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
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.
totally off topic for the threat, but i’m pro animal liberation and on board with a lot of vegan arguments. i don’t really see why i should be held to a different moral standard wrt meat eating than a cat or wolf tho. there are cases where cats eating meat is criminal, but not always. in some cases you need the hunt to balance the birth rates of prey animals. i also don’t think nature is entirely cruel when it comes to predator-prey relationships. i would much rather be put out of my misery than live in a decaying shell.
Male lions kill cubs so they can impregnate their mothers, but this is - to put it lightly - frowned upon in human society. If you put humans on the same moral standard as other animals, you quickly end up in absurd and horrifying places.
that’s not meat eating…
He was answering your question, which was “why should I be treated differently than non-human animals with regards to morality”.
He gave a concrete example, but I’ll speak to the general principle. Non-human animals aren’t civilized moral agents, they lack the capacity to rationally consider the harm they’re causing, and by extension they have no moral obligations. “Ought implies can”. Without the ability to act morally, they can’t be obligated to be moral.
Humans are different. We have the capacity to act rationally and morally. Since we have the ability to consider the harm we’re causing and stopping, we are obligated to. That’s why you’re different than non-human animals.
this argument does however does undermine the previous argument that humans are just another animal and therefore should treat other animals as our equals
Very young children and severely mentally disabled people don’t have the same moral capacity as a typical adult but that doesn’t make it okay to treat them as objects.
I think it’s probably more difficult than you realize to make a moral case for intervening to keep predator/prey populations in balance
you should look into the relationship between deer and wolves in the inter-mountain west in north america. in particular the case studies of the removal and later re-introduction of wolves to yellowstone. there’s some interesting work being done tracking degenerative conditions among deer populations that may be tied to the removal of predator animals from the region. hunting is popular in the region, so its not like humans are doing the job properly either.
its interesting to think about and it upsets dogmatic vegans so win-win. this view leads me towards eating mostly vegetarian, so its not like i’m diametrically opposed to veganism or super into meat eating. it just doesn’t seem coherent to me to draw this special distinction between humans and animals. a solid philosophical system in my opinion should be able to address all inter-species relationships in some way, otherwise it cannot grapple with concepts like homeostasis effectively.
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
We saw a bunch of ukranian refugees show up to the eu a year ago and they received social assistance far greater than any the Syrian refugee received. Why is that?
Poorer segments of Ukrainian refugees are still treated like shit and utilised as cheap desperate labour.
well we were the ones that destroyed Syria to begin with.
Ukraine is not the first group we’ve done this to we also used to pretend to care about oppressed arabs. Give the Ukrainian refugee situation time and western Europeans will hate them
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.
You did a really good job articulating this, fantastic comment.