#british colonialists

[elbiotipo]

Argentine Leftists are not immune to Argentine nationalist propaganda... how are islands 300 miles from your coast rightfully yours, just because you want them ? just because you've nurtured a grievance over the fact you didn't get hold of them during your colonialist state formation? how can you miss something that was never yours? why do you think it's more important than the people who live there for nearly 200 years ? ???????????

get over it.

[thefiresofpompeii]

just gotta wait 16 years, hang in there 🤞🤞

[zeebreezin]

Thought about the New Sequence for too long and went insane again lads

[enbycrip]

Been digging into things on Canadian/British, United States/British and South American/Spanish history recently and the notable thing that has come up on both - in all three cases, the European settlers were the ones actively engaging in genocide of the indigenous population. It was not the active policy of the European government.

In all three cases the European government actually passed protective legislation for the rights of indigenous subjects at the request of either indigenous people themselves travelling to Europe to make these representations, or not-entirely-awful Europeans passing on what was happening to them. They weren’t *incredible* protections in any of the three cases, but they at least recognised that indigenous people were *people* with actual basic rights. Like “not being automatically murdered or enslaved”.

But then European settlers went *batshit* at this legislation. The entire idea of “No Genocide” policies provoked enormous settler backlashes in all three cases. It was even a material, if not enormous, factor in why the US declared independence.

And the European governments in question just…rolled over. Made no real attempt to enforce this protective legislation. And it *certainly* was *not* why Britain sent in troops when the US declared independence. The Founding Fathers just viewed even the fact they had been *asked* to not murder indigenous people as an outrage.

None of this is to excuse European colonial states today of our responsibility to pay reparations and lobby for protections for indigenous people (and BIPOC in general) in our ex-colonial states. We’ve benefitted so much, especially on mass resource plundering, that reparations are a responsibility we cannot shirk.

(I just finished a biography of Charles Hapsburg and how he frittered away *massive* silver imports stolen from South America on European wars. That huge resource injection was pretty vital to the beginning of European international capitalism in the 16th-17th centuries. Before that, states just kept coming up against insufficient metals for currency, especially ones with the intermediate value of silver that let a critical mass of lower-level transactions happen.)

What it is, however, is an examination of the different ways states can be responsible for genocide, eugenics, and other crimes.

It does not need to be active policy for a state to be responsible. Even passing protective legislation doesn’t prevent a state’s responsibility if they don’t take measures to enforce that legislation, and, particularly, *if they give in to loud backlash from privileged parties who see it as an infringement of their privilege for people they are oppressing to be given some basic rights.*

I am not a proponent of “history repeats itself”. Context *always* matters, and every different situation has a different context. However, history itself provides an incredibly important and *necessary* context for situations we face now. And these facts are *incredibly* relevant to *many* situations we are currently facing.

[spearheadrampancy]

i think if you have to be reminded that mocking a certain accent (with the "humour" generally being that said accent indicates poorness, lack of education, or something racist) then perhaps you are not as progressive as you claim to be. just a thought,

[riverofrainbows]

I've been watching "Tasting history with Max Miller" and it's a really interesting source of information, and utterly fascinating. And most of the time he has a very thoughtful and kind approach; he takes great effort to pronounce non english words, he brings up racism, colonialism and misogyny and the fact that history is about real people. But then he sometimes has these massive blind spots, where he uses ableist insults in what really isn't funny 'jokes', he sort of glorifies historical figures doing awful things (like the one guy who conquered india and pakistan and apparently lead to the downfall of local cuisine and culture from how he presented it), he is low key obsessed with war and military of the civil war in the us and world war 1, he apparently doesn't see the glaring red flags in "he restored order in this american gold rush town and expelled the low lifes with a heavy hand, a real hard manly man" (paraphrased, I'm not gonna look it up now) and keeps promoting diet culture and fat shaming (which he has apparently internalised a lot of), and for some inscrutable reason portrayed people in new york completely depleting and destroying the ecosystems of oysters in the area within mere years as a funny quirky thing. Like how does he not notice?

[cheesebearger]

supporting the decolonization of palestine is not antisemitic

[mchiti]

You gotta love british tories, the ones who always loved to think of italy as part of PIIGS (portugal, italy, ireland, greece, spain…yes that’s their name for these country). Now they are commenting the recent arrivals of migrants in italy in terms defending europe from the “INVASION OF AFRICANS”. Oh my oh my!!! Suddenly they love europe. Same ones who wanted brexit? Same ones who call south europe a financial burden? Same ones who said italians and greeks can only be waiters in england?

I wish southern europeans had more pride and understood there is ALWAYS someone southern than someone else. that they are also considered south of the world, just luckier to actually be on the mainland of western capitalism.

[unilateralis]

go go..!

[alexanderpearce]

„we were meant to meet / your exile is reached / you’re home“ okay well the executed and the executioner as a fated pair. you were exiled to a foreign land and you committed horrific bloody acts that you might never have done back where you came from and you are to be executed for them and now your exile is reached. you are leaving this foreign land. you're home. you're home.

[roaminronan]

With the Queen dead I'm seeing 2 *very* different reactions

People from England/America: This is so sad. The passing of a great monarch. Rest in peace to a wonderful woman

People from countries England has colonized and continues to occupy: THE BITCH IS DEAD!!

[a-god-in-ruins-rises]

i can’t even celebrate the death of the queen because so many of the people doing that are cringe and i don’t want to be associated

[modpix-blog]

It's so funny Duolingo decided to shit the bed now of all times because I was considering signing up so I could learn Welsh

[qqueenofhades]

Try to have some respect the queen just DIED. It's not like she was evil or anything

And why should I do that for the head of a family that oversaw the British Empire's legendarily brutal concentration camps in colonialist Kenya during the 1952-1960 Mau Mau rebellion, has personally and repeatedly shielded credibly accused rapist Prince Andrew and tried to get the scandal to go away, personally paid Andrew's financial settlement while the family treated Meghan Markle terribly and gave her none of the same protection, exerted a huge amount of control over UK public finances without any transparency or disclosure (while also receiving huge amounts of that money), got to personally edit laws according to her likes and dislikes, enjoyed sweeping legal immunities that are described as a "threat to UK democracy," is the most visible figurehead of British colonialism even as her descendants put on a horribly tone-deaf Caribbean tour (twice in one year!) that was basically about unreconstructed imperial imagery of the kind that is poisoning Britain, while the entire country buys into the fantasy that she is an impartial, uninvolved, kindly and benevolent grandmotherly figure....?

Nah.

[jewishvitya]

I remembered this essay from years ago when I was unlearning what I knew of Israel and zionism and I couldn't find it again, and now I see it in a Shaun video, with the source.

Ze'ev Jabotinsky, "The Iron Wall." I downloaded it from the Jabotinsky Institute.

These are the titles he gave this essay:

I said that Zionist leaders explicitly talked about Zionism as a colonialist movement. This is an example of what I was talking about.

Some quotes:

There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.

He's saying openly: no land was colonized with the consent of its indigenous population. So we have to do it without that consent.

Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised.

That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of "Palestine" into the "Land of Israel."

He said that any zionist who depends on the Arab population accepting a Jewish state on their lands, might as well withdraw from zionism because that's impossible.

Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.

And then he says that this Iron Wall is the British Mandate and the Balfour Declaration - they're the power that stops Palestinians from resisting us.

He says that despite this, zionism is moral and just, so justice must be done, zionism must move forward. He just wants to be honest about what it takes. He wants to discourage talks of an agreement to avoid signaling to the British that they must try to reach one between us and Palestinians. Just stop them from fighting us, we'll colonize the place.

Zionism was openly colonialist until this language was no longer politically useful.

Editing because I was kinda shocked by the response this got, in several moments. When the slavery of US founders was brought up to dismiss this whole thing. When First Nations reservations were brought up on the same list as the United States as equivalent to Israel, because I said I oppose the existence of a country that prioritizes one ethnic group at the expense of others, and I support democracy that protects everyone equally.

But another thing that's still nagging at me is the idea that this whole essay can be dismissed based on semantic arguments, like sure this uses the word colonialism, but is it actually the colonialism that we talk about and oppose? And what if this word is only used to appeal to the British for support?

This isn't the the first time that prominent zionist thinkers talk about zionism as a colonialist movement. I saw it in old publications, things like magazines, I'd be posting them too if I found them again. I did my own deconstructing years ago, I don't remember where I found all my sources.

I do remember that they talked about the two concepts together - the idea that we're here to colonize, and that we're here to come home. So nowadays there's the arguement that people can't colonize their own homeland, but to them there was no contradiction. I saw it again looking at Herzl's diary last night.

I say I define colonialism through actions and tactics, through the harm that's done to the victims of colonization. Because if we knowingly repeated the actions of colonizers and used the help of an imperial force to conquer a land, having a historic connection to it shouldn't absolve us.

Jabotinsky didn't write to the British in this essay. He wrote to other zionists who wanted to aim for something more collaborative with Palestinian Arabs. And it's true that word choice can mean different things in the context of the time, but there's a reason I chose those quotes. What is he actually saying in this essay?

Consider colonization throughout history - the native population never agreed, so we must do the as colonizers did in the past.

Palestinians will never agree to a Jewish state - so we must do it by force. We should use an imperial force as an "iron wall" to prevent them from resisting. Stop talking about an agreement because then the British will try to reach one instead of holding them back and letting us do our thing.

He's comparing the zionist movement to other efforts of colonization, to talk about emulating them.

This isn't a game of semantics. I'm not just bringing this up just because he used the words.

What he's describing - conquest by force, preventing a Palestinian state, forcibly creating a Jewish majority - is what happened. And it's still what's happening.

This is the branch of zionism that went into practice and founded Israel.

[turnip-o-lantern]

Ok now that i have had my fun beating a dead corpse (boy i wish i could do that rn) let me just say: fuck the british monarchy and everything they stand for, i hope charles dies tomorrow and the royals are forced to work 9-5 minimum pay without any of their filthy money backing them

Lets see if THEY survive this winter