who lack the cultural knowledge to fulfill their expectation and the power to hold them accountable.

The reason I have given you this definition of intent - which is the correct, applicable definition of intent when analyzing state policy as opposed to your model of 'well, the leaders must actively pursue it' - is because it is necessary to understand why the cases I have cited constitute part of a genocidal policy. Said policy is inferred from the general context in which individual actions take place, and thus the intention is found in the composite of state actions and laws rather than in singular acts or individuals.

Under this definition, intent is present because it is not possible to carry out the state's policies without effecting a genocide.

Yes, if the state's policies are goals require the state to commit genocide then the state is engaged in genocide.

And it then follows that if the only possible outcome of the state's policy is genocide, then it is a genocidal policy, right? So even seemingly disconnected policies, created and enforced without specific genocidal intent but which can only as a cumulative whole result in the destruction of a people in whole or in part, can amount to genocide.

Pair that with the fact that case workers responsible for investigating abuse allegations against a poor person are going to be in a lot more trouble if they say things are fine and the child later dies then if they say the child needs to be taken away when the child is fine where he is and the disproportionate removal of indigenous children can be explained without intent. Just the government being its normal callous and incompetent self while trying to protect children.

The disproportionate removal is not just because 'people be poor, yo'. It is disproportionate to precisely the same socioeconomic groups differing only by ethnicity. How do you explain this as 'just the government being callous'?

I can think of at least three plausible ways to explain this, however, verifying that any one of them or even several of them in combination is what is actually going on would be very difficult for a scholar in Australia who has made studying this there life's work. It is impossible for me from halfway around the world in my free time.

I'd like to hear the three you have in mind, because I'd wager there's a good chance someone's already raised that angle or question, and if not, I'd love to be able to explore it myself and see if it pans out.

The discussion of genocide is giving me a headache and I feel confused so I want to summarize what I believe you are saying, please let me know if I have understood you correctly. I believe you are saying that the State of Australia is engaging in genocide against its indigenous population by removing disproportionate numbers of indigenous children from their homes. It claims to be doing so as part of a program to protect children from abuse and neglect, which is a legitimate function of government, but the disproportionate application of these laws constitutes genocide even though the disproportionate application is a consequence of a poorly understood set of institutional and cultural factors not state policy. Is that correct?

That's broadly correct, yes. The policy of removal must be understood however in both its historical and present contexts and constitutes only one part of the genocidal program of policies implemented in Australia. Similar genocidal programs exist in Canada and America, to my knowledge, though I'm not sure about New Zealand at the moment - I'd like to think no, but the answer is probably yes.

You seem extremely confused, but let's see if I can clarify it for you.

Nation: The collective embodiment of the people as an organized community.
People: The persons themselves.
State: The, well, entity known as a state, usually corresponding to but distinct from the nation.
In our specific context, due to the collapse of Indigenous sovereignty, it is not meaningfully possible to speak of the state and the nation as distinct. This is something that will change with the restoration of sovereignty.

Thus, when I say, 'sovereignty is restored not to Indigenous people but to their nations and states', I mean the following: Sovereignty does not attach to individuals on ethnic grounds but collectively to the presently merged Indigenous nation/state, which will divide upon the return of sovereignty into a distinct nation and state arrangement. It is only when sovereignty is returned to the nations and states that they may emerge from their present collapsed state.

Also, the use of 'Tribe' is not universal and in some cases is quite offensive so you'll notice that on the whole I don't use it.

Regarding "tribe" thanks I will avoid it in the future.

Regarding states I disagree. The state is a legal fiction which has no independent reality, like a corporation. It exists only in as far as society chooses to treat it as existing. It has only the rights society chooses to give to it or which it uses as extensions of its citizens rights. The state's ability to own property is an example of the first and the state's right to defend itself (an extension of its citizens' right to self defense) is an example of the second. As a result when the state is not acknowledged it immediately ceases to be. Therefor it cannot exist in a collapsed state and it has no right to be restored. The restoration of indigenous states can be a good means for bring more justice for indigenous peoples but it is not an end in itself.

Tribe doesn't need to be avoided full stop, it just isn't always applicable. It's one of those ones that's fine to use in the right context for identifying a particular tribe or close correlate, but should be avoided as a catch-all term for Indigenous groups since they aren't all tribal either now or at the time of colonization.

As to states, you are correct that a state is a legal fiction. However, this legal fiction embodies more than just 'extensions of its citizens rights' and constitutes its own class of entity, fictitious though that class may be. The state is an organized, centralized community subject to a specific legal order, creating and applying that legal order, and utilizing various organs within itself to make policy, law, etc. Nor does the state necessarily have to be acknowledged to exist; the declarative model of statehood is both more flexible and more valid, and requires no such acknowledgement.

Now, I dispute that a state cannot exist in a collapsed form. As I explained earlier, by collapsed I do not mean failed - and failed states may nonetheless exist as states, weirdly enough - but rather condensed or superimposed. Thus the collapsed state is the state that is synonymous with nation in the constitutive population sense. Such a situation can occur only when the state's territory has been improperly revoked, seized, or stolen and the territorial component of statehood and its corresponding effective capacity for governance has thus ceased to be available. This collapsed state still exists but has been illegitimately subjected to the sovereignty of another, and thus, can only be a state proper when that sovereignty ceases. It is, however, fallacious to consider this a break in statehood - an occupied territory is still the territory of a state, even if governed only in secret or in exile, because no proper cession of territory and sovereignty has been made.

The bigger obstacle in the language of restoration of statehood is, as I explained to Ziggy, the somewhat inapplicable fit of the conventional eurocentric model of statehood to many/most pre-Invasion Indigenous nations. This is why we might find it useful in precise terms to use the term restored/de novo state - a restored or new state - but for ordinary rhetoric the term 'restored state' is sufficient as it drives home the point that these nations existed, exist, and continue to exist despite the illegitimate and unlawful seizure of their territories and effective capacity for governance.

I don't ignore it. I dispute it and think we mean different things by justice, which is why I have asked you for your definition of justice.

Failing to respond to something is ignoring it. If you want to dispute a point you need to say so.

I'd argue - I think quite successfully, if we put it to the test - that almost all of what we've been discussing is in fact part of disputing it. There is a reason we are discussing the purported jus soli right, the nature of justice, etc, and it is because we are actively disputing over whether the outcomes we respectively propose are just.

You haven't actually given my definition of justice. You seem to operate under the assumption that my definition is one that countenances the creation of injustice to amend injustice, which is incorrect. It is for this reason that my proposal consistently includes protections for those presently living within the territories to be returned - which is, I note, common in pretty much every decolonization proposal that bothers with the question of settler futurity at all.

Allow me to venture a definition of justice for the present purpose that avoids your mistake:
The state of affairs in a community in which:
1. The social happiness of this community is preserved; provided that
2. This social happiness does not rely upon the unhappiness of others; requiring that
3. The basic rights of all members of this community are recognized and respected; requiring that
4. Wrongs - being those things that trespass or violate upon the above - are put right; where
5. This righting does not itself injure the social happiness of this community; except
6. Where this injury is necessary to address a greater violation of the first three principles; and
7. No other viable alternative to address this violation exists.

My brief formulation of justice - I trust you will forgive me that I don't unload a full book on you about the construction and deconstruction of the question of justice in a post-colonial state - does not permit the creation of injustice to resolve injustice; justice is the state in which injustice does not exist. If we accept, as I do, that to render people stateless would be unjust, then the call for justice cannot involve this. Safeguards must then be put in place to ensure the basic rights of the members of that community are protected for the situation to in fact be just.

If your desired outcome is not justice, what is it?

I'm not going to give you a definition of justice because I am inclined to think of justice as something that needs to be evaluated in each particular situation and something which in this world is often contradictory and therefor impossible. The discussion of historical land ownership is in fact one of those areas. Every inch of land on the planet has multiple people with the right to claim ownership in justice, they can't all be granted it so whatever is done will be unjust.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you don't specialize in either law or philosophy, yeah? I say this not to be offensive or dismissive but because your position here doesn't, uh, doesn't really work if I'm honest. The position that justice must be specific to time and place - while correct in my opinion and most modern juristic opinions - does not enable the consequent position that justice ought not be defined - in fact, it operates to the exclusion of that perspective.

Let me demonstrate why. Your logic here is pretty much:
1. Justice ought to be evaluated in each particular situation.
2. The result of this individual evaluation creates contradictions between situations.
3. Therefore, justice is impossible to satisfactorily define.

I'm actually sympathetic to this view, incidentally - I share Hans Kelsen's views on justice, where it has to be excluded from any rigorous description (as opposed to prescription) of law because of its subjectivity. But it makes a fatal mistake, because to define justice as something that, due to its specificity in each situation, cannot be defined universally nonetheless creates a definition! This definition will look something like this:

Justice is the state of affairs in which, based on the specific merits of each matter, a just outcome is achieved.

But this is essentially meaningless in isolation, because it gives us no useful metric at all as to what is meant by a just outcome or the matters that should be considered in each particular situation as satisfying justice. If we approach the issue with that definition, we are no closer to understanding what is a just outcome than if we approach it blindfolded and waving our genitals wildly. It necessarily presupposes a prior category of knowledge, namely, the general conditions under which specific conditions may be considered just, good, or acceptable. Without this prior category of knowledge, however constituted ('gut feeling' for instance is, in this case, a valid reason - 'It is justice if it feels just' is pretty much where Hans Kelsen wound up, even if he was very specific about how he got there and how to gauge what feels just), no effort towards justice is possible. This, in turn, creates a new definition that necessarily follows:

Justice is the state of affairs in which, based on the specific merits of each matter, a just outcome as defined by the constitutive norms of justice is achieved.

The norm of justice cannot otherwise function - it can function only by reference to definition and to categorization of just and unjust states of affairs, however determined. So I'm afraid I find it extremely unsatisfactory to try and handwave away justice as 'well, it's specific' - of course it is, but the factors on which the specific individual norms of justice ('you ought to return the land, that is justice' in this instance) rely cannot be invoked without a greater defining norm ('you ought to do justice, which is the action of creating the state of affairs in which... blah blah blah').

I ask you again, too - if your goal is not justice, what is it?

As regards your definition of justice, thank you for not giving me a book on the subject. I have difficulty following what exactly you mean but at this level of abstraction I don't have a problem with what I understand. I do think this definition of justice represents a concession on your part since while this definition of justice does reconcile with the concrete proposals you have made it implies restrictions on the rights of indigenous people's to have their land returned and thus directly contradicts what you have said about justice earlier. I am happy with that since my dislike for the conflict between how you were defining justice and the concrete proposals you were making was one of the major motivations for my posting.

I'm afraid I must disagree. There is no such concession, as my proposals justice has always included protections of various forms for all involved. The definition I have given you contains nothing new other than an explicit, simplified formulation of the present purposes of what I consider to be just. I consider the extent to which the social happiness of settler society relies upon the unhappiness of others - and thus the derogation of the basic rights of the Indigenous peoples both within and without its community - a sufficiently severe wrong to require some injuries to that happiness to resolve, but this in turn does not justify an unlimited scope for said injuries. This is why the theory is not merely tooth for tooth, eye for eye as has been suggested elsewhere in the thread.

First we are not talking about people in the situation you describe we are talking about states.

I'm sorry, didn't you begin this one with 'every person has a right to live where they were born'?.

Yes, I did and I spoke carelessly and imprecisely in doing so. I assumed that the comment made no sense on any scale other then the state and therefor failed to express myself clearly. I am sorry for the confusion. What I meant to say but didn't properly express are two closely related claims.

1) Every person has a right to live in the state in which they were born.
2) Because creating a hereditary class of people without the right to participate in governing the state is wrong every person has a right to citizenship in the state in which they were born.

I'm curious. Are you aware that the vast majority of states do not practice unfettered jus soli citizenship and residence rights? Further, your model exists with a conceptual blindspot that is quite serious: If the only right to participate in governing the state is that of jus soli, then a foreign-born citizen of a state can have no inherent right to participate in the affairs of his own state.

I'm curious to see how you argue that the right to jus soli citizenship trumps all other forms of citizenship law and is sufficient to extinguish the right to citizenship obtained jus sanguinis.

Further, I have specifically used the personal level to prove a point. I'll show you how.

Why? If Person C - and we were, in fact, discussing persons so I will continue to do so. If you did not wish to discuss persons in this context you made a rather tremendous mistake in introducing the issue as a matter of personal right - does not grant the children of Person A, a guest, the right to residency, on what grounds would you propose that they should be forced to do so?

If granting the children of person A, a guest, citizenship is the desired policy of the majority of the citizens of state C then the person C we are speaking about should be forced to do so on the grounds that a democratically adopted policy is morally binding on all citizens of state C.

This evades the point, and again, we aren't speaking of statehood. We speak solely of three people and two pieces of land. Person C has granted Person A - and, as it turns out, their children - refuge but not a right of ownership. On what basis should they be required to grant a right of ownership to Person A's children when Person A's children have a heritable right of ownership over Land A?

If granting the children of person A, a guest, citizenship is not the desired policy of the majority of the citizens of state C then they can avoid doing so by limiting the states of guests too a few months at a time and refusing to permit women who are likely to give birth while visiting as guests permission of visit. Please note, guest implies a short visit, while the timing isn't quite right for this situation Benjamin Franklin's famous aphorism applies here, "guests like fish begin to stink after three days."

Now, we return to the issue that jus soli is not in fact universal (far from it) or unconditional. To return to the personal example, your idea would require that anyone who takes in a pregnant guest, lodger, or refugee is obligated to convey to their children future ownership - a rather staggeringly impractical notion that denies people the right to disperse their properties as they see fit.

If the citizens of state C desire to prevent the children of long term residents from becoming citizens of state C there is no ethical way for them to do so. Preventing those children from becoming citizens violates their human rights by preventing them from participating in the government of their home.

Now, this makes a very fascinating presupposition, which is that the only possible home is the home they are in by exile. So again, on the personal level, your stance requires the following: First, that the inheritance rights to property are severed for the children of the rightful land owner of Land A by the occupation of Person B, and second, that the rightful land owner of land they are staying on is obligated to convey to them an interest in the property.

As they were not born in state A (which has now been renamed state B) and have not lived in state B the children of the people from state A have no right to live in state B, although they may have claims for compensation over the treatment of their parents.

So it is your position, then, that if I go next door, kick the neighbour out at gunpoint, and their kids are born elsewhere, all property rights they may have inherited cease to flow? A single generation of violent dispossession is sufficient in your book to erase any and all claim to land and residency?

And yes all children born in state B are citizens of state B with all the rights and duties that result from being citizens of B.

Person B's children's claim is based solely on violent and illegitimate acquisition. Is it your position that, having kicked out the neighbour at gunpoint, any children I have from that point on ought to inherit the illegitimate acquisition while the owner's children do not?

The analogies you use are properly resolved in accordance with the laws of the state in which the incidents you describe occur. All else being equal it seems reasonable to assume that those laws reflect the citizens of that state's view of justice.

Now, I'd like you to pretend in our thought experiment that there is no recourse to a court, but the state nonetheless maintains that Person A's land claim is legitimate. Person A's children should inherit that claim, correct? Should Person B's children be able to inherit property that was never legitimately acquired by Person B in the first place?

The reason I use this personal level is because every act of state-level dispossession through theft involves this personal level dispossession - the theft of the land took place through this precise kind of dispossession, where one person was forced off their home by another. The same basic circumstances exist between both - the difference is one only of scale. Now, you might wish to quibble that there's a difference - but how will you square that with your position that states cannot possess rights or obligations distinct from those of their citizens, merely applying those rights and obligations on a different scale?

Before you suggest that rights and obligations are different, that would be incorrect. A right is merely the obligation of all others to refrain from/carry out certain conduct in relation to the possessor of a right. There is no meaningful distinction between the two as anything but convenient terms.

As regards conquest or ethnic cleansing, yes the children of the aggressors who acquired the land via theft and murder do inherit the land as legitimate owners. To say otherwise is to say that their residence in the only home they have ever now is illegitimate and thus to say that they ought to be expelled from their home. In other words to deny the legitimacy of their inheritence is to say that because of what their parents or grandparents or even great-great-great-great-grandparents did ethnically cleansing them if fine.

I see. So it is your position, then, that it is unjust - if I may be so bold as to assume by illegitimate you mean unjust, rather than just but unlawful or just but immoral (which would be a rather curious position to hold, to say the least!) or just but in some way inappropriate in form - to, when faced with the issue of a crime's proceeds, restore those proceeds to the persons with a rightful inheritance? That the inheritance of the land taken illegitimately is sufficient to extinguish the legitimate right of inheritance?

This position boils down, quite bluntly, to 'might makes right'. 'We took your land. You were too weak to fight for it. We live here now, and if you want it back, too bad.' If you feel otherwise, feel free to explain in what way the position that violent illegitimate acquisition conveys a completely, unqualifiedly legitimate right to inheritance is not might makes right thinking.

I would not say that the victims claims are completely extinguished after one generation but I would say that their claim to the land is significantly weaker then the claim of the people actually living there.

On what possible basis other than might makes right can this be so?

[K. A. Pital]

As regards conquest or ethnic cleansing, yes the children of the aggressors who acquired the land via theft and murder do inherit the land as legitimate owners. To say otherwise is to say that their residence in the only home they have ever now is illegitimate and thus to say that they ought to be expelled from their home. In other words to deny the legitimacy of their inheritence is to say that because of what their parents or grandparents or even great-great-great-great-grandparents did ethnically cleansing them if fine.

Many times on this board and in private discussions I have warned against such thinking. And of its consequences.

This is, and sorry if it offends you, plain Nazi thinking and it incentivizes powerful nations towards genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass murder. If you get something by force of arms, exterminate or expel the locals, then you get “legitimate rights” to live there for your descendants until the end of time.

This settler thinking is just the theory of Lebensraum in disguise. Oh, but we don’t want to have such associations, do we? Sadly enough the end logic is clear.

Clever colonial Empires did resettle their prized possessions physically cleansing the locals. This is how Britain created such a thing as Northern Ireland, and how many other enclaves of imperialism still exist.

[loomer]

What's fascinating is we've had Rogue 9 arguing for the opposite - that asserting Indigenous communities have a legitimate tie to the land is the equal of Nazi thinking. I'm genuinely curious to see how that one plays out when they're back from the big SCA do because I'm skeptical to say the least!

[Nicholas]

And it then follows that if the only possible outcome of the state's policy is genocide, then it is a genocidal policy, right? So even seemingly disconnected policies, created and enforced without specific genocidal intent but which can only as a cumulative whole result in the destruction of a people in whole or in part, can amount to genocide.

Reading only narrowly, absolutely. If the policies result in genocide but we can't explain why they do so the situation is more difficult to judge.

The disproportionate removal is not just because 'people be poor, yo'. It is disproportionate to precisely the same socioeconomic groups differing only by ethnicity. How do you explain this as 'just the government being callous'?

I can think of at least three plausible ways to explain this, however, verifying that any one of them or even several of them in combination is what is actually going on would be very difficult for a scholar in Australia who has made studying this there life's work. It is impossible for me from halfway around the world in my free time.

I'd like to hear the three you have in mind, because I'd wager there's a good chance someone's already raised that angle or question, and if not, I'd love to be able to explore it myself and see if it pans out.

Since you asked, the three I were thinking of were:

1)Racism among the general public and state employees which led them to judge indigenous people more harshly then others.
2) Much higher rates of child abuse among the indigenous population then among other groups.
3) The experience of the indigenous population is so distinct from that of other groups that the groups your studies compared them to were not actually similar to the indigenous population so the comparison was invalid and the cause really is that they are poorer and less politically connected then anyone else.

That's broadly correct, yes. The policy of removal must be understood however in both its historical and present contexts and constitutes only one part of the genocidal program of policies implemented in Australia. Similar genocidal programs exist in Canada and America, to my knowledge, though I'm not sure about New Zealand at the moment - I'd like to think no, but the answer is probably yes.

OK, your argument appears good yet we appear to have reached a very odd conclusion which makes me suspect that I have missed something. For we seem to have concluded that the government of Australia is committing genocide but we don't know exactly why it is doing so or what needs to change in order for it to stop doing so. We also seem to have concluded that the quick actions that might stop it from doing so, like eliminating the laws authorizing the state to remove abused children from their parents should not be done. Thus we seem to have concluded that we should tolerate the state of Australia continuing to commit genocide, surely that can't be right!!

As to states, you are correct that a state is a legal fiction. However, this legal fiction embodies more than just 'extensions of its citizens rights' and constitutes its own class of entity, fictitious though that class may be. The state is an organized, centralized community subject to a specific legal order, creating and applying that legal order, and utilizing various organs within itself to make policy, law, etc. Nor does the state necessarily have to be acknowledged to exist; the declarative model of statehood is both more flexible and more valid, and requires no such acknowledgement.

Now, I dispute that a state cannot exist in a collapsed form. As I explained earlier, by collapsed I do not mean failed - and failed states may nonetheless exist as states, weirdly enough - but rather condensed or superimposed. Thus the collapsed state is the state that is synonymous with nation in the constitutive population sense. Such a situation can occur only when the state's territory has been improperly revoked, seized, or stolen and the territorial component of statehood and its corresponding effective capacity for governance has thus ceased to be available. This collapsed state still exists but has been illegitimately subjected to the sovereignty of another, and thus, can only be a state proper when that sovereignty ceases. It is, however, fallacious to consider this a break in statehood - an occupied territory is still the territory of a state, even if governed only in secret or in exile, because no proper cession of territory and sovereignty has been made.

The bigger obstacle in the language of restoration of statehood is, as I explained to Ziggy, the somewhat inapplicable fit of the conventional eurocentric model of statehood to many/most pre-Invasion Indigenous nations. This is why we might find it useful in precise terms to use the term restored/de novo state - a restored or new state - but for ordinary rhetoric the term 'restored state' is sufficient as it drives home the point that these nations existed, exist, and continue to exist despite the illegitimate and unlawful seizure of their territories and effective capacity for governance.

There is an interesting conflict in here between the idea that the standard model of statehood is a bad fit for indigenous governments with the idea that there is a "proper" way in which a states territory can be seized. You have commented repeatedly that conquest is different from colonization and conquest (such has been documented many times for most every inch of Europe) does not require correction the way colonization does. If the indigenous governments were not "proper" states doesn't that undermine your claims?

I agree that the nations continue to exist and had their territories unjustly seized.

I'm not going to give you a definition of justice because I am inclined to think of justice as something that needs to be evaluated in each particular situation and something which in this world is often contradictory and therefor impossible. The discussion of historical land ownership is in fact one of those areas. Every inch of land on the planet has multiple people with the right to claim ownership in justice, they can't all be granted it so whatever is done will be unjust.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you don't specialize in either law or philosophy, yeah? I say this not to be offensive or dismissive but because your position here doesn't, uh, doesn't really work if I'm honest. The position that justice must be specific to time and place - while correct in my opinion and most modern juristic opinions - does not enable the consequent position that justice ought not be defined - in fact, it operates to the exclusion of that perspective.

Let me demonstrate why. Your logic here is pretty much:
1. Justice ought to be evaluated in each particular situation.
2. The result of this individual evaluation creates contradictions between situations.
3. Therefore, justice is impossible to satisfactorily define.

I'm actually sympathetic to this view, incidentally - I share Hans Kelsen's views on justice, where it has to be excluded from any rigorous description (as opposed to prescription) of law because of its subjectivity. But it makes a fatal mistake, because to define justice as something that, due to its specificity in each situation, cannot be defined universally nonetheless creates a definition! This definition will look something like this:

Justice is the state of affairs in which, based on the specific merits of each matter, a just outcome is achieved.

But this is essentially meaningless in isolation, because it gives us no useful metric at all as to what is meant by a just outcome or the matters that should be considered in each particular situation as satisfying justice. If we approach the issue with that definition, we are no closer to understanding what is a just outcome than if we approach it blindfolded and waving our genitals wildly. It necessarily presupposes a prior category of knowledge, namely, the general conditions under which specific conditions may be considered just, good, or acceptable. Without this prior category of knowledge, however constituted ('gut feeling' for instance is, in this case, a valid reason - 'It is justice if it feels just' is pretty much where Hans Kelsen wound up, even if he was very specific about how he got there and how to gauge what feels just), no effort towards justice is possible. This, in turn, creates a new definition that necessarily follows:

Justice is the state of affairs in which, based on the specific merits of each matter, a just outcome as defined by the constitutive norms of justice is achieved.

The norm of justice cannot otherwise function - it can function only by reference to definition and to categorization of just and unjust states of affairs, however determined. So I'm afraid I find it extremely unsatisfactory to try and handwave away justice as 'well, it's specific' - of course it is, but the factors on which the specific individual norms of justice ('you ought to return the land, that is justice' in this instance) rely cannot be invoked without a greater defining norm ('you ought to do justice, which is the action of creating the state of affairs in which... blah blah blah').

I ask you again, too - if your goal is not justice, what is it?

You are right I don't specialize in law or philosophy. But you seem to have missed the main point of my claim which was that in many many situtations justice is impossible. Not difficult, not politically unfeasible, but logically impossible. My ideal would be the establishment of a new relationship rooted on forgiveness and charity which lets all involved flourish.

As regards your definition of justice, thank you for not giving me a book on the subject. I have difficulty following what exactly you mean but at this level of abstraction I don't have a problem with what I understand. I do think this definition of justice represents a concession on your part since while this definition of justice does reconcile with the concrete proposals you have made it implies restrictions on the rights of indigenous people's to have their land returned and thus directly contradicts what you have said about justice earlier. I am happy with that since my dislike for the conflict between how you were defining justice and the concrete proposals you were making was one of the major motivations for my posting.

I'm afraid I must disagree. There is no such concession, as my proposals justice has always included protections of various forms for all involved. The definition I have given you contains nothing new other than an explicit, simplified formulation of the present purposes of what I consider to be just. I consider the extent to which the social happiness of settler society relies upon the unhappiness of others - and thus the derogation of the basic rights of the Indigenous peoples both within and without its community - a sufficiently severe wrong to require some injuries to that happiness to resolve, but this in turn does not justify an unlimited scope for said injuries. This is why the theory is not merely tooth for tooth, eye for eye as has been suggested elsewhere in the thread.

You may not see any concession but you have radically changed the presentation of what justice means in this situation from saying that land and sovereignty was stolen from indigenous people and must be returned to saying that we need a solution which corrects the wrongs done to indigenous people without creating new wrongs. The practical policies which result from taking those two seriously are very very different.

I'm sorry, didn't you begin this one with 'every person has a right to live where they were born'?.

Yes, I did and I spoke carelessly and imprecisely in doing so. I assumed that the comment made no sense on any scale other then the state and therefor failed to express myself clearly. I am sorry for the confusion. What I meant to say but didn't properly express are two closely related claims.

1) Every person has a right to live in the state in which they were born.
2) Because creating a hereditary class of people without the right to participate in governing the state is wrong every person has a right to citizenship in the state in which they were born.

I'm curious. Are you aware that the vast majority of states do not practice unfettered jus soli citizenship and residence rights? Further, your model exists with a conceptual blindspot that is quite serious: If the only right to participate in governing the state is that of jus soli, then a foreign-born citizen of a state can have no inherent right to participate in the affairs of his own state.

I'm curious to see how you argue that the right to jus soli citizenship trumps all other forms of citizenship law and is sufficient to extinguish the right to citizenship obtained jus sanguinis.

Further, I have specifically used the personal level to prove a point. I'll show you how.

I'm aware that the vast majority of states do permit unfettered jus soli citizenship but surely in the context of this discussion you can't argue that common practice proves something is just.

I did not mean to argue that jus soli necessarily trumps all other forms of citizenship law. I did mean to argue that all other ways of getting citizenship in a state are defined by the actual government which controls the territory. Therefor in the absence of sovereignty over a territory a nation cannot justly claim to give jus sanguinis citizenship over that territory.

If granting the children of person A, a guest, citizenship is the desired policy of the majority of the citizens of state C then the person C we are speaking about should be forced to do so on the grounds that a democratically adopted policy is morally binding on all citizens of state C.

This evades the point, and again, we aren't speaking of statehood. We speak solely of three people and two pieces of land. Person C has granted Person A - and, as it turns out, their children - refuge but not a right of ownership. On what basis should they be required to grant a right of ownership to Person A's children when Person A's children have a heritable right of ownership over Land A?

Land ownership in the absence of a state's law to regulate it is controlled by the law of the jungle or might makes right. I find the hypothetical you are suggesting absurd in the absence of a government and therefor cannot discuss it because the situation you describe is impossible.

If granting the children of person A, a guest, citizenship is not the desired policy of the majority of the citizens of state C then they can avoid doing so by limiting the states of guests too a few months at a time and refusing to permit women who are likely to give birth while visiting as guests permission of visit. Please note, guest implies a short visit, while the timing isn't quite right for this situation Benjamin Franklin's famous aphorism applies here, "guests like fish begin to stink after three days."

Now, we return to the issue that jus soli is not in fact universal (far from it) or unconditional. To return to the personal example, your idea would require that anyone who takes in a pregnant guest, lodger, or refugee is obligated to convey to their children future ownership - a rather staggeringly impractical notion that denies people the right to disperse their properties as they see fit.

Humans don't live in the absence of government so trying to explain this in the absence of either a formal law or an informal custom regulating property rights is absurd. Your example is an impossibility.

If the citizens of state C desire to prevent the children of long term residents from becoming citizens of state C there is no ethical way for them to do so. Preventing those children from becoming citizens violates their human rights by preventing them from participating in the government of their home.

Now, this makes a very fascinating presupposition, which is that the only possible home is the home they are in by exile. So again, on the personal level, your stance requires the following: First, that the inheritance rights to property are severed for the children of the rightful land owner of Land A by the occupation of Person B, and second, that the rightful land owner of land they are staying on is obligated to convey to them an interest in the property.

So it is your position, then, that if I go next door, kick the neighbour out at gunpoint, and their kids are born elsewhere, all property rights they may have inherited cease to flow? A single generation of violent dispossession is sufficient in your book to erase any and all claim to land and residency?



Person B's children's claim is based solely on violent and illegitimate acquisition. Is it your position that, having kicked out the neighbour at gunpoint, any children I have from that point on ought to inherit the illegitimate acquisition while the owner's children do not?

The analogies you use are properly resolved in accordance with the laws of the state in which the incidents you describe occur. All else being equal it seems reasonable to assume that those laws reflect the citizens of that state's view of justice.

I think squatters rights is an important idea in this context that hasn't come up yet. If you stay on a property for a certain period without the owner attempting to evict you, you acquire ownership of the property. In modern states it is usually a bit more complicated but also only takes a few years.

Now, I'd like you to pretend in our thought experiment that there is no recourse to a court, but the state nonetheless maintains that Person A's land claim is legitimate. Person A's children should inherit that claim, correct? Should Person B's children be able to inherit property that was never legitimately acquired by Person B in the first place?

The reason I use this personal level is because every act of state-level dispossession through theft involves this personal level dispossession - the theft of the land took place through this precise kind of dispossession, where one person was forced off their home by another. The same basic circumstances exist between both - the difference is one only of scale. Now, you might wish to quibble that there's a difference - but how will you square that with your position that states cannot possess rights or obligations distinct from those of their citizens, merely applying those rights and obligations on a different scale?

Before you suggest that rights and obligations are different, that would be incorrect. A right is merely the obligation of all others to refrain from/carry out certain conduct in relation to the possessor of a right. There is no meaningful distinction between the two as anything but convenient terms.

In the absence of the ability to have recourse to a court and the use of the state's monopoly on violence to end person B's illegal and unjust occupation of person A's land the state is failed and the just outcome will (in accordance with the definition of justice you provided above) be that outcome which best serves the social happiness of the community while righting as many wrongs as possible. This will be settled by negotiation among all members of the community when a state is able to assert its monopoly on violence and so end the anarchy in which person B is able to take and hold person A's land by force.

I find your recourse to personal relationships and personal property here interesting because many pages ago on this thread it was argued against your position that the number times the land in Europe had been stolen proved that simply returning stolen land to its rightful owners was a completely impractical proposition. You responded that conquest and colonization were different things and only colonization (which generally did not occur within Europe) required the radical remedies you recommend. How do you square that with the idea that all state level theft is the same as the theft of personal property. The theft of personal property happens the same in both colonization and conquest?

I see. So it is your position, then, that it is unjust - if I may be so bold as to assume by illegitimate you mean unjust, rather than just but unlawful or just but immoral (which would be a rather curious position to hold, to say the least!) or just but in some way inappropriate in form - to, when faced with the issue of a crime's proceeds, restore those proceeds to the persons with a rightful inheritance? That the inheritance of the land taken illegitimately is sufficient to extinguish the legitimate right of inheritance?

This position boils down, quite bluntly, to 'might makes right'. 'We took your land. You were too weak to fight for it. We live here now, and if you want it back, too bad.' If you feel otherwise, feel free to explain in what way the position that violent illegitimate acquisition conveys a completely, unqualifiedly legitimate right to inheritance is not might makes right thinking.

You have truly summarized my position as having the might to steal property and hold it for several decades conveys a legitimate right to the property. I would not say unqualified because my actually position is that after those few decades you know have two people with a just claim to the property and so justice is now impossible and the only thing that can be done to move toward justice is to build a new relationship based on some combination of compensation and forgiveness. Is that might makes right, yes. At a small scale level this is called squatter's rights. At are large scale level this is jus soli sovereignty.

The only other alternative is that the original owner has the legitimate right in justice to have the people living on the land removed. You have repeatedly refused to accept that consequence of your interpretation of property rights so how is your position different from mind?

Nicholas

[loomer]

And it then follows that if the only possible outcome of the state's policy is genocide, then it is a genocidal policy, right? So even seemingly disconnected policies, created and enforced without specific genocidal intent but which can only as a cumulative whole result in the destruction of a people in whole or in part, can amount to genocide.

Reading only narrowly, absolutely. If the policies result in genocide but we can't explain why they do so the situation is more difficult to judge.

Not really. If they amount to genocide - it's genocide. That's pretty much the accepted position in international law at this point. Genocide = genocide.

I can think of at least three plausible ways to explain this, however, verifying that any one of them or even several of them in combination is what is actually going on would be very difficult for a scholar in Australia who has made studying this there life's work. It is impossible for me from halfway around the world in my free time.

I'd like to hear the three you have in mind, because I'd wager there's a good chance someone's already raised that angle or question, and if not, I'd love to be able to explore it myself and see if it pans out.

Since you asked, the three I were thinking of were:

1)Racism among the general public and state employees which led them to judge indigenous people more harshly then others.
2) Much higher rates of child abuse among the indigenous population then among other groups.
3) The experience of the indigenous population is so distinct from that of other groups that the groups your studies compared them to were not actually similar to the indigenous population so the comparison was invalid and the cause really is that they are poorer and less politically connected then anyone else.

It's 1 and 3. Racism is the factor that makes the comparison invalid. Neither of these, however, disproves that the policy is part of a genocidal whole.

That's broadly correct, yes. The policy of removal must be understood however in both its historical and present contexts and constitutes only one part of the genocidal program of policies implemented in Australia. Similar genocidal programs exist in Canada and America, to my knowledge, though I'm not sure about New Zealand at the moment - I'd like to think no, but the answer is probably yes.

OK, your argument appears good yet we appear to have reached a very odd conclusion which makes me suspect that I have missed something. For we seem to have concluded that the government of Australia is committing genocide but we don't know exactly why it is doing so or what needs to change in order for it to stop doing so. We also seem to have concluded that the quick actions that might stop it from doing so, like eliminating the laws authorizing the state to remove abused children from their parents should not be done. Thus we seem to have concluded that we should tolerate the state of Australia continuing to commit genocide, surely that can't be right!!

Yes, you must have missed quite a great deal to hit that conclusion because it's not only not something I've said, but not even reasonably open based on what I have! You seem to have inserted a truly bizarre piece of logic in the middle, amounting to 'if we can say it's a genocide, but we can't draw a hard line on why (the why is actually answered already, by the way - it's racism) we can't do anything to stop it'. This is, to be blunt with you, the most nonsensical possible conclusion and one that only someone who doesn't object to an ongoing genocide could possibly reach. The logic does not follow from any of the rest - it is an insertion you have made that suggests we can do nothing because... Reasons? But there are no reasons we can do nothing, whether 'quick actions' or, as this debate is about, systemic reform sufficient to remove the causative factor of that genocide entirely.

It is you, Nicholas, who has reached the conclusion we can do nothing - not the rest of us.

There is an interesting conflict in here between the idea that the standard model of statehood is a bad fit for indigenous governments with the idea that there is a "proper" way in which a states territory can be seized. You have commented repeatedly that conquest is different from colonization and conquest (such has been documented many times for most every inch of Europe) does not require correction the way colonization does. If the indigenous governments were not "proper" states doesn't that undermine your claims?

I agree that the nations continue to exist and had their territories unjustly seized.

It in no way undermines the claim that the seizure of territory was illegitimate, no. I'm not sure why you feel it would. Perhaps you can explain?

You are right I don't specialize in law or philosophy. But you seem to have missed the main point of my claim which was that in many many situtations justice is impossible. Not difficult, not politically unfeasible, but logically impossible. My ideal would be the establishment of a new relationship rooted on forgiveness and charity which lets all involved flourish.

It is easy to demand that the subaltern focus on forgiveness and charity - and that's what your position boils down to, because the settlers have nothing to forgive nor any right to give charity. It is also a bullshit position, as is your position that 'justice is logically impossible'. This presupposes the following:
1. Justice either is or is not, rather than a spectrum of possible states of justness;
2. Where justice cannot be obtained in full, it is impossible to achieve;
3. Where something is impossible it should not be pursued.

I dispute all of these notions. Justice, by its nature, is never an on/off 1/0 two-position model. It is always capable of containing a multitude of states of mixed greater or lesser justice and injustice. Nor is it necessary to attain absolute, complete justice (which is in fact never possible - justice is an ideal, not a concrete reality) in order to attain a state with a sufficiently overwhelming justice:injustice mixture as to constitute a just outcome, which we might call - accurately - justice. Finally, even if it is impossible, the pursuit of justice leads to a happier, stabler, fairer society - and thus, chasing the impossible dream is not only valid, but imperative if we wish to have such a society.

You have made the claim that justice is logically impossible in enough circumstances as to render it essentially moribund. This is a bold claim, to say the least - one that would require the fundamental redesign of pretty much every society on earth. So, Prove It. I'll even accept a proof that justice is normatively invalid, since normativity works somewhat differently to ordinary logic. I understand you're not a jurist or philosopher so I won't hold that proof to the highest standards but bold claims require evidence. I'm especially curious to see how you disprove justice while also defending forgiveness and charity - what justification can there be for either other than pure ego, social control, or justice?

As regards your definition of justice, thank you for not giving me a book on the subject. I have difficulty following what exactly you mean but at this level of abstraction I don't have a problem with what I understand. I do think this definition of justice represents a concession on your part since while this definition of justice does reconcile with the concrete proposals you have made it implies restrictions on the rights of indigenous people's to have their land returned and thus directly contradicts what you have said about justice earlier. I am happy with that since my dislike for the conflict between how you were defining justice and the concrete proposals you were making was one of the major motivations for my posting.

I'm afraid I must disagree. There is no such concession, as my proposals justice has always included protections of various forms for all involved. The definition I have given you contains nothing new other than an explicit, simplified formulation of the present purposes of what I consider to be just. I consider the extent to which the social happiness of settler society relies upon the unhappiness of others - and thus the derogation of the basic rights of the Indigenous peoples both within and without its community - a sufficiently severe wrong to require some injuries to that happiness to resolve, but this in turn does not justify an unlimited scope for said injuries. This is why the theory is not merely tooth for tooth, eye for eye as has been suggested elsewhere in the thread.

You may not see any concession but you have radically changed the presentation of what justice means in this situation from saying that land and sovereignty was stolen from indigenous people and must be returned to saying that we need a solution which corrects the wrongs done to indigenous people without creating new wrongs. The practical policies which result from taking those two seriously are very very different.

This is not a radical change - it is a change of focus from the specific to the general, to explain why the specific is just. The practical policies I advocate remain the same - the restoration of land and sovereignty to Indigenous peoples, with safeguards where appropriate for settler peoples. These are the specific norms of justice I propose versus the general norm of justice I laid out to explain why the requirement of safeguards and limitations is not, in fact, unjust. The radical change you perceive is no such thing.

Yes, I did and I spoke carelessly and imprecisely in doing so. I assumed that the comment made no sense on any scale other then the state and therefor failed to express myself clearly. I am sorry for the confusion. What I meant to say but didn't properly express are two closely related claims.

1) Every person has a right to live in the state in which they were born.
2) Because creating a hereditary class of people without the right to participate in governing the state is wrong every person has a right to citizenship in the state in which they were born.

I'm curious. Are you aware that the vast majority of states do not practice unfettered jus soli citizenship and residence rights? Further, your model exists with a conceptual blindspot that is quite serious: If the only right to participate in governing the state is that of jus soli, then a foreign-born citizen of a state can have no inherent right to participate in the affairs of his own state.

I'm curious to see how you argue that the right to jus soli citizenship trumps all other forms of citizenship law and is sufficient to extinguish the right to citizenship obtained jus sanguinis.

Further, I have specifically used the personal level to prove a point. I'll show you how.

I'm aware that the vast majority of states do permit unfettered jus soli citizenship but surely in the context of this discussion you can't argue that common practice proves something is just.

I did not mean to argue that jus soli necessarily trumps all other forms of citizenship law. I did mean to argue that all other ways of getting citizenship in a state are defined by the actual government which controls the territory. Therefor in the absence of sovereignty over a territory a nation cannot justly claim to give jus sanguinis citizenship over that territory.

Fortunately, I do not intend to suggest that common practice proves something is just. I wondered, however, whether you simply had an anglo-centric bias that precluded this awareness, since it is a necessary consequence of your position that jus soli citizenship is a fundamental right that every state that does not permit jus soli citizenship is in breach of the rights of millions of people.

Your second point, I'm afraid, is nonsense - your argument at 1) necessarily presupposes that jus soli is in fact the sole valid form of citizenship law. If every person has a right to live in the state in which they were born, then jus soli is an innate right of every person that cannot be derogated, eroded, or rescinded without it constituting a breach of a right. So you may not have intended to argue this, but you have - and so the flailing about 'all other ways' is pretty well irrelevant.

Now, let's use an example here of a nation that gave its citizens right to a territory it did not control. The Polish Government in Exile during WW2 extended Polish citizenship to the children of its people born in London, Paris, etc, despite having no effective territorial claim over Poland at that time. Would you deny that this jus sanguinis citizenship was valid?

If granting the children of person A, a guest, citizenship is the desired policy of the majority of the citizens of state C then the person C we are speaking about should be forced to do so on the grounds that a democratically adopted policy is morally binding on all citizens of state C.

This evades the point, and again, we aren't speaking of statehood. We speak solely of three people and two pieces of land. Person C has granted Person A - and, as it turns out, their children - refuge but not a right of ownership. On what basis should they be required to grant a right of ownership to Person A's children when Person A's children have a heritable right of ownership over Land A?

Land ownership in the absence of a state's law to regulate it is controlled by the law of the jungle or might makes right. I find the hypothetical you are suggesting absurd in the absence of a government and therefor cannot discuss it because the situation you describe is impossible.[/quote]

I think you can discuss it. I think you don't want to, because it's leading you to some uncomfortable conclusions. You also make an erroneous statement here - that land ownership in the absence of a state law is 'the law of the jungle'. Said ownership may be, and routinely is, governed under local customary law rather than state-based law. However, it is central to the point being made that the seizure is unlawful but no legal remedy exists, so fair enough.

If granting the children of person A, a guest, citizenship is not the desired policy of the majority of the citizens of state C then they can avoid doing so by limiting the states of guests too a few months at a time and refusing to permit women who are likely to give birth while visiting as guests permission of visit. Please note, guest implies a short visit, while the timing isn't quite right for this situation Benjamin Franklin's famous aphorism applies here, "guests like fish begin to stink after three days."

Now, we return to the issue that jus soli is not in fact universal (far from it) or unconditional. To return to the personal example, your idea would require that anyone who takes in a pregnant guest, lodger, or refugee is obligated to convey to their children future ownership - a rather staggeringly impractical notion that denies people the right to disperse their properties as they see fit.

Humans don't live in the absence of government so trying to explain this in the absence of either a formal law or an informal custom regulating property rights is absurd. Your example is an impossibility.

My example is deliberately absurd, but is intended to prove a point. In this instance, there will still be law and custom regulating property rights. You, however, are the one making the claim that this - that any pregnant guest, lodger, etc's children ought to obtain a right to the land they are born on despite the rights of those already present - ought to be. Defend it, or concede it. I will accept an argument on a state level here, if you prefer, but either way - defend the position or concede it. You feel jus soli ought to trump all other factors - prove it should.

If the citizens of state C desire to prevent the children of long term residents from becoming citizens of state C there is no ethical way for them to do so. Preventing those children from becoming citizens violates their human rights by preventing them from participating in the government of their home.

Now, this makes a very fascinating presupposition, which is that the only possible home is the home they are in by exile. So again, on the personal level, your stance requires the following: First, that the inheritance rights to property are severed for the children of the rightful land owner of Land A by the occupation of Person B, and second, that the rightful land owner of land they are staying on is obligated to convey to them an interest in the property.

The analogies you use are properly resolved in accordance with the laws of the state in which the incidents you describe occur. All else being equal it seems reasonable to assume that those laws reflect the citizens of that state's view of justice.

I think squatters rights is an important idea in this context that hasn't come up yet. If you stay on a property for a certain period without the owner attempting to evict you, you acquire ownership of the property. In modern states it is usually a bit more complicated but also only takes a few years.

Certainly, but squatters rights are usually rendered invalid if the property was not abandoned but was inhabited and seized by force. In fact, it is usually considered absolute grounds to render squatter's rights invalid if there has been any substantial act of violence towards people with a legitimate right to the property. This is the case both in our hypothetical and in the settler-colonial states - neither was empty at the time of occupation. On what basis do you feel it is acceptable to convey squatter's rights following the murder or forced displacement of the original inhabitants by those who would claim said rights?

In the absence of the ability to have recourse to a court and the use of the state's monopoly on violence to end person B's illegal and unjust occupation of person A's land the state is failed and the just outcome will (in accordance with the definition of justice you provided above) be that outcome which best serves the social happiness of the community while righting as many wrongs as possible. This will be settled by negotiation among all members of the community when a state is able to assert its monopoly on violence and so end the anarchy in which person B is able to take and hold person A's land by force.

The state need not be failed - if indeed one single incident of a failure of the courts to be available and of private citizen violence can create a failed state then we in fact live in nothing but failed states! Our inhabitants occupy a functional state - perhaps one in need of law reform, but functional. This point of yours amounts to little more than 'this is impossible and I will not argue it' and is thus entirely unsatisfactory.

The State insists Person A's land claim is legitimate. On what basis can person B's illegitimate land claim extinguish this right and the right of inheritance?

I find your recourse to personal relationships and personal property here interesting because many pages ago on this thread it was argued against your position that the number times the land in Europe had been stolen proved that simply returning stolen land to its rightful owners was a completely impractical proposition. You responded that conquest and colonization were different things and only colonization (which generally did not occur within Europe) required the radical remedies you recommend. How do you square that with the idea that all state level theft is the same as the theft of personal property. The theft of personal property happens the same in both colonization and conquest?

It's not a recourse, but rather an illustrative example. I'm perfectly happy to argue it on the state level as well, but as you have a very warped notion of what constitutes a state that may not work too well. Now, conquest and settler-colonialism are in fact different things - do you disagree? I also don't recall saying that conquest does not require remedy - I seem to recall, in fact, saying rather that we are only concerned at the present with settler-colonialism, which is a rather significant distinction.

I square it quite easily. Motive, method, and underlying claim to legitimacy or lack thereof are the factors that create the distinction between conquest and settler-colonialism. Settler-colonialism is built on the idea that the land was not in active use, that its inhabitants did not have a rightful claim to it, and that accordingly, it was not theft. This idea is fundamentally incorrect, and it is thus theft without any other justificatory factor - and, unlike in cases of conquest, settler-colonialism fundamentally relies on the model of state dispossession mirroring private to a far greater extent that conquest (indeed, in conquest, very often the individual is not stolen from directly but rather one power structure steals another power structure's rights - the ordinary person quite often experiences relatively little direct theft of property and instead suddenly finds herself subject to a German or a Saxon or a Frenchman, but otherwise in circumstances much the same as the day before!)

You have truly summarized my position as having the might to steal property and hold it for several decades conveys a legitimate right to the property. I would not say unqualified because my actually position is that after those few decades you know have two people with a just claim to the property and so justice is now impossible and the only thing that can be done to move toward justice is to build a new relationship based on some combination of compensation and forgiveness. Is that might makes right, yes. At a small scale level this is called squatter's rights. At are large scale level this is jus soli sovereignty.

Squatter's rights are incompatible with violent theft, so try again. Nor is justice impossible. The suggestion that justice is impossible hinges on the following logic:
1. It is legitimate to acquire territory or property through violence;
2. Violent acquisition then confers a legitimate property right;
3. This right gives rise to a legitimate heritable claim in law/morality to that property.
3 cannot function without 1, and 1 is broadly agreed upon to be an unacceptable position in law and morality. So it's really something closer to this:
1. Violent acquisition of property is illegitimate;
2. Thus, any property right claimed over violently acquired property is illegitimate;
3. Thus, any heritable claim in law/morality to that property founded on the illegitimate right is illegitimate.

You are right that your morality here is little more than might makes right, but might makes right is entirely inconsistent with your desire for a relationship of compensation and forgiveness. If might makes right, there is no need or justification for compensation or forgiveness - these are things that can exist only in the face of a wrong. If might makes right, there is in fact no wrong - or else might does not, in fact, make right.

The only other alternative is that the original owner has the legitimate right in justice to have the people living on the land removed. You have repeatedly refused to accept that consequence of your interpretation of property rights so how is your position different from mind?

Nicholas

What's odd is that you interpret my position of 'there exists a right to the return of land, but this right is not unfettered' as a total derogation and refusal to accept that right of return and the right of removal that attaches to it. It isn't - it is a limitation on that right in the name of preventing an injustice, and it is in fact a viable alternative position both logically and juristically. Your attempt at a forced duality - 'either there is an unconditional right of removal, or might makes right' is fundamentally flawed because, like your idea that justice is either on or off, it fails to account for the possibility of mixed outcomes and states.

[Rogue 9]

What's fascinating is we've had Rogue 9 arguing for the opposite - that asserting Indigenous communities have a legitimate tie to the land is the equal of Nazi thinking. I'm genuinely curious to see how that one plays out when they're back from the big SCA do because I'm skeptical to say the least!

How it plays out is pretty damn obvious; the idea that ethnicity creates ties to land, rightful inheritance of land, and the illegitimacy of other ethnicities' presence on the land is essentially blud und boden, though I know and acknowledge you don't mean it that way. I'm sorry, but I came back to a huge mess at work, and between that and editing and organizing five and a half hours of video I haven't had time to thoroughly catch up on the thread. I'm working to do that before I formulate a thorough response, but am not done. If you didn't devote a whole post to specifically calling me out, I'd have just kept reading, but since I've been active elsewhere on the board I don't want to leave the impression I'm ignoring this. It's 3:00 am where I am, so forgive me, but I'm not going to get further into it at this particular moment.

[loomer]

What's fascinating is we've had Rogue 9 arguing for the opposite - that asserting Indigenous communities have a legitimate tie to the land is the equal of Nazi thinking. I'm genuinely curious to see how that one plays out when they're back from the big SCA do because I'm skeptical to say the least!

How it plays out is pretty damn obvious; the idea that ethnicity creates ties to land, rightful inheritance of land, and the illegitimacy of other ethnicities' presence on the land is essentially blud und boden, though I know and acknowledge you don't mean it that way. I'm sorry, but I came back to a huge mess at work, and between that and editing and organizing five and a half hours of video I haven't had time to thoroughly catch up on the thread. I'm working to do that before I formulate a thorough response, but am not done. If you didn't devote a whole post to specifically calling me out, I'd have just kept reading, but since I've been active elsewhere on the board I don't want to leave the impression I'm ignoring this. It's 3:00 am where I am, so forgive me, but I'm not going to get further into it at this particular moment.

It's cool, and it wasn't meant as a call out. Just genuine curiosity to see how that plays out.

[Elfdart]

What's fascinating is we've had Rogue 9 arguing for the opposite - that asserting Indigenous communities have a legitimate tie to the land is the equal of Nazi thinking. I'm genuinely curious to see how that one plays out when they're back from the big SCA do because I'm skeptical to say the least!

I think the moral to this story is that revanchism is a bad idea.

[Broomstick]

What racist act? Loomer going on and on about how he's a "whitefella" who wants to adopt Native culture/language/whatever despite his own admission he's an Anglo-Australian with no actual claim to any of it? That yes, he has some Native heritage somewhen but it's so dilute but yet he presumes to speak for all those Natives out there with his grand de-colonization plan? And I mocked him for it?

Sounds like yet another white person wanting to exploit Native/minority cultures for his own ends to me.

Again, you accuse me of a racist act... but isn't that something to report to the mods if there is any actually basis to that accusation?

Having now ended my engagement (where I was, as it happens, specifically asked by one of the local Elders in attendance to work towards the goal of decolonisation and see if the Timber Creek precedent can be used in Bundjalung native title claims) and with an hour or so to spare, I thought I’d quickly reply to this. The other one that merits a reply will come when I’ve returned home.

You assert that my desire to know the culture of where I live is a racist act. This is offensive to me, so well done. But you make the fundamentally fallacious and erroneous claim I have no claim to that culture.

I trimmed much of your thread to condense my reply and make it more readable.

First, where I live the proper term for "indigenous peoples" is currently Native when you aren't referring to a specific tribe/nation/group. My use of it is not in any way intended to be insulting as around here it is the respectful term. Calling a Native an Aborigine could be construed as insulting - the opposite of where you live. So, pardon my confusion of dialects, I will do my best to refer to indigenous populations in your part of the world as Aborigine or whatever term you inform me is most respectful.

Second - and again, this may be a significant cultural difference - in my part of the world you have a LOT of people of apparently white descent claiming Native descent for one purpose or another, often expressed as having a "Cherokee princess" in the family tree. Over and over again these people are found to have NO Native ancestry, no connection whatsoever. Now, with genetic testing, it's being found that some of them actually have African ancestry - the "Cherokee princess" was used to mask darker-than-typical-Caucasian ancestry. So Americans tend to view claims of Native (or Aboriginal) ancestry with deep suspicion - what's the ulterior motive. That is why many Native groups in my country moved to things like blood quanta and/or requiring Census and other records to establish actual connections (and they do NOT accept genetic testing because it can't connect anyone to a specific tribe, and even if the general public doesn't know the Natives know that many of the "Native American genes" are also easily found in Asia, particularly places like Siberia which is not surprising because the ancestral connection between the Western Hemisphere and Asia is not news). Especially when the Indian casinos started making money a bunch of people came out of the woodwork claiming to be relatives hoping to get a piece of the action. If I reacted to your claims of a small amount of Aboriginal ancestry with skepticism and scorn it was arising out of cultural milieu that, upon reflection, does not apply in Australia. That was my bad.

A third problem here is people claiming Native ancestry, or knowledge of Native practice and religion, for purposes of profiting off that cultural appropriation. This is seen as yet another theft and exploitation by the Natives, the whites stealing the one thing they have left, their culture. It's also despised by a lot of non-Natives. And those people sound a lot like you did in some of your posts. Again, my reaction was coming out of a cultural issue that either doesn't exist in Australia or exists in a very different form.

We do have people over here who genuinely do join Native groups not to profit but to become part of the culture. It is extremely rare - the Natives have been burned a lot by this. Any claim of such in the US is going to be met with something between extreme skepticism and outright hostility (as I demonstrated without realizing) not only by the Natives but also by the mainstream conqueror culture because false claims of Native culture are associated with con artists and cult leaders. Such people are regarded like Tarot card readers and scam artists. They often ARE tarot card readers and scam artists.

So, to the extent I misjudged the situation I apologize. I spent some of my spare time this past week looking into this sort of thing and apparently the situation is very, very different in Australia. One could say the two places are 180 degrees apart on this. I did not realize this. I'm not sure you realize this, either, but I could be wrong on that.

This is not to be construed as a concession on my position regarding "decolonization" which I still think is fucked up and a recipe for ethnic cleansing if not actual genocide.

[Broomstick]

This would be rather more convincing if you hadn't been posting during a good chunk of that time.

Yes, I made some posts when I had a spare moment here and there. Other threads I didn't respond to because doing so required more effort and thought. But fuck me for wanting to think before posting, right?

Having so graciously reminded Effie of the board rules, I might remind you that broken record tactics are against them as well, and I can think of nothing that better sums up your current approach of 'disappear, come back, ignore arguments, repeat arguments already refuted'.

Which is it? I'm allowed to have a life outside the board, or I'm bad for going away for awhile?

And, again, I think you are reading "Broomstick does not reply in detail to every individual post" as "Broomstick does not read those posts". I am not obligated to respond to each and every post separately. Aside from that, when we have pages and pages of lengthy posts it can be quite easy to miss one without intending to, especially if I've been away for a number of days.

I also trust you'll be explaining precisely why you saw fit to try and use the name of an ethnic group I work with to offend me (at which, I note, you utterly failed - there is nothing offensive about the word, though frankly your attempt to do so was both pitiful and pathetic), as I can only currently assume it was tied into your attempt to insinuate that I am in some way ashamed to have Indigenous ancestry. I'd like to believe that's not the case, so please, help me to do so.

I was puzzled that you thought I was claiming you had "shame" in claiming Aboriginal ancestry when that was not the case. Where I live, such a claim is much more associated with scams, con-games, exploitation, and profiting off pseudo-knowledge which is why, for the life of me, I could not understand why you were condemning profiting off indigenous peoples then turning around and making a claim associated with doing exactly that.

Now that I have a better understanding of the differences between our respective countries I realize that was not what you were doing.

Now, given that the situation for the indigenous peoples between our two countries is different, even if there are also similarities, will you consider that what might work in Australia may not work in the US, or that a different approach would be better for the indigenous peoples of the US because there are some very significant differences between those two places?