Skip Navigation

chapotraphouse @hexbear.net

refolde [she/her, any] @hexbear.net

2y ago

What the fuck is it with settler states that make them so outrageously evil?

I don't usually use 'evil' to describe things but I don't know any other word to describe settler states and their tendency to massacre and torment people they stole their land from and gleefully brag about all the horrific atrocities they've committed/want to commit. Never before have I seen a group people that take more joy in the suffering of others than the kinds of people that want to wipe out entire societies and claim their land for their own.

This is the kinda shit where if you write villains that act exactly like this people will slam you for bad or unrealistic writing, but no, it would actually be perfectly in line with reality all things considered.

EDIT: ps I know me not good at writing things. Wish I can write my thoughts on this better, but I can't really get it into right now

59 comments

The simplest answer is the material conditions of having one's direct material interests conflict with other people's rights and survival. It's a sort of cognitive dissonance resolution thing, that when someone is benefitting from hurting someone else they'll start trying to rationalize it: it's their "right" to take this for themselves, it's the "natural order" of the world that they should receive and others must suffer for it, the ones who are suffering are wicked and deserve to be hurt, and so on. Give that sort of mindset generations to fester and stew and you get it formalized into all sorts of violent reactionary ideologies. This is true whether one's talking about bourgeoisie, landlords, privileged ethnic groups, men in a patriarchal society, or settlers.
The specific arrangement of settler colonialism is also effectively a trap: the settlers' entire way of life and continued comfort depends on the brutal order of extraction and theft continuing, because their homes are on stolen land (and sometimes are literally homes that were directly stolen as-is), because their jobs are on stolen land, because all their wealth is tied up in systems that rely on the settler state. This means that an end to the settler project and a redress of its crimes means they lose everything and are destitute in a reactionary system that unpersons anyone who lacks land and wealth, that they would become refugees and find themselves at the mercy of other predatory capitalists eager to exploit and destroy them for profit. Considering that engaging in a genocidal settler colonialist project in the first place means starting from a position of already having a genocidal supremacist ideology, you can see how it only gets worse with time as the material conditions make it entrenched and more costly for its perpetrators to stop.
Edit: fuck this is reminding me of a "textbook" on military strategy I read when I was in highschool and was the sort of insufferable nerd who'd read stuff like that, which apart from having galaxy brain takes like "partisan resistance movements are a bad strategy because 'they are not militarily useful' and further 'corrode social morality' leading to restless populations later" also literally talked about and praised settler colonialism as a method of conquest for rather similar reasons to those I'm condemning it with here, that the settlers necessarily must be in conflict with the natives and so would "be more loyal" to the core that they both rely on and have cultural ties to than a subjugated native population would be. I looked around to see if I still had it so I could look at its brainworms through the lens of marxist analysis I have now, but its not on my bookshelves so I think it must be one of the ones that got ruined or lost while I was moving. I'm just struck by the memory of how it was basically taking a correct material analysis of some things and then applying the most ass backwards moral valuations to it to the point that now I'm wondering if it wasn't written by some trot turned neocon or something.
- Well said. I think principles are really well-formed when they apply to a ton of different topics, even outside of the original scope of what the person writing intended. You listed a good number of cases where these kinds of material conflicts manifest, but there was one big one left out that a lot of leftists omit, veganism.
  Even leftists, who are this aware about the cognitive dissonance humans fall victim to rationalize harm, still fall into these patterns. "What I choose to eat is my right", "it's natural that we kill and eat animals", "nature is cruel", "(non-pet) animals don't deserve moral consideration because they're lesser".
  It's interesting because a lot of times these leftists aren't landlords, they aren't bourgeois business owners, they aren't benefactors of the patriarchy or imperialism. So their lack of material interests in perpetuating these systems allows them to critically analyze it. Then when it comes to a system of oppression they do benefit from, their critical analysis ends at "mmm bacon is so fucking tasty".
  
  And they get angry and insulted - "How dare you compare me to an animal!" - because carnists cannot imagine viewing animals as anything other than disposable inferiors.
- The only flaw with your argument is that the Jews would have nothing if they left Israel. They would be welcomed with open arms into countries that actually want them (even though they shouldn’t be allowed to simply leave, they should be punished and face the wraith of the indigenous people they tried genocide but that’s a moralistic argument and unlikely to happen). They would keep most of their wealth and have no problem reintegrating into the imperial core, we saw this with the South Africans, South Vietnamese, the Cuban losers, hell it probably goes back farther than the confederates who fled to Brazil to continue slavery. The colonizers will always have safe harbor in the imperial core and its other peripheral territories. They aren’t going to be left in poverty if the colonial project fails.
  
  1.) Israel isn't "The Jews". Zionists and Israel do not speak for all Jewish people and conflating the two is anti-Semitic and strengthens Zionist assertions that they are legitimate representatives of all Jewish people.
  Secondly, I sincerely doubt that Israelis would be welcomed with open arms anywhere. No state in the West is going to accept hundreds of thousands or millions of refugees no matter where they're from. And despite the performative support for Israel there's still a great deal of anti-Semitism.
  
  I don't think they would I think if Israelis arrived as destitute refugees in Europe a whole lot of shit would change really fast in how Israelis are percieved. Israel is liked at the moment because the political order tells people to like them and the political order likes them because they buy weapons
  
  I thought about that while writing it, but I couldn't quite figure out a way to complete that thought and articulate it. Because while it's true that they're more readily accepted into the imperial core than their victims, they're still not guaranteed the level of comfort and security they have, they're not assured employment or stable housing, and if their assets are all tied up in land or share ownership of companies in the settler state they could be quite destitute. They don't have it as bad as other refugees or immigrants, obviously, but that sort of uprooting and chaos is still something scary and threatening. So I left it as-is, since that bit is also more a stream-of-consciousness expression of settler fears than an exhaustive description of what relocating them back into the imperial core would entail.
- when someone is benefitting from hurting someone else they'll start trying to rationalize it: it's their "right" to take this for themselves
- You did a really good job articulating this, fantastic comment.
- I half-wrote and deleted like 3 things I felt were incomplete, but they all pretty much boil down to this
- "Might makes right"
in other forms of colonialism you can profit from the natives being robbed. Settler colonials however require the natives to die so the claim to their land can be fully realised.
actually they need the natives to have never existed in the first place but the first step to that is to kill them
this was one of the sources of conflict between Britain and America in the run up to the American revolution
- this was one of the sources of conflict between Britain and America in the run up to the American revolution
  This is an extremely important point, and one that is usually swept under the rug in the USian telling of history
  
  to be clear it's not that the British morally objected it's just that the natives were more profitable for Britain than the settlers and Britain did not want the settlers who were a bad investment comparatively to destroy the natives who were profitably exploited in the fur trade
  Also the natives were a source of local armies that allowed Britain to relatively cheaply fend of Indian and Spanish claims in America if they were kept on side and very expensive to fight if they weren't. It's was no small expense to train an army in native suppression in London, equip them and then ship them thousands of miles.
  source
  For the settlers however the natives were simply in the way
  this led to a conflict of interest in the two colonial groups
  
  Bacon's Rebellion is such highlight of how deep this runs. Literally all lower classes, including slaves, united against the Virginia planter class, just because the Governor wouldn't genocide the Natives.
  The private ownership of land is always the material cause. The lower classes of settler colonials always wants to flee their own society because of consolidated land ownership. Same as when early Virginian colonists wanted to run their own tabacco farm instead of share crop. Same as now with Israelis moving to cheaper rents in the West Bank.
They fear the violence that they inflict will be turned on them. Their one actual ideological position is that the violence must never stop and always be aimed at the colonial subject
They can't give an inch. The settler state is a Jenga Tower of lies and violence that could be toppled if too many pieces are removed. So it must be constantly reinforced with more and more lies, more and more violence.
- A large part of the reason Rabin was assassinated back in the 90s is because he was actually ordering the IDF to remove settlers from newly occupied land. The more enthusiastic wing of the Zionists, including Ben Gvir (who vandalized Rabin's car shortly before Rabin was assassinated) and Bibi denounced him as a traitor among other, harsher words. That was probably the last real chance at anything resembling peace.
- I like that analogy
It's because settler-colonies are inherently genocidal. The settler-indigenous dialectic functions different from the bourgeoisie-proletariat dialectic or the aristocrat-peasant dialectic. Those other dialectics can be generalized as a master-slave dialectic where the master oppresses and abuses the slave but is still reliant on and can't truly get rid of the slave. The settler, unlike the master, doesn't need the indigenous. In fact, the settler needs the indigenous gone asap in order to steal their land and other natural resources. Therefore, the settler-indigenous dialectic can be resolved not only with the overthrow of the settler-colony by the indigenous like all oppressed groups overthrowing their oppressors, but it can also be resolved with the extermination of the indigenous at the hands of the settler. This inherent genocidal goal of settler-colonial society leads to settlers upholding genocidal ideology and in general, acting like deranged monsters.
Fundamentally - There are people everywhere, and there have been for tens of thousands of years. We keep pushing back the date when people arrived in NA (per European science, Indigenous people have their own accounts). There are only a handful of landmasses in the world that haven't been settled for at least 1k years or more.
So, if you're going to colonize and settle somewhere there are already people there, and they're in the way, and you're going to have to do incredibly cruel and violent things to take their stuff and exterminate them.
Racism, yes. But also most settler colonist states have a history of trauma that drives the actions of the settlers.
The US and the Puritans, New Spain and a bunch of PTSD'd child soldiers fresh from the reconquista, SA and the Dutch refugees, Convict Australia...etc.
The people colonial powers use as settlers are traumatised into leaving by the power, and that trauma weaponised against the existing population. And that traumatic superstructure sticks around for centuries as a mindset of "only oppession is possible."
- In Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, he talks about how the conquistadors were at the lower levels of some kind of debt peonage pyramid scheme where the low-level soldiers owed a certain amount of gold to Cortés for organizing and outfitting the expedition, who owed a bunch of money to various creditors including the King of Spain, who owed a bunch of money to various bankers in Venice etc. So they were financially encouraged to be as brutal and extractive as possible when they gained power over the Native peoples. Graeber describes it as one of the first building blocks of capitalism, where those in power had no responsibility other than to extract as much wealth as possible from the people they had power over.
- I've heard theory that the reason the US never had a socialist revolution like Europe is that whenever pressure built up too high in the US the government would send waves of settlers out to "seek their forture", luring them with the promise of free land to abandon the cities. In Europe where that wasn't an option labor tensions would built until they hit a tipping point.
  
  Ah yes, the Matt Christman theory on the dialectic of American free real estate
  
  J. Sakai’s book “Settlers” talks about that most excellently.
  Another relief valve for those tensions would be importing vast scores of European Immigrants to take up just enough of the backbone labor position to crush any kind of worker revolt, while you further genocide and deport the current backbone of your labor force; Mexicano, Chinese, Japanese, Native, Afrikan, etc.
  I’m still reading the book, but where I’m at now discusses how the main purpose of the New Deal was to resolve the contradiction that is inevitable when you do that. The solution was to Americanize the migrant European labor force. Hence the creation of the Middle Class if I’m understanding it right.
  The middle class being, a strata of Labor paid just enough out of the spoils of imperial conquest to keep the bulk of Labor from wanting to rock the boat too much. Strikes and other various labor disputes were deemed okay if they were directed internally at getting a bigger share of the loot, and not at overthrowing US imperialism or something similar.
  So while during The New Deal the Army wasn’t used as it was historically to break up strikes on behalf of the capitalists, the army was used quite extensively to shut down revolutionary revolt in Puerto Rico.
- I think there are lots of psychological things at play. Think about survivor bias and how shitty that is. It's those kinds of things that manifest themselves from individual phenomena into the societal realm as well that contribute to all of it.
- that's not it as evidenced by the differences between Israel and the Taliban
  also I once lived with an athiest Israeli and he was genuinely terrifying in the casual way he would talk about violence
  
  also I once lived with an athiest Israeli and he was genuinely terrifying in the casual way he would talk about violence
  
  also I once lived with an athiest Israeli and he was genuinely terrifying in the casual way he would talk about violence
  Examples?
- I think religious fundamentalism is like a lubricant for these kinds of projects
- No, the OG Zionists like Herzel were atheist. They cynically justified their theft of land through the proclamations of a God they didn't even believe in. That's the depths of depravity of Zionism.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say it’s the settler-colonialism
It boils down to racism. When you internalize the stupid racist theories, it is even justifiable and beneficial (in their twisted worldview) to slaughter/enslave them.
- the racist theories come from the material need to kill and rob to maintain their way of life they are the ad hoc justification of killings that had to happen to maintain the comfort and wealth of the colony. It's the other way around the settler colonialism creates the racism
TL;DR: They wouldn’t be settler states if they weren’t.
I almost feel like settler colonialism is just an extension of a deeper evil, which of course begs the question of where that evil comes from, but I think settler colonialism is just "we want to take your stuff and live here, and will justify that violence to ourselves in whatever way we can". And then those justifications have to get more and more dehumanizing the more land you take and the more indigenous people you slaughter, at which point the base steers the superstructure, and then the d i a l e c t i c shifts, and the superstructure starts steering the base. And then there's the whole issue of the massive discrepancy in military firepower, then with muskets but now with bombers, which means you never have to really be confronted with a proportional response and even start considering peace, you can just keep gunning.
I want to build a house here
that means these people who live here have to be removed
guess I have to use force
but that's okay because I will make better use of the land than them
plus they are probably subhuman anyway
no wait they're actually definitely subhuman
otherwise they wouldn't have attacked us peaceful pilgrims
maybe we got a little too angry and perhaps overreacted when torching their village
but in retrospect they would have killed us if we hadn't struck decisively first
I bet the neighboring village will have an emotional reaction upon hearing this
barbaric savages that they are
so it's for the best that we strike swiftly against them too
- The one thing I'll add is that it's often not "I want to build a house here" but "I've been exiled here for (reason) by the colonial power and now I have to build a house here. The power has done this by design."
You said it, its the blatant dehumanization, people are seen as being innately lesser in settler states by settlers so they're 'just part of the environment' like a forest or a crop of grain (hence all the garden of civilization bullshit by colonialist sorts), and this is used to exploit them in a multitude of ways. Add on capital accumulation and yikes.
When your dog barks at you or your cat scratches you, most people would be a little offended. You’re taking care of them, making sure they eat and have a warm bed, and they lash out on you.
This is how settlers see the colonized. You’re not a human, you’re a domesticated animal who needs to be trained. And if you lash out against their generous civilization, they become offended.
Is colonialism a symptom of whiteness or is whiteness a symptom of colonialism? I don’t know which one came first but one of them of them is the symptom and the other is the cause. We need to find and treat the cause.
- Whiteness is a symptom of colonialism. That particular distinction was invented in response to Bacon's Rebellion, which had rebels of all ethnic backgrounds. The (bourgeois/feudal lord) response was to invent the category of blackness, as opposed to whiteness, as a legal category that would be subject to the mistreatment that led to Bacon's Rebellion. Everyone else would now be lumped together despite existing ethnic distinctions between English, Dutch, German, etc and provided with little titles and cutouts so that they could see a path for themselves beyond that of their black previous compatriots. That worked fairly well and reinforced itself over time, becoming the legalistic political basis of chattel slavery.
  To be clear, settlers were already colonists that murdered indigenous people, stole their land, and dehumanized them. But it wasn't based on whiteness in particular, as the category hadn't been invented.
  
  Yeah, Whiteness was invented to support and justify colonialism.
- brb taking a melanin supplement to still the demonic blood in my veins

59 comments