Synergy posted:

i'm getting close to the end now, but i had a question about this paragraph:

Settlers Chapter 12

The maquilas do not constitute any economic development for Mexico. They are just labor-intensive intrusions of U.S. manufacturing. It isn't just the profits that go to the U.S. oppressor nation. The U.S. receives both the super-profits and the consumer products themselves, while retaining all the white-collar managerial, professional, clerical, technical and distributive jobs made possible by the production. Even in this form - of giving Mexican women employment at wages five times the usual rate in the rural areas - the imperialist looting has a destructive effect on the social fabric. The border maquilas gather women from all over the unoccupied zone, while helping to force jobless men north across the artificial border.

my economic knowledge is poor but i thought in the most exploited countries the native merchants/companies were bought/driven out by foreign multinationals so the local population had no choice but to accept the lower wages and working conditions. this passage seems to suggest the opposite unless i'm misunderstanding something here or it's an isolated case

I think (but could be wrong--I read that passage a while ago and also have a less developed economic knowledge) in this case and many others where statistics show that the wages working in multinational factories are higher than what people in developing nations would normally get, they are comparing urban manufacturing with rural farming. The expansion of manufacturing in developing countries comes at the expense of small scale farming that would normally make up the economy. So rather than subsisting off local agriculture, the rural population goes off to be wage slaves in dangerous and repressive factories, and then spends the money on imported foods and goods from other multinationals--but the "wage" is technically higher, though the day-to-day lives of the people are arguably worse.

Synergy posted:

on a positive note, i asked a relative of mine if they would be interested in reading a book about oppression in america and they said "yeah, i guess" so i bought a copy of settlers. they know some of my political views and have read some brief articles i've sent them about imperialism but i'm probably going to include a page with a few quick definitions to some words like "bourgeoisie" or "proletariat". so i was wondering if any of you have suggestions for a quick starter for someone that probably gets all their news from tv or magazines?

What is Marxism all About? is published by WWP and is basically a solid 1-3 page explanation of a bunch of different socialist terms. ive found it pretty helpful to quickly explain things for a while.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9297279-what-is-marxism-all-about

e: it was mentioned as the FIST guide above.

Edited by JohnBeige (Dec. 24, 2017 10:50:24)

tears posted:

chapter 6 is a complete mess, sakai gets references mixed up all over the place, do not worry i will fix this for you

that was purposely to throw off the Feds'. The Art of War, it's in there somewhere.

Synergy posted:

i noticed the new version has the article "Cash & Genocide: The True Story of Japanese-American Reparations"

Spoiler!

Cash & Genocide: The True Story of Japanese-
American Reparations

This article was hastily written for the New Afrikan revolutionary movement in the
late 1980s, at a time when there were confused discussions going on about the
surprising Japanese-American reparations legislation then in Congress. The overall
story can still stand as correct, but there are small factual inaccuracies of the
moment. The individual dollar amounts for the u.s. reparations for Aleut peoples were
changed after this article was written (upped to $16,000). We received reparations in
one lump sum payment, not dragged out over ten years as first proposed in Congress
(although the payouts were only slowly dispersed well into the Clinton administration
years). In the 25 years since then, the freer Aleut communities have grown
economically, both from their commercial fishing and from the islands’ role as a
regional fishing industry supply base.

What wasn’t clear enough to us when this article was put together was how the u.s.
government intended to use these reparations as a cover for quietly maintaining its
“legal” right under u.s. law to carry out ethnic targeting, ethnic removal, and ethnic
cleansing anytime in the future. We decided to leave the original article unchanged,
though, as evidence of the earlier movement discussion. This article was originally
circulated as a discussion paper in the Winter of 1988, and later published in the New
Afrikan revolutionary nationalist journal, Crossroad, in April 1989.

____________________________________________

How did Japanese-Americans get over $3 billion in reparations from the USA? What’s
behind this surprising act “to right a grave wrong,” as none other than Ronald Reagan
called it last August?

Japanese-American reparations is as much about New Afrika and the indigenous
nations — particularly the Pribilof Aleuts, as shown extensively below — as it is about
Japanese. Even more so. When right-wing president Reagan signed the reparations act into
law on August 10, 1988, many New Afrikans saw it as a precedent that morally must be
extended to them. But what the U.S. Empire is doing now is more about preparations than
reparations, i.e., preparing their Empire to do New Afrikan genocide, covering up and
legitimizing the genocide they’ve already done to the Native Nations.

“‘The Japanese people were just awarded $20,000 each for America’s mistreatment of
them, for putting them in camps during world War II,’ Queen Mother Audley Moore
reminded the gathering at her 90th birthday celebration in Harlem last summer. She
raised the obvious question: ‘When will our elected officials, our people in Congress,
begin to demand reparations for the almost irreparable damage that slavery did to our
people? When will We get paid for the 18 hours a day, 7 days a week labor that We
were forced to do for free during slavery?’”

Some people are naturally expressing resentment at Japanese-Americans for somehow
getting preferential treatment. Writing for The Final Call, Sept. 16, 1988, J. Wayne Tukes
asks: “Why should African-American tax dollars be used to compensate others?” Tukes
sees a conspiracy, with Japan behind it all: “What kind of pressure is Japan placing on the
American government/business to extract a public and financial apology at this time? Is it
because of the position Japan holds in the current world economy?”

Two African-American reporters for The Sun, Sandra Crockett and Jerry Bemby, put
forward another theory: That reparations is due to Japanese Americans’ superior political
power. In their column “$1.7 Million and a Mule,” the two reporters incorrectly calculate
that the Japanese-Americans will get “restitution that amounts to $6,666.00 for each year
of suffering … At the going government rate of $6,666.00 per year, and calculating it from
the arrival of the first slaves in the early 1600s to the signing of the Emancipation
Proclamation in 1863 … black Americans are due $1.7 million each.”

After telling their readers that “a lot of black Americans were probably appalled” at
the U.S. giving reparations to Japanese-Americans, Crockett and Bemby say that
Japanese-Americans’ apparent power should be an example to black politicians: “Japanese
American lobbyists pushed hard to get the bill passed and did an admirable job. So it’s
time that the members of the Congressional Black Caucus begin pushing…”

These kind of theories sound plausible, but they aren’t even close to true. To sum up
what really happened:

Japanese-American politicians didn’t fight for us to get reparations. Nor was there
any mass movement or struggle or lobbying for it until the U.S. government gave the goahead.

Japanese-American reparations first came into legislation as part of a bill by a
white congressman to compensate for the genocide of the Pribilof Aleut indigenous
people. Japan, which doesn’t consider Japanese-Americans to be Japanese … couldn’t
care less and wasn’t involved at all.

Japanese-American congressmen were against cash reparations at first, until the
U.S. ruling class decided that it needed this and told them to jump in and take the credit
for it. That’s a matter of record. The bill covers up U.S. genocide against the Aleut
peoples, and U.S. plans for new genocide against New Afrika. It’s about nothing but
genocide, coming and going.

Just to clear away some fantasies: This bill doesn’t mean that every Japanese-
American won the lottery or that our community is being compensated for suffering and
loss of human rights. What it means is simply that those survivors of the WWII
concentration camps still alive today (about ten percent of our people) will be repaid for
our property losses back then.

In 1942 we were ordered to sell all our land, businesses, farms, houses, and
household goods before we boarded the trains to the camps. White settler vultures,
knowing we had no bargaining position, bought up everything we had for nickels and
dimes. A new car was worth maybe $50 that day, a home maybe $300 or $500. Many
whites just went down to the courthouse and said that a Japanese had sold them their farm,
and were given title as new owners. All legal to this day.

Our going to concentration camps was a big holiday to nearby white settlers, a closeout
sale. After the War the U.S. government itself assessed our direct property losses at
$400 million in 1940 dollars (many billions in today’s inflated dollars). The Evacuation
Claims Act after the War only compensated us for those losses at 8 percent or 8¢ for every
dollar we lost. So, in effect, this reparations act only repays the property losses of 48 years
ago, and only for those 60,000 individuals still alive on the day Ronald Reagan signed the
bill. And by the terms of the act, repayment will be stretched out over a ten year period or
more, with the dying getting theirs first.

THE FULL STORY

Played down in the news about Japanese-American reparations was the section of the act
giving an estimated 400 Pribilof Aleuts $12,500 each. The reparations act established that
the Pribilof Aleuts deserve less compensation than Japanese-Americans because their
WWII imprisonment was supposedly justified. This is where the real story begins.
Most people never heard of the Pribilof Aleuts before this, and if the U.S. has its
way never will know about them. They are an indigenous people (who do not like being
called “Indians”), living on a desolate chain of islands in the Bering Sea between the
USSR and Alaska. Until the year 1966 they were the last remaining slaves in the USA.

When the expansionist USA purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire right after
the U.S. Civil War, in 1867, the Pribilof Aleuts were just considered part of the property
being sold. For the Pribilof Islands, uninhabited by humans before their “discovery” by the
Russian explorer Gerasim Pribilof in 1786, are home to 1.5 million seals. The great seal
colony, valuable because of their fur, became an imperial business owned by the Russian
Czars.

To get the workers needed to hunt the seals and process their pelts, the Czars forced
hundreds of indigenous families from the larger Aleutian Islands to move to the Pribilofs
to be imperial serfs. Serfs were the bottom class in pre-socialist Russian society. While
they could not be bought and sold as chattel slaves were in the U.S., serfs were still a class
of slaves. The property of wealthy masters to whom they owed life-long obedience and
labor, serfs lived without wages or rights. On the Pribilofs, the Aleut slaves were given
Russian names and converted to the Russian Orthodox faith. The islands became slave
plantations.

To the Pribilof Aleuts, the change of Euro-capitalist owners in 1867 changed nothing
in their own lives. For their seal hunt became a profitable U.S. government monopoly, and
they became slaves of the USA. From 1867 to 1966, everything and everyone on the
Pribilof Islands was owned by the U.S. government. Although the Bering Sea is rich in
fish, the Pribilof Aleuts were forbidden to fish or work for themselves!

Their food and housing was doled out or withheld as punishment by the white slaveowners
from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Their only work was the annual seal
harvest, while they survived the rest of the year by running up their debt at the U.S.
government-owned store. Federal agents tightly controlled travel to and from the islands.
Outsiders who might raise political questions were kept out.

In 1942 this tight little slave colony was interrupted by World War II. Japanese
military forces captured the Aleutian Islands of Attu and Kiska in June 1942. Hundreds of
Aleuts fled to the mainland. U.S. military authorities decided to remove the remaining
slaves, since their communities were needed as military camps and the fur trade was
suspended anyway. Then, too, the U.S. didn’t entirely trust their slaves.

Ordered by soldiers to board military transports with only what they could carry in
their arms, 881 Pribilof Aleuts were relocated to old, unused buildings at abandoned
Alaskan mines and canneries. Survivors remember that they were dumped without
blankets or even food, forced to live in derelict wooden barracks that had only gaping
holes where windows and doors used to be. After two Alaskan winters, one out of every
four Pribilof Aleuts had died from malnutrition and exposure.

Another surprise gift from America awaited them in 1945 when they were returned
to the Pribilofs. Everything was gone. GIs had burglarized their communities, stealing all
the religious icons from the churches and taking “souvenirs” from the homes. Everything
that the GIs didn’t want or couldn’t take — native boats, homes, churches, clothing, and
dishes — had been smashed. Appeals to the U.S. for emergency compensation brought a
response from the U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, who authorized $10,000
compensation — not $10,000 for each person or each family, but for the entire community
— about $12 each. Labor and life with the seal harvest began again on Amerika’s arctic
slave plantation.

The first change came only in the 1960s, as the world anti-colonial revolution was
pressing the U.S. Empire to reform. A political candidate for the Alaskan State legislature
tried to visit the Pribilofs, but was denied permission to speak with the Pribilof Aleut
slaves by their white overseers. It was a local scandal, since America always pats itself on
the back for allegedly abolishing slavery before in 1863.

So in the 1966 Fur Seal Act, a U.S. Senate amendment gave the Pribilof Aleuts the
right to travel freely and speak to whomever they wished for the first time in their colonial
history. The U.S. government was still their only employer, and still owned the islands and
all the physical property on them, however. It wasn’t until 1978 that the Pribilof Aleuts
were finally given the right to vote, to have their own local government, and to own their
own homes. Finally, they have reached the level of New Afrikans and Puerto Ricans.

The 1988 reparations act, in addition to paying Aleut survivors $12,500 each, gives
the Pribilof Aleut communities $5 million as tardy reimbursement for the WWII burglary
by U.S. troops as well as $1.4 million as compensation for destruction of religious
property. The Aleut people get another $15 million to finally settle and make permanent
their involuntary exclusion from Attu Island in the Aleutians. Attu was taken for a U.S.
naval base and is now forbidden to native people as a U.S. government “wildlife
sanctuary.”

This reparations act is serving genocide, both coming and going. The act gives
Aleuts money in return for finalizing U.S. ownership of their islands and natural
resources. It even justifies their WWII removal and internment. It is important to America
right now to make everything look nice, to pay small amounts of cash to supposedly settle
all the old human rights injustices. Because the U.S. is quietly wiping out the Aleut
people. They don’t want Aleut labor anymore and, in fact, the possibility of Aleut claims
to control their islands and the rich seabed around them is seen as a problem for America,
a problem for which America has a “Final Solution.”

U.S. military planners have always seen the Pribilofs and Aleutians as the stepping
stones for invaders to the “soft underbelly” of the South Alaskan coast. Their doctrine
calls for maintaining strategic control of these colonial islands as a military barrier against
the Russians. That is why they’ve never permitted the Aleuts to return to Attu Island.
Their worst-case nightmare would be for native people to demand sovereignty and kick
the U.S. military out.

Pribilof Aleut poverty (there is 80 percent unemployment) is “Made in the USA.”
With one of the world’s richest fishing areas, with large seal herds for food, oil, and fur,
the Pribilofs can easily support an Aleut population of only 750. But being U.S. citizens,
being part of the U.S., means that all those resources are owned by the U.S. Empire. The
reparations act, in appearing to right old injustices, in setting the seal on U.S. ownership of
the fur seal trade and fishing rights, is legalizing the decline of Aleut population.

To help break up Pribilof Aleut communities, the U.S. government has even
suggested ending the fur seal hunt, supposedly out of respect for animal rights. The seal
hunt isn’t so profitable anymore, anyway. Once the Aleuts gained certain rights in the
1960s and 1970s, and started demanding things like electricity, medical care, and wages,
the profits went away. It wasn’t seals that were the origin of profits, it turns out, but
owning whole villages of slave women, children, and men.

Aleuts are still forbidden by U.S. law from hunting seals for themselves, since the
government says that its treaty with Japan and Canada forces it to own the fur seal trade
(Canada and Japan are 15% each minority partners). To the Aleuts this is the final irony. In
1911 there were 300,000 seals on the Pribilofs, but now there are 1.5 million (25,000 are
killed each year). While Aleuts go hungry and their numbers shrink. One Aleut leader
said: “If we didn’t have the fur harvest, we on the Pribilofs wouldn’t have anything. Once
there were 15,000 Aleuts. Now there are 3,000 to 1.5 million seals. It’s the Aleut people
who are the endangered species.”

THE NEW AFRIKAN EQUATION

It isn’t that Japanese-Americans don’t justly deserve reparations. We do, and this $20,000
is tiny in terms of what we suffered, but that has nothing to do with why the U.S. ruling
class is doing this. In 1979 the first congressional bill was introduced to give cash
reparations to U.S. civilian internment survivors. Its sponsor, Rep. Mike Lowry (DWash.),
proposed giving each Aleut and Japanese-American survivor $15,000 plus $15 for
each day imprisoned. His bill was instantly unpopular with the white nation. There was
the usual moaning from the brain-dead white majority (Lowry got calls demanding “Why
are we paying the people who attacked us at Pearl Harbor?”), from candidate Ron Reagan
and the GOP.

Japanese-American congressmen, like Norman Mineta (D-Calif.), who are put into
congress to represent white interests, were the loudest in their opposition to the Lowry
bill. We watched the strange sight of the biggest Japanese-American politicians, such as
U.S. senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), attacking the idea of Japanese-American
reparations while New Afrikan congressmen like Ron Dellums (D-Calif.) were fighting
for it.

U.S. senator Inouye, who was never imprisoned himself, argued that giving the rest
of us money would dishonor the memory of our noble suffering: “You can’t put a price tag
on it. Putting a price tag on it would cheapen the whole thing.”

Intelligent settler opposition to reparations wasn’t really concerned about Japanese-
Americans one way or the other, but was afraid that a bad example was being set for New
Afrikans! Samuel Rabinove, the director of anti-discrimination programs for the American
Jewish Committee, warned against Japanese-American reparations in this way: “If
$25,000 restitution were to be paid for each of the 120,000 Japanese-Americans
incarcerated, what would be a fair and reasonable sum for each of the 25 million black
Americans who are descended from slaves and who have suffered the most grievous
injustice since Emancipation? What would be a fair and reasonable sum for each of the
one million American Indians living today for the virtual genocide perpetrated on their
peoples? Any attempts to quantify appropriate reparations for blacks and Indians simply
boggle the mind and quickly become political impossibilities. A special reparations
payment for one group but not for the others is difficult to rationalize.”

Within that settler debate on Japanese-American reparations loomed the much larger
issue of America’s unresolved war with its New Afrikan colony. It was for this reason that
the U.S. ruling class decided on not merely Japanese-American reparations, but for a final
round of public settlements of “all other” human rights and territorial claims against the
Empire. If need be, the ruling class was going to shove reparations and cash settlements of
treaty claims down the throats of its racist white citizenry.

This policy was advanced, step by step, even during the reactionary Reagan years,
precisely because “human rights” is a ruling class strategy! When reparations finally
came up for a vote in 1988, the way had been arranged behind the scenes. Rep. Lowry had
withdrawn his name, so that the bill could be reintroduced as the work of the Japanese-
American congressmen who had at first opposed it. The Republican Party joined the
Democrats on this. While a fogged-in Ronald Reagan kept wondering why people wanted
reparations, and threatened to veto the bill, his White House Chief of Staff, Howard Baker,
and vice-president Bush supported reparations. It sailed through the Senate by 69 votes for
to 27 against, and Reagan obediently signed it into law.

America needs to look like it has clean hands on colonialism, has to have final
settlements on territorial claims. Because human rights is a world issue now. People
around the world already know that the USA is a center of injustice and violence-forprofit.
Look at how the U.S. government has been unable to kill the rumors that Americans
are adopting Latin American infants to use as organ donors for their white children. This
charge was first made by the wife of the president of Honduras, a pro-U.S. death squad
pretending to be a nation. Since then it has appeared, despite U.S. protests, in hundreds of
newspapers in Asia, Afrika, and all over the world.

Last October, the European Parliament passed a French motion to condemn the U.S.
for this inhuman practice. That’s a special embarrassment for America, since among the
12 nations of the European Parliament are America’s closest NATO allies. Even after the
U.S. State Department got the UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar to confirm
their denial, that this rumor was without any factual basis, the story still spreads and
spreads. Washington cannot stop it, because the people of the world believe that this is
exactly what “J.R. Ewing” would do.

The U.S. ruling class needs human rights settlements to help America keep its stolen
territory. The world balance of power is shifting. Large empires like the USA and USSR
are declining faster and faster, and small oppressed nations within them are kicking to be
independent. If that’s obviously true for Estonia and Armenia and Tibet and Northern
Ireland, why isn’t it going to be true for Hawaii and Aztlán and New Afrika, too?
Now the U.S. ruling class wants its government to spread some cash around. They
want to get people’s voluntary-looking consent to U.S. government ownership of Third
World land and natural resources. This policy led to the historic 1971 Alaska Native
Claims Settlement Act. Without voluntary agreement by the 80,000 Inuit, Aleut, and other
natives of Alaska, who are the true owners, the U.S. couldn’t safely invest billions to
develop the huge Alaskan oil fields.

Just imagine what a small Inuit (whites call them “Eskimos” but that isn’t their
name) liberation army, with sticks of dynamite, could do to the lonely crude oil pipelines
snaking their unguarded way across the arctic tundra. In return for recognizing U.S.
sovereignty over their lands and resources, the 80,000 native people got $1 billion, got to
set up 13 regional economic development corporations, and got back 44 million acres of
arctic territory for themselves (until white people discover something else valuable there).

“Let’s Make A Deal!” is the hottest neocolonial operation going in the U.S. Every
year there are more cash settlements. Last August, the 1,400 member Puyallup “tribe”
whose 1873 reservation included what later became the city of Tacoma, Washington,
accepted $162 million and 900 acres of forest and waterfront land to settle their claim to
the city. Ironically, when the U.S. army first rounded up the Japanese-Americans in
Seattle in 1942, it named its temporary internment camp after the Native peoples
—“Puyallup Assembly Center.”

There are cases now where the U.S. government is forcing cash on reluctant Native
Nations (“Indians”). In California, the U.S. government is urging Yurok peoples to accept
$15,000 each in return for renouncing all rights to their reservation. In the Black Hills of
South Dakota, a sacred Sioux religious and cultural area that U.S. corporations want to rip
up for uranium and other minerals, the U.S. congress has voted the Lakota Nation $1.5
billion as a final settlement. But the struggle goes on, because the Lakota have officially
refused the money — they want their land and sovereignty, instead. Did you ever think
you’d see the day when white people were trying to force an indigenous nation to take
$1.5 billion?

This is why the U.S. ruling class didn’t blink an eyelash at the $3–4 billion that
Japanese-American reparations will eventually cost. (To save face for Republicans, the
Act appropriates only $1.25 billion. That sum is put in a trust and invested, with the
interest paid out each year for ten years or more, limited to $500 million in any one year.
Total payout will be well over $3 billion.) Billy Joe Blob, white neanderthal, scratches his
head and can’t believe that “colored people” are getting all this money. But the U.S. ruling
class knows what it’s doing.

WHAT ABOUT NEW AFRIKA?

The struggle for New Afrikan reparations is coming. In fact, last November 25, people
watching the Morton Downey, Jr. television talk show saw a free-for-all on the topic of
New Afrikan reparations, with guests including reparations organizers and New Afrikan
independent presidential candidate Lenora Fulani. The ruling class is stalling for now,
saying that Civil Rights has settled all New Afrikan human rights claims. Japanese-
Americans get $3 billion-plus, the Puyallup get $162 million, and New Afrikans get Jesse
— a low-calorie substitute.

Don’t forget: reparations are part of the preparations. All these settlements
recognizing U.S. sovereignty, all these cash deals showing good-hearted Uncle Sam trying
to right old human rights abuses, are setting a scene. They are encircling New Afrika,
trying to isolate New Afrika internationally. Why, even former presidents Ford and Carter
have said that the U.S. might have to offer Puerto Ricans a showdown “statehood or
independence” plebiscite. America ain’t offering New Afrika any choices or plebiscites,
though, because the Empire has a different solution on the way.

Until 1988, committing genocide wasn’t a felony, not even a misdemeanor, in the
U.S. It’s no coincidence that after stalling for 40 years, the U.S. Senate finally completed
ratifying the international genocide treaty at the same session that approved Pribilof Aleut
and Japanese-American reparations. For the first time genocide is a Federal crime. We
know why the white nation never wanted genocide to be illegal. They put Nazis and
Japanese warlords on trial for doing genocide, but were very careful never to make it a
crime inside the U.S. — until now, when they feel safely shielded by their human rights
and reparations offensive.

On December 9, 1948, the UN General Assembly had passed the pact outlawing
genocide, and 97 nations had ratified the treaty. Not the U.S. however, where the genocide
treaty was frozen in the U.S. Senate for 40 years. Why? New Afrika, of course!! After the
treaty was finally enacted into U.S. law last summer, the New York Times admitted:
“Senate racists fought it out of fear that Blacks might use it.” Behind the story of
Japanese-American reparations and settlements of human rights claims, is the unresolved
war between America and New Afrika: Independence or Genocide.

i'm having trouble understanding the below passages:

In the Black Hills of South Dakota, a sacred Sioux religious and cultural area that U.S. corporations want to rip up for uranium and other minerals, the U.S. congress has voted the Lakota Nation $1.5 billion as a final settlement. But the struggle goes on, because the Lakota have officially refused the money — they want their land and sovereignty, instead. Did you ever think you’d see the day when white people were trying to force an indigenous nation to take $1.5 billion?

This is why the U.S. ruling class didn’t blink an eyelash at the $3–4 billion that Japanese-American reparations will eventually cost.

what does the U.S. ruling class have to gain from giving Japanese-Americans reparations? the Lakota Nation example makes sense since the empire is trying to take the land and resources but the Japanese-Americans don't have that so what's the drive?

Until 1988, committing genocide wasn’t a felony, not even a misdemeanor, in the U.S. It’s no coincidence that after stalling for 40 years, the U.S. Senate finally completed ratifying the international genocide treaty at the same session that approved Pribilof Aleut and Japanese-American reparations.

he mentions this as a reason i guess but it seems like kind of a stretch that the U.S. Senate would care that much about public perceptions of previous genocides. i feel like there has to be a deeper reason for elite settlers to care

But what the U.S. Empire is doing now is more about preparations than reparations, i.e., preparing their Empire to do New Afrikan genocide

is he talking about the massively increased prison population here or something else? what more damage could be done?

i don't got answers i just read this. i gotta say i been a marxist for 20 years and i still learn fucked up shit like this on the regular. damn

A team comprised of geological and environmental science researchers from Stanford University has been studying the impact that early European exploration had on the New World and have found evidence that they say suggests the European cold period from 1500 to 1750, commonly known as the Little Ice Age, was due to the rapid decline in native human populations shortly after early explorers arrived... The researchers say that the population decrease, which came about due to the introduction of previously unknown diseases, led to the rapid reforestation of the Americas. This led to a sudden increase in the amount of carbon dioxide being pulled from the air, which meant the atmosphere wasn’t able to hold as much heat, which led to colder air covering Europe.
The team, led by visiting scholar Richard Nevle, came to this conclusion after analyzing charcoal remnants in soil and lake sediments left behind by early American inhabitants as they burned forests to make room for farmland. They found that starting approximately 500 years ago, the charcoal accumulations came to a virtual standstill, coinciding with the death of native peoples.
Nevle et al then got out their calculators and crunched the numbers. They estimate that for a population of some 40 to 80 million indigenous people, the total amount of deforested land would likely have amounted to something the size of California. And since most estimates suggest that close to 90 percent of the native peoples died or were killed after the Europeans arrived, that meant most of that land returned to forest. That many trees, they say, all of a sudden appearing, almost as if out of nowhere, could have resulted in a loss of some 2 to 17 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air. To further bolster their argument, they say that core samples taken from the ice in Antarctica have air bubbles in them that show a reduction of carbon dioxide by 6 to 10 parts per million between 1525 and the early 1600s.

death to amerika

slipdisco posted:

on an optimistic note, here's the ecological case for repeating settler history but this time as white genocide,


A team comprised of geological and environmental science researchers from Stanford University has been studying the impact that early European exploration had on the New World and have found evidence that they say suggests the European cold period from 1500 to 1750, commonly known as the Little Ice Age, was due to the rapid decline in native human populations shortly after early explorers arrived... The researchers say that the population decrease, which came about due to the introduction of previously unknown diseases, led to the rapid reforestation of the Americas. This led to a sudden increase in the amount of carbon dioxide being pulled from the air, which meant the atmosphere wasn’t able to hold as much heat, which led to colder air covering Europe.
The team, led by visiting scholar Richard Nevle, came to this conclusion after analyzing charcoal remnants in soil and lake sediments left behind by early American inhabitants as they burned forests to make room for farmland. They found that starting approximately 500 years ago, the charcoal accumulations came to a virtual standstill, coinciding with the death of native peoples.
Nevle et al then got out their calculators and crunched the numbers. They estimate that for a population of some 40 to 80 million indigenous people, the total amount of deforested land would likely have amounted to something the size of California. And since most estimates suggest that close to 90 percent of the native peoples died or were killed after the Europeans arrived, that meant most of that land returned to forest. That many trees, they say, all of a sudden appearing, almost as if out of nowhere, could have resulted in a loss of some 2 to 17 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air. To further bolster their argument, they say that core samples taken from the ice in Antarctica have air bubbles in them that show a reduction of carbon dioxide by 6 to 10 parts per million between 1525 and the early 1600s.


death to amerika

that's a very cool idea although i believe the actual amount of land clearance versus forest management by native americans is still something that's fairly hotly debated.