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

[Broomstick]

Person 1 resides in the territory of NS-A, in an existing township. When the OS is dissolved, the remain living in the township because this township is not along a national border, is not in sacred ground, and is not otherwise subject to seizure for public purposes (e.g. because it's vital to place new civic infrastructure on).

OK. Fine. They can live in the township... but what about those people who, rather then rent, BOUGHT a home under the old rules, sunk most of their wealth into it, and have no other thing of even a tenth the value of that land and building? If you compensate them... who determines an appropriate value? And where does the compensation come from? And... how generous, you allow them to live in a home that they (under the old rules) bought and paid for but which now belongs to someone else to whom they have to pay rent for the rest of their lives. What, exactly, do you think is going to be the reaction to that? You're talking about confiscating the major item of value from the 65% of Americans that own their home.

Person 2 resides in a small existing township along the border of NS-A and NS-B. When the OS is dissolved, they are displaced. This is because the land is along a national border, and no treaty has been reached that would make it practicable. They are given a fair and equitable compensation package for the loss of their home, and offered citizenship in NS-A or NS-B or both, depending on what those governments feel is an appropriate citizenship policy, or are assisted to resettle in another area entirely if they wish to move to be with family/etc.

Um... I fail to see why a property or township straddling a border requires anyone to move. This is an issue that has already come up multiple times in North America due to prior errors in surveying or other events. There are towns with an international border running down the middle of them. There are buildings with international borders running through them. The practice has been to allow such towns/cities/buildings/homes to remain and develop work-arounds that do not involve displacement. I would recommend continuing that practice in the event of a mass-redistribution of land ownership. Forcing people to move would not only seem unnecessary but only cause resentment and disruption.

Person 3 resides in a rural area in NS-B. When the OS is dissolved, they are asked to leave their home because the land they inhabit has special sacred significance. They, like Person 2, are given citizenship in NS-B, NS-A, or both, a compensation package, and assistance to resettle in land that is not sacred.

The devil here is in the details. Who decides what is adequate compensation and, more importantly, where does that compensation come from? Who is going to pay the bills here and where does the money come from? (or the land, if you're doing a land swap)

None of these persons are being forced to leave the state they grew up in - perhaps to move a few miles down the road, which is of course traumatic but may be necessary to either right a wrong or for the pragmatic purposes that States already possess the right to dispossess and displace people in the furtherance of. In virtually all serious decolonization proposals, they are not rendered stateless, forced to leave the places they know, or made homeless.

This is so blatantly false I am amazed that you say it.

YES you are rendering every citizen of the US stateless by dissolving the US. Maybe everyone gets a country afterward, but there are no guarantees.

YES you are forcing people to leave "the places they know" by demanding that they relocate.

YES you are making people homeless by taking away their ownership in their homes and/or demanding they relocate.

YES you might well be forcing people to "leave the state they grew up in" or, more to the point, they state they live in (since plenty of Americans move from the state of their birth). I don't think you have any idea how extensive some Native land claims could be. "Move a few miles down the road"? Holy fuck, you have no idea. The Navajo nation's much diminished present holdings are 70,000 km2, slightly larger than the State of West Virginia. It's larger than ten US states! That's just one Native nation. There are HUNDREDS of Native tribes still in existence. A big chunk of Utah belongs to the Uintah and Ouray. In addition to the Navajo claiming a big slice of Arizona, there's the Tohono O'odham taking another bite out of Arizona. Pine Ridge extends over part of both South Dakota and Nebraska and is bigger than either Delaware or Rhode Island. Those are the diminished holdings of the Natives, which are a tiny drop in the bucket of the US total area only because the US is a pretty damn big place. If you start restoring lands to all the other tribes in the US, as well as ancestral lands to the groups who still have something... YES, goddammit, at least some people are going to wind up moving out of state and more than just a few miles down the road. At least admit that's going to happen to some people, that for some people this would be a fucking disaster, and it's not going to affect JUST the white people but also the black people (who have no more claim to North American land than anyone else who isn't a Native) and Asians who have immigrated and folks from way south of the border who might have some claim to lands in South America but not North.

Even if no one is asked to move (which even you acknowledge isn't reality) the fact that ownership will transfer from the current owners to someone else by decree represents a MASSIVE transfer of wealth and disruption to the economy. Again, WHERE is the compensation for this going to come from? And if it doesn't - well, great, you've just exchanged the poverty of one group of people for the poverty of an even larger group of people.

You also make the error of equating the argument that 'decolonization does not equal ethnic cleansing and mass displacement' with 'decolonization will not effect many people'. It will of course do so - the US, for instance, would cease to exist and thus every US citizen would cease to be so, which is an enormous impact. But to effect everyone and require large scale change is not the same as requiring ethnic cleansing and mass displacement.

No, you're just going to render every non-native stateless, transfer their major item of wealth to someone else, and say they "probably" won't have to move elsewhere. That couldn't possibly end in tears...

Likewise, on a day to day level rather than in the political sphere, the actual impact on most people's lives is minimal under most decolonization proposals. What difference is it to the office clerk or shop worker or professional blogger if they pay rent to an Indigenous trust or traditional land owner rather than a settler company or owner?

What about the 200,000,000 (give or take a few) who were NOT paying rent but were owners under the old system? It makes a BIG difference if someone who used to own the house they're living in now has to pay rent to a new owner after ownership was transferred to someone else.

You're right - I really have few fucks to give if I wind up writing my rent check to the Potawatomie Nation or to whomever would get my block in such a scheme rather than the company that currently owns it (most likely it would be Potawatomie - which still retain some of their ancestral lands - or the Miami, if any still exist but as of right now only the Pokagon Potawatami remain in northern Indiana). Because I'm a renter I don't care. It means a fuckton more to the people across the street who paid $100,000 or $200,000 for THEIR residence under the presumption they own it and the land it sits on. Especially if they've paid the mortage off any only have to worry about property taxes now. What about my employer? Quite a bit of the wealth of the company lies in their real estate holdings, which they use as collateral for loans when needed, or sell some of it to raise funds for some other project. Take that away and they may not be able to secure financing when needed, or have to pay the balance on outstanding loans immediately because the loans are no longer secured and backed by collateral. There's all sorts of knock-on effects from this sort of redistribution that aren't immediately apparent.

[Broomstick]

Here's a thought experiment I find interesting in this regard. In the United States if you're in any town with a decent sized population (35k+) you're pretty much guaranteed to find a Mexican Restaurant, a Chinese Restaurant, and usually you're not far away from something like an Indian or Thai restaurant. In towns not much larger it's not unreasonable to find Ethopian or South American food, and you're almost guaranteed to have on hand cuisine in the French tradition along with a variety of other European foods.

With that in mind, how many Native American restaurants can you name, and where can you expect to find them?

The problem you pose is two-fold:

1) It's not at all hard to find Native American foods - they have, in fact, become solid parts of other cultural cuisines world wide. Maize, many beans, many squash, pecans, potatoes, avocados, dragonfruit, the capsicum peppers... The Mexican restaurant, not surprisingly when you think about it, has a LOT of Native foods. The hot capisicum peppers in Chinese cooking? They're from the Americas. Also the ones in the Thai and Indian food. The Italian restaurant is going to have a lot of tomatoes... which come from Central America. Native American food is found around the world.

2) There are some practical difficulties with setting up a Native American restaurant. For example, a staple of many Natives were acorns. Preparing acorns for consumption is a pain in the ass, which is why in Europe they were fed to pigs except during times of famine. They're just too much trouble if you have alternatives. Pokeweed is another - it's quite good (my mother-in-law used to serve it on her table) but, again, the prep time and work is a pain in the ass and if you don't do it right it will make you very, very ill. When the Europeans showed up with crops a lot easier to grow, process,and eat the Natives say "hooray!" and switched from pokeweed to lettuce and cabbage. Likewise, some of the animal foods are difficult to obtain these days. Bison were nearly exterminated (you can get it now, although a lot it is a bison/European cattle cross because pure bison are both hard to manage and fucking dangerous). You can't get passenger pigeon anymore. There are ethical issues with eating muktuk. And so on.

So... basically, the Native American foods that were easy to use were subsumed into other cuisines. The stuff that wasn't... well, it was largely abandoned for sound reasons.

Arguably, Mexican food IS Native American food, or at least a fusion of it with European influence. So is some Jamaican food like the various varieties of "jerk" - jerk pork, jerk chicken, etc. Putting cranberry sauce on turkey (which Americans do at least once a year, by and large) is of Native origin. Succotash, tortillas, quinoa, sunflowers, maple syrup, salsa, mole, tacos, tamales, fried green tomatoes, ceviche, pineapples... and don't forget chocolate.

It's not that Native American food disappeared, it's that everyone else started growing and eating it, too.

[Broomstick]

So, the generally accepted history of emancipation nowadays, for several decades now, sees it as driven by the slaves themselves, who by engaging in what is called the slave general strike, forced the Union to adopt emancipation as a war aim by forcing a choice between actively defending slavery by returning escaped slaves reaching Union lines to slavery, or accepting the reality of self-emancipation.

What the fuck?

"Generally accepted" by who and based on what?

When did the Union ever engage in returning escaped slaves once the Civil War was underway? If anything, retaining them sapped the manpower of the Confederacy although I seriously doubt they escaped in truly significant numbers. Most slaves in the Confederacy remained in the Confederacy, and stayed in that territory even after the war when they were freed. It wasn't until the 20th Century that you had a large migration of black people from the southern to the northern states.

And this in turn forced the Reconstruction Amendments through a Congress which never had enough Radicals to force them through on their own, via a progressive radicalization of the war itself and the goals of the war.

More like Reconstruction was seen as a way to punish the former Confederacy and ensure another Civil War did not break out.

So in that sense, a slave uprising, without getting into the nitty-gritty of Fort Wagner or the Battle of the Crater or the battle of Mobile Bay, did kill slavery in the United States.

Bullshit. Rising industry made slavery less economically viable and the nail in the coffin was the Civil War.

However, you have accepted neo-Confederate histories of slavery which insist that it was something other than the necessity of forcibly keeping people reduced to the status of objects which created the hideous brutality of slavery, so I am not surprised that you are not up to date in this area too.

Again, you try to paint me as an adversary rather than engage in actual discussion.

The point of slavery was for some to profit off the labor of others, that is always the point of slavery.

With that in mind, how many Native American restaurants can you name, and where can you expect to find them?

Well, there's always your nearest powwow... Which points to another effect, of the "excluded middle" in American eating and restaurants. Native people might have it strongest of all.

Yeah, but frybread not only isn't particularly good for you, it entered Native American culture as a response to the reservation system. Corn soup made with pork certainly has indigenous roots but the pork came from Europe (there's a reason the changes in agriculture during the the Colonial Period are call The Great Exchange). Not that either of those is less than authentic - they're just as authentic these days as tomato sauce is authentically Italian.

[Tribble]

The only real practical alternative is what they are doing right now: continue negotiations, continued lawsuits and standing up for their treaties, continue to draw attention to their issues (both internally and internationally), and push for more autonomy / material needs / rights in the process.

Would you say that this approach has been particularly helpful thus far in light of things such as the pipeline protest, high incidence rates of drug and alcohol abuse, rampant unemployment, and shockingly low life expectancies on some reservations?

Not to mention the lack of safe food and drinking water, the sex trafficking, the disappearances and murders that largely go unsolved and rarely investigated, etc. Believe me, the situation for the First Nations is considerably worse than what the general public knows about. And it seems, what the general public cares about.

And still, I'd say that approach is better than the ones I've seen being discussed here - the simple reality is that violence isn't going to work, and the idea of getting the US to disband itself is simply ludicrous.

Doesn't this present a much bleaker picture than what Straha paints? One wherein not only is the US, to borrow theological terms, totally racist but also utterly racist?

If the goal of de-colonialism is for the dissolution of the US, then yes, the prospects of that happening are pretty damn bleak.

This is why every serious proposal for decolonization is not 'rise up! Do it now!' but 'we must systematically engage with the settler population to try and bring about justice'. There is an assumption on the part of anti-decolonization posters that those of us in favour of it view it as something that can happen tomorrow, without any serious change in the belief of the majority. This belief, as already repeatedly stated, is incorrect. We make no such claims, we do not claim that somehow the Indigenous peoples of America, Australia, etc can take on the settlers in a civil war or that somehow it's just going to magically happen without enormous amounts of hard yakka. What we do claim is the audacious hope that actually, most people are fundamentally not evil - most people wish to see justice done, to be kind, and to live as equals. That, with this goodness, we can continue to struggle and to bring about a better world through legal and political reforms, and that in order to do so, the existing states and, most crucially, the attitudes that enable them to exist as they do will need to be dismantled.

This is why we find it unconvincing when people tell us what the 'practical alternative' is, as though what you define as the 'practical alternative' is not in fact an integral part of the decolonization effort. What you tell us to do - which, in a nutshell, is to settle for a world in which people are not desirous of justice, not kind, and not interested in equality - we are already doing. You tell us to be practical, and in doing so, you tell us to abandon the dream of a better world.

I can't speak for Straha, Effie, or the decolonization activists I know in person. I can, however, speak for myself as an Australian, as a whitefella in the Bundjalung Jugun who fervently hopes to one day be able to call himself a Bundjalung whitefella as much as an Australian, as a Freemason. And I say fuck that.

I am saying that I see no practical way for First Nations to dismantle the US, at least in the political, legal, military and economic sense. It simply cannot be done by them, whether violently or non violently. The federal government will not dissolve itself. The State governments will not dissolve themselves. The federal government and vast majority of the states will not allow another state to leave, and they will not allow a First Nations group to declare complete independence and not be ultimately subject to the US. The vast majority of the population have no inclination nor desire to see the US / states dismantled, and I am extremely skeptical that anyone would be able to convince them to do so.

This does not mean that I am against legal and political reforms, nor am I against reconciliations and reparations, not am I against changing people's attitudes etc. I'm all for it. But dissolving the US as an institution? Not a chance of that happening, no matter how much some may want it to. This should be pretty obvious given the US's history, really.

Edit Well, barring some major catastrophe which results in the total breakdown of society of course, though in that circumstance the First Nations are likely just as screwed as everyone else.

[Rogue 9]

So, the generally accepted history of emancipation nowadays, for several decades now, sees it as driven by the slaves themselves, who by engaging in what is called the slave general strike, forced the Union to adopt emancipation as a war aim by forcing a choice between actively defending slavery by returning escaped slaves reaching Union lines to slavery, or accepting the reality of self-emancipation.

What the fuck?

"Generally accepted" by who and based on what?

When did the Union ever engage in returning escaped slaves once the Civil War was underway? If anything, retaining them sapped the manpower of the Confederacy although I seriously doubt they escaped in truly significant numbers. Most slaves in the Confederacy remained in the Confederacy, and stayed in that territory even after the war when they were freed. It wasn't until the 20th Century that you had a large migration of black people from the southern to the northern states.

Many thousands of slaves did escape to Union lines, there treated as contraband of war and not returned. It was a small percentage of the four million some odd slaves held in the Confederacy, but it was still quite significant. Wikipedia has a good overview, though if this turns into a serious point of discussion I can bring forth real sources with a little effort.

That said, it's overstating the case to say that this is the sole reason for the postwar abolition of slavery. It contributed, and so did the enlistment of black soldiers, but striking at slavery was a war aim for the quite practical reason that it underpinned the southern economy and therefore removing it crippled the Confederacy. Having done that, and having enlisted freed slaves in the Army, Lincoln observed that, "There have been men who proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors, [but] I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will."

[Effie]

So, the generally accepted history of emancipation nowadays, for several decades now, sees it as driven by the slaves themselves, who by engaging in what is called the slave general strike, forced the Union to adopt emancipation as a war aim by forcing a choice between actively defending slavery by returning escaped slaves reaching Union lines to slavery, or accepting the reality of self-emancipation.

What the fuck?

"Generally accepted" by who and based on what?

When did the Union ever engage in returning escaped slaves once the Civil War was underway? If anything, retaining them sapped the manpower of the Confederacy although I seriously doubt they escaped in truly significant numbers. Most slaves in the Confederacy remained in the Confederacy, and stayed in that territory even after the war when they were freed. It wasn't until the 20th Century that you had a large migration of black people from the southern to the northern states.

And this in turn forced the Reconstruction Amendments through a Congress which never had enough Radicals to force them through on their own, via a progressive radicalization of the war itself and the goals of the war.

More like Reconstruction was seen as a way to punish the former Confederacy and ensure another Civil War did not break out.

So in that sense, a slave uprising, without getting into the nitty-gritty of Fort Wagner or the Battle of the Crater or the battle of Mobile Bay, did kill slavery in the United States.

Bullshit. Rising industry made slavery less economically viable and the nail in the coffin was the Civil War.

However, you have accepted neo-Confederate histories of slavery which insist that it was something other than the necessity of forcibly keeping people reduced to the status of objects which created the hideous brutality of slavery, so I am not surprised that you are not up to date in this area too.

Again, you try to paint me as an adversary rather than engage in actual discussion.

The point of slavery was for some to profit off the labor of others, that is always the point of slavery.

With that in mind, how many Native American restaurants can you name, and where can you expect to find them?

Well, there's always your nearest powwow... Which points to another effect, of the "excluded middle" in American eating and restaurants. Native people might have it strongest of all.

Yeah, but frybread not only isn't particularly good for you, it entered Native American culture as a response to the reservation system. Corn soup made with pork certainly has indigenous roots but the pork came from Europe (there's a reason the changes in agriculture during the the Colonial Period are call The Great Exchange). Not that either of those is less than authentic - they're just as authentic these days as tomato sauce is authentically Italian.

I would go through and point-by-point this, but the problem is that you really don't have the kind of historical background necessary to make this a fruitful discussion. Like, "slavery was killed by industry" is utterly bullshit- the American textile industry, which was far more critical than steel production to the American economy in the first half of the 20th century, was dependent on King Cotton, and indeed one of the big sectional crises growing out of this was a conflict over whether the fruits of that industry should go first to the slaveowners providing the raw materials or to the mill owners and exporters handling the value-added goods, which in turn is a large part of why abolitionism and especially radical white abolitionism was centered in the northeast and New England. Even in 1860, slaves were the single largest aspect of American wealth.

And more recent research has pointed out that slavery was being adapted to manufacturing production beyond the already-existing crafts manufacture on the majority of plantations. Well, "more recent" in the sense that James McPherson's 1988 Battle Cry of Freedom already alludes to the increasing consensus that slavery would not die on its own, that it had to be held down and killed. I am an amateur with regards to history as a whole, let alone to the American Civil War. But this is, if not 101-level material, 200-level material.

And this "slavery is about profiting from the labor of others"- that's a description of capitalism, of manorialism, of Sumerian tributary economies, even, to a large extent, a description of socialism under Preobrazhenkist economics. It's an utterly meaningless definition, and it especially does not encapsulate the core of chattel slavery as opposed to other types of slavery, the total reduction of a person to an object, an artifact, a gear in a machine and nothing more or less.

This, in turn, is very important for understanding the John Henry folktale, where a former slave manages to defeat the abstract "Machine" that seeks to reduce him from a free human being into a cog and then replace that cog with a better one.

And, to circle back around to the meta-topic that has been going about, this is also a description of the "American system of manufactures" and the "Yankee know-how" that emerged in the first half of the 19th century and which were trumpeted as the highest expression of the free-labor system in contrast to grim, dismal slavery which dragged America and the world down with the shamefulness of it all. At its core, there is a close, intimate, and personal relationship between the high ideals of American life and the vicious, bloodstained aspects of it all, one which is so entangled together that it is ultimately no surprise that people look at it and conclude that anything which extracts the one from the other is so transformative that whatever comes out the other end cannot be said to be in continuity with the thing that had existed before.

That is not my belief but it is ultimately a primarily semantical argument about nomenclature and not any kind of broad disagreement of the nature of the problem or the necessary character of the things which must be done to fix it.

Reconstruction, to be completely blunt, was not an effort to "punish" the South, nor was it anything as tawdry as "preventing another Civil War". The true believers in Radical Reconstruction had been those who had welcomed the Civil War as the Second American Revolution to fix the failures and the inadequacies of the first, to bring about a new birth of freedom. It is thus curious to imagine that they intended to punish the South by pouring in vast efforts to construct infrastructure that had been neglected and left to rot by the slavocrat governments, that they intended to punish the South by supporting and promoting what in many states were the least corrupt governments they have ever had then or now, that they intended to punish the South through a frankly extremely expedited process of readmission.

Reconstruction failed, and a good analysis of this failure can be found in du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, Foner, Reconstruction, and White, The Republic For Which It Stands. There is also a simpler, more introductory analysis in Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, Lies Across America, and Sundown Towns. But we do ourselves no favors when we take the glory and the beauty of Reconstruction, of the blossoming birth of freedom, of the revival of democracy which had been stagnant just a decade before, and pretend it was just military occupation.

With that said, I am bemused by your comments here and in previous posts about Native cuisines. The whole point, as I was alluding to, is that some cuisines are respectable and others are not. Mexican food is respectable in its whitened Tex-Mex form, so we have Chili's and fajitas at Applebee's and all that. Black food is not respectable, so there is no soul food equivalent to Applebee's and national barbeque chains are whitened enough to make them respectably middle-class. Chinese food went through an initial round of softening for American tastes, and then P. F. Chang's forced through yet another round in order to make it safe for the middle.

Native cuisines don't even have the equivalent of a Chinese dive joint or a hole in the wall that does chicken and waffles or a taqueria that doubles as a grocery. There's a cafeteria in the Smithsonian and a tiny handful of fairly haute-cuisine Native restaurants around the country, and then there's the food available informally. Natives do not exist in the American imagination as people, but rather as curiosities and relics. Even though there are about as many Native people as Norwegian-Americans, the two have almost entirely different levels of cultural presence in the US.

This is a long way from "frybread is unhealthy" and whatever point you were trying to make by noting that cultural contact creates change.

Has anyone considered a US territory fractured into dozens to hundreds of polities, now completely disrupted and poor regardless of what color combinations of people live where, won’t be a place the diminutive population of Native Americans will be able to compete in?

North America would become a lawless basketcase and essentially subject to the same forces that disposed the natives in the first place. Only now on an unprecidented scale. Ironically, and unfortunately, the diminished state of native wealth and relative power means the only thing holding them together as anything other than any other random <1% minority group is the US government. Without it and it’s engorcement of treaties there is no scenario where there lot gets better as separate sovereign entities. They would be re-conquered or absorbed or abandoned in short order.

EDIT: missed a page, you did.

Look, if you're going to vomit insipid Social Darwinism and pre-realist notions of international relations all over a thread, would it kill you to spell-check so I don't end up giggling at "unprecidented" and "engorcement"?

[Straha]

The French in 1800 were not monolithic clones. In fact, slavery had ended in France at the time, so by bringing the young Thomas-Alexandre to France his slavery ended (after which his white father saw that he was educated and got him into the military). Meanwhile, in Haiti chattel slavery was in full force in all its ugliness.

That's a narrative and a statement re: French individuality that no one is contesting. What's your argument?

Dumas did not "partially" escape - he became a brigadier general and at one point the his only superior was Napoleon. One of his sons was accepted into the French Academy and achieved world-wide fame as an author which he still enjoys today, his other son was a successful playwright. Black people in France have had disadvantages, yes, but nowhere near what they did in the US and the colonies which is why quite a few people of African descent from the US have traveled to France for either part or the remainder of their lives (this was actually fairly common up through the 1970's). While not claiming France is perfect, France itself was better for people of African descent than many other countries, and especially better than any New World colony or nation. Including French New World colonies which, in regards to slavery, were pretty fucking horrific.

Again, what's your argument? That the ability for someone to transcend pre-existing race and class structures proves they didn't exist? That Black Haitians weren't industrious enough to fight for their own freedom? Unless you think this disproves the notion that the French intervened multiple times to reimpose black chattel slavery I'm not sure what your point is.

This just strikes me as absurd. No one would take seriously the claim that Frederick Douglas' ability to be a writer and influence politicians would mean that the United States in the 1840s and 50s wasn't systemically and horrifically racist.

I wasn't talking about Frederick Douglas or the United States, I was talking about Thomas-Alexandre Dumas and France and Haiti. The French and the French society in France in 1800 had definite differences from the French and French society at the same time in Haiti. So saying the French were "unable to recognize a freed slave as a free man" not only didn't apply to Haiti at the time (which did have a class of free colored even if they were a minority) but applied much less so to France back in Europe. People of African descent, even those born into slavery somewhere else, could achieve significant social status (even if they still had problems of bias) and wealth in France. Indeed, the French could recognize a freed slave as a free man, to the point that any slave from anywhere else who entered the territory of France was considered a free man (which was a damn sight better than the bullshit Dredd Scott case in the US).

A. Frederick Douglas is a useful analogy here. If you think there's a meaningful distinction between Frederick Douglas and Dumas I want to hear why.

B. If you think that the French were happy to recognize freed black folk, why did the French on the island invite the British to intervene to maintain slavery in 1793, and why did the French invasion force in 1801 seek to reimpose Slavery onto Freed Black men?

C. Again, you seem to be trying to make an argument that racial categorization was porous and that dualistic notions of black and white aren't useful, but I don't get how you think this forms a cohesive answer to anything I've said or advances the conversation. Also, in order to win it as a truth claim you need to 1. answer point B, 2. answer why there was no chattel systemic chattel slavery of white populaces at the same time, and 3. offer a counter-narrative of how colonization and African enslavement worked without it being racially based.

Haiti is a bit more complicated than simply white vs. black, master vs. slave. Not the least because it was not unusual for a financially successful free black to become a slave owner, pre-revolution the mixed race creoles held a level of society for themselves, and post-revolution dominated politically and economically those whose ancestry was mostly or exclusively African. Post-revolution, the creoles became the new oppressors, keeping the masses poor and uneducated. One oppressive group replaced by another.

I'm not sure how nuances and complexity in Haiti rise to rebut the claim that slavery, and the concept of a free Haiti, were racially coded and part of an order of white supremacy.

It certainly had its origins in white supremacy but, as I said, there were free people of color in Haiti, they were an essential part of the civil service and society (whites were outnumbered at least 10:1), and some of them were significant slave owners in their own right. The oppressed becoming the oppressor. Which, again, leads to the fear on the part of the controlling faction that if the current status quo is altered they will become the oppressed - look, given the chance the black man will own slaves, too, and he's just as brutal as a white master!

Again. I'm not sure how the admitted nuances that everyone is aware of in this thread rebut the claim that slavery, and the concept of a free Haiti, were racially coded in an order of white supremacy. I'm especially not sure how you think this means that the French answer to the Haitian revolution wasn't racially coded.

You are misinterpreting what I am saying. I am not trying to defend the status quo. I am saying that if you try to alter it there will be problems. Of course, NOT altering it means problems, too.

So you are saying something that everyone in this thread is already painfully aware of?

2. Massive treaty violation continued well into the 60s and 70s, notably through daming and water infrastructure projects. No effort has been made to undo this damage on the US government's part. Nor has any effort been made to structurally change how the US deals with Native Tribes.

No, the US government is not in the habit of demolishing damns and hydroelectric power. For anyone. And yes, EVERY treaty the US government has had with Native nations has been broken to some extent, if not entirely.

But there's a reason you said "in the the 60's and 70's" and not further. Since that time things have started to improve. Again, this is in no way saying things are great, that there aren't still terrible injustices, and there aren't still massive problems. But the US Federal government is starting to uphold Native rights in the courts and enforce them. Let's at least acknowledge there has been some change in the proper direction even if not nearly enough. In current US society it is at least possible to make these changes whereas a century ago it just wasn't going to happen at all. If you want your redress then hooray, at least now it is possible for this to happen. Better yet, possible without widespread bloodshed or open war although it will be a long, slow process.

1. The reason I said 60s and 70s was not because they stopped at that point out of respect. It's because that was the last time there were treaty violations en masse, with water infrastructure projects. Once the water infrastructure projects were built they didn't need to build anymore... because they already existed. Admittedly, I'll say that I phrased it poorly because the violations are still on-going. The dams still exist. The land is destroyed. The people, moved.

2. I think it's disingenuous, at best, to claim that I'm somehow spotting that treaty violations ended there when the very next paragraph I wrote cites DAPL as a fresh and present violation.

What makes you think the trend is going in the right direction? As recently as DAPL not only were treaty rights run over roughshod and violated, but the call to ignore them was a frontispiece of the Trump campaign, and they were certainly not respected by Obama until well after he was a lame-duck and even then in only the most cursory of manners. Nobody is saying things are different now. It's more that we live in the aftermath of a highly successful campaign of ethnic cleansing. Things are different, not necessarily better.

Well, for one thing, the Seneca got Salamanca back. Including structures that had been added to it. They were also upheld in their right to control access to their lands, were able to enforce agreements to share tollway funds with them, and got to tell the State of New York to go to hell when it tried to collect state taxes.

Not to pull my New Yorker card here, but they never 'lost' Salamanca. It was always on Native Land, always recognized as being in a reservation, with a century's worth of explicit legal precedent saying that they had a landlord-lessee relationship with the people on it, backed by contracts and statutes. When they contractually had the right to raise the rent they raised the rent. People sued to have them not raise the rent. At no point was this truly a natives rights case as much as it was a contracts case. The litany of times when this goes the other way when it actually is a Native Rights case would make your legal assertion suspect.

In other places - Minnesota and Michigan regarding wild rice cultivation, fishing and hunting rights in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest - Native nations are having their rights regarding resources upheld. There's that whole business of casinos - the Natives started dominating legal gambling outside Nevada and New Jersey because they were able to legalize it when the surrounding US regions still outlawed it, and having it was a major advance of the notion that Native groups make the law on their own lands rather than the folks around them doing so. All of this has improved the economy of the Natives involved.

Okay, so Natives have been able to take over a slew of roles and economic rights that White Folk don't care about anymore, meanwhile, when White folk want something (natural resources, oil, access) they get it with the full force of the government. Again, not sure how this points to a positive trend as much white apathy.

Again - I am in no way trying to oversell this. There are still festering problems like Pine Ridge and any number of Native towns plagued by unemployment and drug use. The point is that it is now possible for Native nations to gain ground and have their rights upheld. Which was simply not existent a century ago. That's the change, and that's the positive. It's a small glimmer of hope. Definitely, it needs to be improved and built upon, it's not nearly enough.

Why is that glimmer of hope an argument to shelve demands for decolonization? Why does that glimmer of hope legitimate the US occupation of native lands? What makes you think that glimmer of hope is substantive as opposed to the glimmer that, for instance, Black folk got in the realm of education after Brown v. Board of Ed, only to now be faced with (as cited earlier in the thread) no real progress.

I suppose, the better questions: Given that the entire legal and social framework of the US requires not respecting Native rights to property, self-government, etc. what makes you think that gradual movement will erode that to the point of collapse as opposed to, say, hitting a metaphorical wall against which that movement will simply not win? Also, why do you think that this strategy would be better than a political and social push for decolonization?

[Straha]

Has anyone considered a US territory fractured into dozens to hundreds of polities, now completely disrupted and poor regardless of what color combinations of people live where, won’t be a place the diminutive population of Native Americans will be able to compete in?

North America would become a lawless basketcase and essentially subject to the same forces that disposed the natives in the first place. Only now on an unprecidented scale. Ironically, and unfortunately, the diminished state of native wealth and relative power means the only thing holding them together as anything other than any other random <1% minority group is the US government. Without it and it’s engorcement of treaties there is no scenario where there lot gets better as separate sovereign entities. They would be re-conquered or absorbed or abandoned in short order.

EDIT: missed a page, you did.

This has been answered at excruciating length at multiple points in this thread. And the way the Settler-Colonial mind makes the immediate leap from "Settler-Colonists are no longer in charge" to "LAWLESS ANARCHY!" has also been discussed at some length. If you're going to add something at least try and make it original.

[Straha]

And still, I'd say that approach is better than the ones I've seen being discussed here - the simple reality is that violence isn't going to work, and the idea of getting the US to disband itself is simply ludicrous.

Where has anyone, ever, in this thread advocated violence as the main political strategy to deploy for decolonization? If you're going to strawman at least try not to do it so fucking pathetically.

Doesn't this present a much bleaker picture than what Straha paints? One wherein not only is the US, to borrow theological terms, totally racist but also utterly racist?

If the goal of de-colonialism is for the dissolution of the US, then yes, the prospects of that happening are pretty damn bleak.

This does not mean that I am against legal and political reforms, nor am I against reconciliations and reparations, not am I against changing people's attitudes etc. I'm all for it. But dissolving the US as an institution? Not a chance of that happening, no matter how much some may want it to. This should be pretty obvious given the US's history, really.

Let's start this as a more basic question: Do you believe the US should, morally, exist? If yes, why? If not, then why shouldn't people advocate for its dissolution regardless of the short-term political viability of that strategy?

[loomer]

Loomers posts show good intentions but ignore practicality. Like it or not nations like the US NEVER dissolve peacefully. They can reform but the kind of mass division where the army and resources are divided between the various states? Yeah He also implied the average it workers livelihood doesn’t depend on stolen land. If his house was built on land that was part of a Native American nation it sure as shit does.

You can make changes, you can even restore some land. But the dissolution of the US? Never going to happen.

Your concession is accepted, fuckwit.

As regards sovereignty, it was transferred to the United States by right of conquest. This is the normal procedure by which sovereignty has historically been transferred and is morally legitimate. The only alternative widely accepted today is the sovereignty resides with the people living in a territory, and that is generally not Native Americans today. The only reason we can talk about doing justice by restoring native sovereignty is that the colonization of the United States was so successful at destroying native cultures and history that a naive individual looking at what we know about North American history can conclude that the persons living there when the Europeans arrived had a right to the territory. Based on the history of Europe it seems far more probably that sovereignty over every valuable bit of North America had been transferred by conquest many times before Europeans arrived so the owners when Europeans arrived had no more right to sovereignty then the people who took it away from them do. This is where the analogy to Europe is appropriate because the difference between Europe and the United States is that we have a knowledge of Europe's history before 1500 and therefor more awareness of just how often sovereignty changed hands by conquest and therefor how utterly impossible it is to find any person or people who have a clear moral claim to sovereignty over a territory.

If we accept that within settler-colonialism conquest occurred - which is a far from settled matter, as Straha has explained - and that this is a legitimate method of seizing sovereignty, then we must inevitably arrive at the following logic: Indigenous peoples and their allies morally can and indeed should violently reconquer their traditional lands, killing all those who resist. The fact they do it will justify it. By this notion, I must point out (at the risk of reductio ad hitlerum, though legitimately in this case), the German policy of acquiring lebensraum is also morally legitimate - is this a moral logic you are comfortable with?

As a final point I would like to say that while the ideal of an equal negotiation between the non-native people currently living in the United States and the native population is appealing it is also impossible. Negotiations are always unequal when the two parties have radically different amounts of power. Unless the power differential changes what Native Americans can get out of such negotiations will always be what the majority of Americans are prepared to give them. I wish you luck in persuading the non Native American population of the United States that they ought to give up control over the laws under which they live and the institutions which have the power to tax them. No taxation without representation has always been a big thing for Americans.

Once again, I find myself having to reiterate a fundamental element of nearly all peaceful decolonization proposals: The process is not 'Indigenous vs Non-Indigenous'. At its core it calls not for an equal negotiation between blackfella and whitefella, but between blackfella and his friends and whitefella. This is also why the objection 'they would have to give up control over the laws under which they live' is meaningless - the process calls for no such thing, and in fact, relies quite fundamentally on the participation of those people in those laws and institutions. It cannot happen otherwise.

I'll add, as an aside, one of the most interesting lines of decolonization has been in Australia under the Mabo doctrine, which officially rejected the idea that Australia was Terra Nullis and allowed for the recognition of Native Title as both pre-existing and contemporaneous, even when settler title existed. It's actual effect has been somewhat moderate, but there's real potential there and it represents an interesting line of legal flight to go down in a decolonial strategy.

I suspect this may be part of our different emphases - Australia's half-hearted willingness to embrace legal means of reform necessarily predisposes me to argue along the existing law of nations, and means the idea that people may lose their land to legal action on the basis of illegitimate seizure is perhaps less foreign to me than to many of the detractors.

I find it interesting that anti-decolonization posters like yourself routinely return to the idea that the process must involve the 'forced relocation of massive amounts of people' when it is, again, not something being sought except where unavoidable by all but the extreme fringe of decolonization proposals. No such forced relocation is suggested except in the marginal areas, in which case the ordinary legal system can be employed, with its well-established tradition of the employment of coercive sanctions up to and including violence to obtain its ends. In this regard, such relocations are no different to eminent domain seizures.

First of all - why do you assume I am "anti-decolonization"? I am raising possible problems with accomplishing restoration of land rights, I am nowhere saying I am opposed to doing this. I don't think it's likely to happen any time soon, but that doesn't mean I'm opposed to the idea in theory.

I was responding to Civil War Man, but I find it interesting that you believe this referred to you. Why is that?

First, there is the fear that new (or if your prefer, the restored owners) will become the New Oppressors.

It certainly can happen, and it is of course a risk - but it's a risk that is worth taking in the furtherance of justice and humanity.

I used the word "fear" for a reason, not "risk". It is a fear, which means it is felt in a highly emotional place. Given that there are examples in history of "the worst" coming to pass it is not an entirely irrational fear, either. South Africa would definitely be a place to look at, to see how these fears were addressed and calmed sufficiently to allow the place to continue as a viable nation. Studying history isn't just about studying the worst cases, after all. No one is going to willingly sign up for a situation where they or their children are going to be the oppressed, no matter what justice might be involved. At some point the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" thing has to stop so we don't all wind up blind and toothless. The difficulty of doing that should not be minimized. Among other things, it involves the acknowledgement that not everything can be set right and there is no perfect justice.

We do not seek 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'. We do not seek for anyone's children to be oppressed - in fact, the goal of decolonization is the destruction of the settler-native-slave triad that creates this oppression. What we seek is informed by the failures in Zimbabwe and South Africa, just as what was done to the peoples of Australia was informed by the American precedents. As you yourself noted earlier, this does not occur in a vacuum, and we are well aware of and cognizant of the failures of other efforts. We also make no pretense that every single wrong can be righted or perfect justice ever achieved - we do not, however, make the leap to 'and therefore, we should not seek justice at all'.

Here's a problem with, for example the recent restoration of Salamanca to Seneca control: The non-native residents purchased housing - not rented or leased, PURCHASED - under the assumption (which until 1990's was, apparently, also held by courts, banks, and other entities) that while the land belonged to the Seneca what was built on the land belonged to the non-natives who paid for it. Then, in the 1990's not only did the courts hold that the Seneca held the land (which, actually, was never in disputed) but also the "improvements", that is, everything built on the land, which had been built under the assumption that those who built the stuff owned the stuff. The non-natives who had, in some cases, sunk the majority of their wealth into those "improvements" saw this as theft - which is why it wound up in court. No one objected to signing a lease to stay on the land - that had been the practice for 100 years already - but the objection was to being "forced" to sign a lease to stay in a home bought/built/owned by a person, that the person had paid property taxes on for all the years they were there, that had (from their viewpoint) been given to someone else. Those people lost all the equity in those properties. Hell, yes, they were angry. They had, in fact, played the game according to the rules everyone else did... until the game changed in 1990 without any input from them. They feel they have been lied to. (I'm sure the Seneca can empathize with that, even if they still want to assert their ownership claim).

And when a person purchases a stolen car, even without knowing it's stolen, they also play the game according to the rules everyone else did... and then when the theft is discovered, they lose the car and it is returned to its lawful owners. I note also that when you build on rented land, you can still be evicted from private property if you refuse to sign a lease for that land - precisely what happened here, with the addition of the legally authorized seizure of the improvements. This authority, I note, came from the US Government - they had input when they voted, just as with all other laws formed by their existing government. It was also in accord with a well-recognized principle of property law that improvements on leasehold land default to the land owner when the lease ends unless otherwise specified in the lease's language, which was not the case here. See Banner v US (238 F.3d 1348).

They played the game according to the rules everyone else did. And then they lost the game, according to the rules everyone else did. Why should the Seneca not have employed the legal remedies available to them when faced with tenants who refused to renew the lease? We may, of course, argue that the general principle of property law involved is unjust - I'd be sympathetic - but at that point the issue becomes whether US law and the idea of private property is just, not whether there was some special character of this to do with it involving Indigenous seizure.

Now, there are ways to deal with these things. For example, these "improvement owners" could be fairly compensated, with the Seneca paying something for the "improvements" that sit upon the land (the Seneca aren't what you'd call rich, but they aren't penniless, either) either as a lump sum or via regular payments. There could be an arrangement where non-natives who had made these "improvements" under the assumption of ownership could continue to "own" them and pay only rent on the land beneath for the rest of their lives, but any heir or new "owner" would not be an owner but a new lessee under the post-1990 understanding. Maybe there's another alternative I haven't thought of. Or you could just say "sucks to to be you, you put your life savings into this but someone else owns it now". But if you do the last of those choices there is no way to avoid extended bitterness.

See above. Their loss was based on standard principles of property law as applied every day across multiple continents.

There probably is no way to do these things without pissing someone off along the way. There are no perfect answers to any of this Gordian knot of injustice that has built up over centuries. I am suggesting, though, that seizing the property of one group to "atone" for the seizure of property of another group centuries ago is probably not the ideal approach to a long term solution to the grabbing.

But again - what is proposed is limited seizure, with deliberate restrictions to ensure minimal disruption and reasonable protection to those presently inhabiting the areas under dispute. Nor is it proposed to 'atone' for an act centuries ago, but to make good an ongoing delict against the common law and morality of the people.

So we should just ignore these problems and questions? Forbid pointing out that there are difficulties to achieving justice either short or long term?

I am in no way saying that this can't be done - I have in fact posted about baby steps in that direction which demonstrate that this sort of restoration is possible. I will also continue to point out that it is very, very difficult to scale up and I will continue to ask for details on how people plan to do this.

No. Just as you are not intending to say 'we should not do this', I do not intend to say 'we must not question it'. However, the questions - as has been made clear in this thread by Yan's shitfuckery - regularly pose as a smokescreen for the real claim of 'over our dead bodies'.

The problem is the disparity of power and wealth. There are very few situations where nations as poor and as lacking in power as Native Americans have to negotiate with a superpower like the United States. France disagreeing with Germany is a fairly equal contest. The US and China disagreeing likewise. But how has, for example, Guatemala faired against the US? (Hint: it's where we get the term "banana republic") And Guatemala is considerably wealthier and more powerful than Native American nations.


Personally, I'd much prefer for the word "justice" to have such power that a disparity of power and wealth would not matter. But we don't live in that world.

But again - the proposed Indigenous states will not be magically poor and lacking in power. The proposals call for restoring Indigenous sovereignty over territories, which will necessarily include existing infrastructure, cities, revenues etc. Will New York City suddenly cease to be a significant metropolis simply because it is now part of the Lenape State? What is proposed does not go 'okay, so, burn everything down and start again', but rather, 'dissolve the existing power structures'.

It is actually a rather racially charged insistence to go 'the disparity will be enormous!' simply because a state, inheriting the wealth and population of its predecessor in the region, is constituted along Indigenous territorial lines and principles of equity and justice.

Again, certainly. But just as there is a risk that not all restored Indigenous states may wish to join the defence pacts, there is a possibility - a fairly good one, in fact - that they will. Again, this is not a risk unique to the idea of restoring Indigenous statehood and sovereignty, and the usual recourses to prevent wars of aggression remain available - whether they be defensive pacts or international law. In the case of the dissolved America, whatever common federations arise will likely also be nuclear capable, which is a fairly reliable tool for telling others to fuck right off - afterall, as you yourself point out, this restructuring doesn't take place in a vacuum, and nuclear weapons infrastructure is one of many assets to be considered and divided between the emergent states unless total disarmament is part of the process.

You're still talking about dismantling the United States, one of the most powerful entities on the planet. It would be at least as destabilizing as the dissolution of the USSR. I'm not saying it's going to cause WWIII - I rather doubt it would - but it's going to have international ramifications. EVERY nation that currently has a treaty/agreement/etc. with the US is going to have that unilaterally ended. Which is pretty much everyone. What happens to Japan? The US has pledged to defend Japan so that it need not have a standing military as other nations do - but if there is no US then what? Japan is left vulnerable. What happens to South Korea? What about NATO? The North American Trade Agreement will no longer exist... and recreating it will require negotiating with possibly hundreds of different sovereign entities. The world will become much less certain for quite awhile.

Certainly. But at what point does the security of the world justify an ongoing delict against the common law and morality of the people? At what point does saying 'okay, justice is nice, but you can go fuck yourself because Japan needs us to shield them' become moral?

You are correct that some older agreements will probably continue (including some, like the Iroquois Confederacy, that pre-date the existence of the USA and currently has about 125,000 people between the US and Canada, so it's also an example of a pre-existing trans-national Native group). Quite a few of these Native nations already issue their own passports for international travel, have police forces, and so forth. There is certainly a lot of infrastructure already in place. No matter what, though, dissolving the US is going to be a mess.

Not the least because there are other deep divides - there have been rumblings of secession of various regions for generations due to all sorts of reasons, including disputes between groups of European descent. Once you dissolve the current Union you're going to have all sorts of breakaways, from socialist communist mini-enclaves to attempts to set up religious theocracies to racial "homelands" (not just white - some groups of African descent want apartheid, too) to other stuff I haven't though of at the moment.

Certainly. But this was also a threat during the decolonization of Africa and South America. Is it sufficient to say 'we'd love to help, but you might have a civil war if we do, so we're going to have to continue oppressing you'?

I'd prefer there not be a fight at all.

Then it's fortunate that Mexico is unlikely to be suicidal enough to provoke a nuclear power!

Laws against homicide are only effective if there is a strong enough government to enforce the law. You are talking about not only dissolving the Federal government but also the State governments. Who will be left?

The new State - and potentially Federal - governments that replace them, for starters. Again - the alternative to the US being proposed is not 'nothing!' but rather 'new states'.

The Native nations do not have standing armies. They do not have arsenals. They do have tribal laws and tribal courts and tribal police... but, say, the Navajo and Hopi (two of the larger and better organized Native Nations in the region) do not have the capacity to suddenly take over law enforcement for New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada.

Why do you assume that the existing army regiments, national guard, arsenals, police forces, etc will not be subsumed into the newly established states? Again, there is a strangely racialized logic to this - 'the Indigenous peoples will be poor, they will be unarmed, they will be...' when what is proposed is that the states will inherit what has come before.

Not to mention that some of the state governments - which DO have arsenals in the form of the National Guard for that state - are already adversarial vs. the Native Nations and are currently held in check by the Federal government and its courts.

So... how do you plan to deal with the problems arising from your proposed plan of dissolving the Union?

And this is why the proposals call for winning over the settler majority, not simply barelling blindly ahead and hoping for the best. By the time a referendum can successfully endorse decolonization, the majority will necessarily be in favour of the notion - and as such, the risk of the state governments suddenly going hog wild is limited.

First - oh, yeah, wars between the various US states not only are possible but have historically occurred. Not just the big US Civil War, but others as well. Granted, the Toledo War was nearly bloodless (at least one person got stabbed, but I don't think anyone actually died) but given the current state of the USA I'd expect some definite conflicts once the lid of the Federal government is removed and some long-standing issues are allowed to boil over.

But - as the on-going conflict between New York State and the Seneca illustrate - there's going to be plenty of issues between the new entities your proposal creates. New York State, despite the intervention of the Federal government, keeps trying to impose sovereignty over the Seneca (and other Iroquois groups within its borders) in various ways. Take away the Federal government and there will be more of that, not less. Who is going to keep the peace while the process of re-forging the national landscape of North America takes place? The Native Nations are still out-numbered and out-gunned, and not nearly as wealthy. This will certainly give them massive incentive to make alliances, but will it be enough?

I will not address the idea, yet again, that the Indigenous states will somehow be outnumbered, outgunned, and poor. Nor will I address the absurdity of assuming that the states as constituted will still exist, when as components of the extant government to be dissolved, they too will be gone.

Or - as someone else already noted - a people can learn from the mistakes of the past or other nations and realize that by not treating other people like shit and vermin you lower the chances of nasty massacres down the line. If you don't want to fear oppression don't oppress other people.

Completely agreed. We must, then, act to end the systems of oppression currently in place - which is all that is suggested. The only people involved treating anyone like shit and vermin are the current settler-states.

Has anyone considered a US territory fractured into dozens to hundreds of polities, now completely disrupted and poor regardless of what color combinations of people live where, won’t be a place the diminutive population of Native Americans will be able to compete in?

North America would become a lawless basketcase and essentially subject to the same forces that disposed the natives in the first place. Only now on an unprecidented scale. Ironically, and unfortunately, the diminished state of native wealth and relative power means the only thing holding them together as anything other than any other random <1% minority group is the US government. Without it and it’s engorcement of treaties there is no scenario where there lot gets better as separate sovereign entities. They would be re-conquered or absorbed or abandoned in short order.

EDIT: missed a page, you did.

There is no particular reason to assume that the resulting reconfigured US will be 'completely disrupted and poor', as the proposals call for an organized handover of power and the inheritance of the Indigenous states of the wealth and infrastructure that precedes the dissolution. And, once again, the idea that it will be Indigenous vs Everyone Else misses that the central pillar of these proposals is the cultivation of settlers willing to vote yes on such a proposition: It is, then, not 'the .9% will be outnumbered and therefore vulnerable' - it is 'the 51% are going to be outnumbered!!' which is, well, a rather obvious logical absurdity, don't you think?

OK. Fine. They can live in the township... but what about those people who, rather then rent, BOUGHT a home under the old rules, sunk most of their wealth into it, and have no other thing of even a tenth the value of that land and building? If you compensate them... who determines an appropriate value? And where does the compensation come from? And... how generous, you allow them to live in a home that they (under the old rules) bought and paid for but which now belongs to someone else to whom they have to pay rent for the rest of their lives. What, exactly, do you think is going to be the reaction to that? You're talking about confiscating the major item of value from the 65% of Americans that own their home.

The proposals, again, do not call for the seizure of all ownership from settlers, especially not where those settlers are strictly smallholders - so no, Broomstick, I am not talking about confiscating the major item of value from the 65% of home-owners. I have repeatedly made this point. Landholders who do lose their lands will be compensated under the ordinary laws of compensation and value assessment used for eminent domain seizures, with the money coming from, shock, tax revenue and the pre-existing wealth reserves of the dissolved government during its transitional period.

Um... I fail to see why a property or township straddling a border requires anyone to move. This is an issue that has already come up multiple times in North America due to prior errors in surveying or other events. There are towns with an international border running down the middle of them. There are buildings with international borders running through them. The practice has been to allow such towns/cities/buildings/homes to remain and develop work-arounds that do not involve displacement. I would recommend continuing that practice in the event of a mass-redistribution of land ownership. Forcing people to move would not only seem unnecessary but only cause resentment and disruption.

The reason it is used as an example is because it is one of the easily understood ones as an example of where it may be necessary. There is of course no such requirement, and most proposals do not call for it as an actual policy, but instead, utilize it solely as an example of what occurs if and when it is necessary - for instance, if you live on a house in the middle of the US border and they want to put a wall in the middle, do you think you'll be allowed to stay?

The devil here is in the details. Who decides what is adequate compensation and, more importantly, where does that compensation come from? Who is going to pay the bills here and where does the money come from? (or the land, if you're doing a land swap)

Already addressed. Why is it you continue to take the tack that ordinary principles of law somehow do not apply?

None of these persons are being forced to leave the state they grew up in - perhaps to move a few miles down the road, which is of course traumatic but may be necessary to either right a wrong or for the pragmatic purposes that States already possess the right to dispossess and displace people in the furtherance of. In virtually all serious decolonization proposals, they are not rendered stateless, forced to leave the places they know, or made homeless.

This is so blatantly false I am amazed that you say it.

YES you are rendering every citizen of the US stateless by dissolving the US. Maybe everyone gets a country afterward, but there are no guarantees.

The proposals under discussion do in fact guarantee no one will be made stateless except in extreme fringe cases. The proposals usually look something like this: 'The state of X is to be dissolved into the new states of Y and Z. Those citizens of X resident in the territory of Y will be made citizens of Y, those of Z Z, except where there is a compelling reason for them to be made citizens of the other.'

So... NO, we are not rendering anyone stateless. This is so blatantly true I am amazed you say otherwise.

YES you are forcing people to leave "the places they know" by demanding that they relocate.

The proposals require relocation only in a relative minority of areas, where necessary for the public good - and there, only as far as is necessary. So NO - we are not forcing people to leave the places they know, just to move down the road in limited circumstances.

YES you are making people homeless by taking away their ownership in their homes and/or demanding they relocate.

NO, we are not. The proposals call for the rehousing and compensation of those relocated. It is in fact a major point of most such proposals that no one should be made homeless and wherever possible, it is to be avoided, and where not possible, is to be rectified as quickly as possible. And again - there is no such universal plan to take away people's homes and ownership of them.

YES you might well be forcing people to "leave the state they grew up in" or, more to the point, they state they live in (since plenty of Americans move from the state of their birth). I don't think you have any idea how extensive some Native land claims could be. "Move a few miles down the road"? Holy fuck, you have no idea. The Navajo nation's much diminished present holdings are 70,000 km2, slightly larger than the State of West Virginia. It's larger than ten US states! That's just one Native nation. There are HUNDREDS of Native tribes still in existence. A big chunk of Utah belongs to the Uintah and Ouray. In addition to the Navajo claiming a big slice of Arizona, there's the Tohono O'odham taking another bite out of Arizona. Pine Ridge extends over part of both South Dakota and Nebraska and is bigger than either Delaware or Rhode Island. Those are the diminished holdings of the Natives, which are a tiny drop in the bucket of the US total area only because the US is a pretty damn big place. If you start restoring lands to all the other tribes in the US, as well as ancestral lands to the groups who still have something... YES, goddammit, at least some people are going to wind up moving out of state and more than just a few miles down the road. At least admit that's going to happen to some people, that for some people this would be a fucking disaster, and it's not going to affect JUST the white people but also the black people (who have no more claim to North American land than anyone else who isn't a Native) and Asians who have immigrated and folks from way south of the border who might have some claim to lands in South America but not North.

I have repeatedly made clear that there is no presumption in the proposals that only Indigenous people will be permitted to live on the land of the Indigenous states, and that the proposals call, quite expressly in many cases, for the precise opposite. So NO - no such action is proposed (barring very odd fringe cases). These proposals do not call for ethnostates.

Also, why on earth do you think I'm only talking about whites? Have I made such a statement at any point? Have I made any particular statement about whites specifically at all other than to refer to CANZUS et al as white supremacist and myself as a whitefella?

Even if no one is asked to move (which even you acknowledge isn't reality) the fact that ownership will transfer from the current owners to someone else by decree represents a MASSIVE transfer of wealth and disruption to the economy. Again, WHERE is the compensation for this going to come from? And if it doesn't - well, great, you've just exchanged the poverty of one group of people for the poverty of an even larger group of people.

Again - the proposals quite expressly do not call for complete transfer of ownership, or even for the transfer of a majority of ownership in areas where most land is held by individual freeholders in small household plots and businesses. And again, the compensation will come from tax revenue and the wealth of the dissolved state during the transitional period.

No, you're just going to render every non-native stateless, transfer their major item of wealth to someone else, and say they "probably" won't have to move elsewhere. That couldn't possibly end in tears...

None of these are part of what is being discussed.

What about the 200,000,000 (give or take a few) who were NOT paying rent but were owners under the old system? It makes a BIG difference if someone who used to own the house they're living in now has to pay rent to a new owner after ownership was transferred to someone else.

You're right - I really have few fucks to give if I wind up writing my rent check to the Potawatomie Nation or to whomever would get my block in such a scheme rather than the company that currently owns it (most likely it would be Potawatomie - which still retain some of their ancestral lands - or the Miami, if any still exist but as of right now only the Pokagon Potawatami remain in northern Indiana). Because I'm a renter I don't care. It means a fuckton more to the people across the street who paid $100,000 or $200,000 for THEIR residence under the presumption they own it and the land it sits on. Especially if they've paid the mortage off any only have to worry about property taxes now. What about my employer? Quite a bit of the wealth of the company lies in their real estate holdings, which they use as collateral for loans when needed, or sell some of it to raise funds for some other project. Take that away and they may not be able to secure financing when needed, or have to pay the balance on outstanding loans immediately because the loans are no longer secured and backed by collateral. There's all sorts of knock-on effects from this sort of redistribution that aren't immediately apparent.

If they owned their house, they will continue to own it under the vast majority of decolonization proposals. The goal of decolonization is quite expressly not to simply flip the odds - it is to completely dismantle the settler-native-slave triad, and it is not necessary to seize all settler owned property to do so, nor is it seriously proposed to do so. The land and property that is under discussion is where excess land and property is held and all publicly-owned lands, and I have little sympathy for those who profit on the unjust exploitation of stolen land. However, since these proposals also call for negotiation and agreement, there is window for - and indeed, must necessarily be some degree of - government-covered loan dismissal, investment protection, etc for those who will be in turn unjustly affected.

[Tribble]

Where has anyone, ever, in this thread advocated violence as the main political strategy to deploy for decolonization? If you're going to strawman at least try not to do it so fucking pathetically.

Given that their was talk about the Haitian Revolution, I was simply pointing out that it wouldn't work in the US.

inserts a picture without reading the post I was responding to

I highlighted and bolded the part where loomer (who I was responding to, not you) did in fact call for the dissolution of the US. If you read subsequent posts of loomers it looks like that's one of the things s/he thinks is worth serious discussion, if not advocating for.

Let's start this as a more basic question: Do you believe the US should, morally, exist? If yes, why? If not, then why shouldn't people advocate for its dissolution regardless of the short-term political viability of that strategy?

Morally speaking the US should not exist... Yet it exists, and short of the apocalypse it's not going anywhere anytime for the foreseeable future.

Why shouldn't people advocate for its dissolution regardless of the short-term political viability of that strategy? Or the long-term political viability for that matter?

Because at best you accomplish nothing with the US government and general public just ignoring you.

At worst it would be counter-productive, as many of the people who may be sympathetic to reconciliation and reparations would no doubt be put off by the concept of dissolution. It's too extreme a concept I think for most Americans to ever agree with, even though on an intellectual level they may understand where you are coming from. It's better to focus you're time and energy elsewhere IMO.

Plus if any dissolution is going to happen, I guarantee it wouldn't be on behalf of the First Nations; it'll be a state like Texas deciding they've had enough of d'em nasty evil liberals, and splitting off again precisely so that they can stamp minorities further into the ground.

Quite frankly, I'm surprised I have to point this out to you.

[Straha]

Where has anyone, ever, in this thread advocated violence as the main political strategy to deploy for decolonization? If you're going to strawman at least try not to do it so fucking pathetically.

Given that their was talk about the Haitian Revolution, I was simply pointing out that it wouldn't work in the US.

Nobody has ever said the Haitian revolution is a model that Native Tribes should follow. Have you read the thread?

inserts a picture without reading the post I was responding to

I highlighted and bolded the part where loomer (who I was responding to, not you) did in fact call for the dissolution of the US. If you read subsequent posts of loomers it looks like that's one of the things s/he thinks is worth serious discussion, if not advocating for.

This is the post you are responding to. Effie's response to you is that you paint a world wherein the United States is not just racist, but that there is no possibility of ever fixing the racist structures that undergird the United States, whereas the world I paint is one where the U.S. is racist but that racism is not inevitable in the world and that racist structures can be challenged and overcome. Your response is to claim 'Well, total destruction of the U.S. is a pipe dream.' Which misses the point spectacularly.


To loop back to the OP again. It is, at least, refreshing to see people now staking out a position that the U.S. is fundamentally racist and that serious attempts at fixing structural racism will be resisted by the majority of the population to the point of violence. Which highlights just how in-line with the American political project Trump is on these issues.

Let's start this as a more basic question: Do you believe the US should, morally, exist? If yes, why? If not, then why shouldn't people advocate for its dissolution regardless of the short-term political viability of that strategy?

Morally speaking the US should not exist... Yet it exists, and short of the apocalypse it's not going anywhere anytime for the foreseeable future.

Why shouldn't people advocate for its dissolution regardless of the short-term political viability of that strategy? Or the long-term political viability for that matter?

Because at best you accomplish nothing with the US government and general public just ignoring you.

The government isn't the goal in the short term. The general populace isn't the goal in the short term. You've already made the assertion that both are at present fundamentally too racist to be swayed to care about the plight of Native Tribes and will resort to violence when confronted with wanting to help them. This is an assertion that I don't necessarily disagree with.

But if you agree that the United States shouldn't exist, and we can kick the discourse on this through conversations so that others either agree with that line or accept the validity of that logic, then we have shifted the discourse of politics to allow decolonial projects to exist. Nobody in this thread thinks that decolonization is something that is going to happen in the short term (perhaps not even in our life times), nor do they think those long-term projects won't involve compromise, the goal is to fight for its potential. That means that this rhetoric is an absolutely essential part of that project, and compromising before it even gets out of the gate would be toxic to the project.

At worst it would be counter-productive, as many of the people who may be sympathetic to reconciliation and reparations would no doubt be put off by the concept of dissolution. It's too extreme a concept I think for most Americans to ever agree with, even though on an intellectual level they may understand where you are coming from. It's better to focus you're time and energy elsewhere IMO.

I point you to the discussion with Effie. If you think that the people currently living in the United States simply cannot be non-Racist then you have painted a fundamentally pessimistic worldview that makes mass atrocities inevitable. In which case A. your continued adherence to the United States makes me question your ethical commitments and B. it seems that the United States should be treated like apartheid South Africa and the rhetoric of delegitimating it in an internationalist sense becomes absolutely necessary.

[Darth Yan]

It’s amazing people assume handovers of power and resources will be peaceful.

Also that loomers response to all the international chaos that would occur is “eh who cares? Justice is more important”

[loomer]

It’s amazing people assume handovers of power and resources will be peaceful.

Also that loomers response to all the international chaos that would occur is “eh who cares? Justice is more important”

Your concession has been accepted. Kindly be quiet while the adults are talking.

[Effie]

It’s amazing people assume handovers of power and resources will be peaceful.

Also that loomers response to all the international chaos that would occur is “eh who cares? Justice is more important”

The idea that stability is more important than justice primarily serves to prop up dictatorial governments as they brutalize their subjects.

[Straha]

I'll add, as an aside, one of the most interesting lines of decolonization has been in Australia under the Mabo doctrine, which officially rejected the idea that Australia was Terra Nullis and allowed for the recognition of Native Title as both pre-existing and contemporaneous, even when settler title existed. It's actual effect has been somewhat moderate, but there's real potential there and it represents an interesting line of legal flight to go down in a decolonial strategy.

I suspect this may be part of our different emphases - Australia's half-hearted willingness to embrace legal means of reform necessarily predisposes me to argue along the existing law of nations, and means the idea that people may lose their land to legal action on the basis of illegitimate seizure is perhaps less foreign to me than to many of the detractors.

I think this may be national character than anything? Like, on a fundamental level Mabo in Australia or something like it in the U.S. has to be part of a mosaic of strategies to be effective.

I'm, obviously, less sure about decolonizing strategies in Australia, but in the U.S. I've found that if you appeal on moral grounds for an ending of violent occupation you get a sort of half-hearted shrug. My sense is that the language is already encoded in the rhetoric that surrounds US foreign policy and interventionism and it becomes an easy way for people to tune it out.

But in my experience people in the U.S. grok property rights. If you tell them "something that was theirs was taken wrongly" people have an intellectual and moral framework that they can fit this into, and even if it doesn't propel them forward it at least lays bare the contradictions inherent to U.S. claims to land and property law. And, generally speaking, people do not feel comfortable avowing overt contradictions. From there real movement is possible.

[Straha]

And that's the truth, isn't it? Deep down (or not so deep down), you faux-progressives admire Trump because he "tells it like it is", because in your mind all of America is equally evil, but at least Trump is (in your mind) honest evil, or open evil (because somehow openly embracing and normalizing evil is better than ostracizing it as a society), and he gives you the satisfaction of being able to say that you were right all along about America. There's a part of you that wants him to win, because it will validate your cynicism, and let you have the satisfaction of saying "I told you so". Its also probably why you hate to admit that Russian interference or collusion happened (aside from your ideology requiring you to side with America's enemies regardless of facts). Because if you acknowledge that it happened, that Trump's election was illegitimate, then it interferes with the narrative that Trump is truly representative of the American nation and the will of its people.

BTW, TRR. It's interesting to me that when people in this thread start publicly defending the US's policies towards Native Tribes by stating that the populace is so naively racist that open discussion of their racism will cause horrifying blowback that you let it slide. If your breed of 'progressive' won't fight that battle then why should people believe you'll be around for any other anti-racist struggle?

[The Romulan Republic]

And that's the truth, isn't it? Deep down (or not so deep down), you faux-progressives admire Trump because he "tells it like it is", because in your mind all of America is equally evil, but at least Trump is (in your mind) honest evil, or open evil (because somehow openly embracing and normalizing evil is better than ostracizing it as a society), and he gives you the satisfaction of being able to say that you were right all along about America. There's a part of you that wants him to win, because it will validate your cynicism, and let you have the satisfaction of saying "I told you so". Its also probably why you hate to admit that Russian interference or collusion happened (aside from your ideology requiring you to side with America's enemies regardless of facts). Because if you acknowledge that it happened, that Trump's election was illegitimate, then it interferes with the narrative that Trump is truly representative of the American nation and the will of its people.

BTW, TRR. It's interesting to me that when people in this thread start publicly defending the US's policies towards Native Tribes by stating that the populace is so naively racist that open discussion of their racism will cause horrifying blowback that you let it slide. If your breed of 'progressive' won't fight that battle then why should people believe you'll be around for any other anti-racist struggle?

I haven't "let it slide"- I just haven't been following this discussion closely the last few days. My comments in other threads have made it quite clear on many occassions how I feel about the idea of backing off on discussing racism because it might offend racists. That is, I think its an idiotic, immoral and self-defeating strategy, and that threats of violence from the other side should not be allowed to influence policy.

I find your increasingly tenuous attempts to brand me a racist pathetic, and libelous. I advise you to drop it, because "TRR supports or is indifferent to racism" is not a narrative I am okay with being propagated on this board just so you can score some debating points, and I will report your ass if you keep at it.

Of course, I'm sure its no coincidence that you posted this drivel in response to a post about Russia. Just another round of deflection and Whataboutism. I guess you're just another faux progressive collusion denier, who is perfectly fine with enabling fascism as long as an enemy of the US does it.

[Effie]

Perhaps it is worth examining why Russian interference in American and German elections went so very differently, such that the Nazis won a primary and then the general election in the US and they've managed to top out at 10% and are now declining in Germany.

[The Romulan Republic]

Perhaps it is worth examining why Russian interference in American and German elections went so very differently, such that the Nazis won a primary and then the general election in the US and they've managed to top out at 10% and are now declining in Germany.

Perhaps enough Germans still remember what happened the last time these people were given any leeway? If any country should have learned that lesson, its Germany.

Or it may be that the German government/police are more on the ball/less corrupt, and their election system less vulnerable. I don't know enough about the German election system to say for certain, but given the disfunction of the US system, it wouldn't surprise me.

[Effie]

Perhaps it is worth examining why Russian interference in American and German elections went so very differently, such that the Nazis won a primary and then the general election in the US and they've managed to top out at 10% and are now declining in Germany.

Perhaps enough Germans still remember what happened the last time these people were given any leeway? If any country should have learned that lesson, its Germany.

Or it may be that the German government/police are more on the ball/less corrupt, and their election system less vulnerable. I don't know enough about the German election system to say for certain, but given the disfunction of the US system, it wouldn't surprise me.

I am sure the 90somethings with direct experience of Nazism would be the deciding factor in German elections.

[The Romulan Republic]

Perhaps it is worth examining why Russian interference in American and German elections went so very differently, such that the Nazis won a primary and then the general election in the US and they've managed to top out at 10% and are now declining in Germany.

Perhaps enough Germans still remember what happened the last time these people were given any leeway? If any country should have learned that lesson, its Germany.

Or it may be that the German government/police are more on the ball/less corrupt, and their election system less vulnerable. I don't know enough about the German election system to say for certain, but given the disfunction of the US system, it wouldn't surprise me.

I am sure the 90somethings with direct experience of Nazism would be the deciding factor in German elections.

Don't play dense.

Anyone late 70s or older would be old enough to have memories of Nazi Germany, or its immediate aftermath. Even those slightly younger would have grown up in a Germany where De-Nazification was recent, and would have parents who lived through it. And Germany still carried that guilt, even after the war was over. Of course its a factor. Exactly how much of one, I can't say.

[Effie]

Perhaps enough Germans still remember what happened the last time these people were given any leeway? If any country should have learned that lesson, its Germany.

Or it may be that the German government/police are more on the ball/less corrupt, and their election system less vulnerable. I don't know enough about the German election system to say for certain, but given the disfunction of the US system, it wouldn't surprise me.

I am sure the 90somethings with direct experience of Nazism would be the deciding factor in German elections.

Don't play dense.

Anyone late 70s or older would be old enough to have memories of Nazi Germany, or its immediate aftermath. Even those slightly younger would have grown up in a Germany where De-Nazification was recent, and would have parents who lived through it. And Germany still carried that guilt, even after the war was over. Of course its a factor. Exactly how much of one, I can't say.

Why are you positioning it as a determinative factor? You're essentially positing that all countries are equally vulnerable to Donald Trumps- so why did Emmanuel Macron, like him or not, defeat Marine le Pen? Why are South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan undergoing leftward shifts?

[The Romulan Republic]

I am sure the 90somethings with direct experience of Nazism would be the deciding factor in German elections.

Don't play dense.

Anyone late 70s or older would be old enough to have memories of Nazi Germany, or its immediate aftermath. Even those slightly younger would have grown up in a Germany where De-Nazification was recent, and would have parents who lived through it. And Germany still carried that guilt, even after the war was over. Of course its a factor. Exactly how much of one, I can't say.

Why are you positioning it as a determinative factor?

I posited it as one possible factor. I did not claim that it was the determinative one.

You're essentially positing that all countries are equally vulnerable to Donald Trumps-

Quote and link where I said that. Because I can quote my last fucking post where I said that the US political system was especially vulnerable.

I am so fucking sick of having people proclaim to me what my position is so that they can refute the straw man. I think it would be the height of hubris to imagine that any nation is immune to fascism, but they are certainly not all equally vulnerable, and I would make no such claim.

so why did Emmanuel Macron, like him or not, defeat Marine le Pen? Why are South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan undergoing leftward shifts?

Ah, I think I get where you're going with this. You want to prove that America of all nations on Earth is uniquely evil and racist and susceptible to fascism, am I right?

[Broomstick]

I would go through and point-by-point this, but the problem is that you really don't have the kind of historical background necessary to make this a fruitful discussion.

And you do? More on that later.....

Like, "slavery was killed by industry" is utterly bullshit- the American textile industry, which was far more critical than steel production to the American economy in the first half of the 20th century, was dependent on King Cotton

So... you're claiming that "the first half of the 20th Century" somehow retroactively affected the outcome of the US Civil War? WTF? YOU are getting history back-to-front with that statement.

But, more to the point - the cotton gin dramatically reduced the number of slaves needed to produce cotton in the deep south by automating separation of seed and cotton. Rinse and repeat for many industrial applications. The more automation came in the less need for slaves. While increasing technology was not the sole reason for the elimination of chattel slavery it was certainly a factor.

But, since you can't tell the difference between "the first half of the 20th Century" and the 1850's I see no further point in addressing your post.