Settler Colonial Contagion: A Long Simmering Plague
Photograph Source: Israel Defense Forces – CC BY-SA 2.0
The fact that we are still having to contend with the immediacy and toxicity of settler colonialism in this, the year 2024 is nothing short of astounding. It’s probably amazing that we are still even here with philosophy such as this strangling our world. Almost every strain of entitlement and the brutal negating of the rights of others comes down from this short-sighted and ultimately extinction-level mindset.
Ownership entitlement barrels into neighboring bodies and lands. The literal tanks that crush bodies move forward. It is as if the world couldn’t understand the figurative so the gods decided on a visual you couldn’t deny. Tanks running over bodies. Yet, the people still say (in the manner of abusers everywhere)……well, it’s a shame they made those soldiers do that. Beware, however, of the risks involved with such behaviors– you might get PTSD and not want to eat meat if you engage in running over other humans with your tank. I usually leave bits like that unexplained as I give the reader credit for knowing of current events, but this I feel I have to elaborate on….the ever-disgusting CNN did a story looking into Israeli soldier PTSD after “seeing” bodies run over by tanks. The passive voice use was incredible and it seemed to be taken as gospel that these bodies forced the soldiers to do these acts. It was almost as if a piece was created to make you feel sorry for the executioners at gas chambers. Many of you may know that there was a similar trauma that was reported on in regard to German soldier morale during WW2. Those perpetrating atrocities like the mass shootings of Jewish people and dumping bodies in pits were committing suicide and exhibiting what we, of course, now call PTSD. This seems to have been the impetus for more mass industrialized killing in the form of the gas chambers—to spare the boys the more evident dirty work. This is a chilling fact as we see history repeating itself—we certainly don’t need to see the IDF get more industrialized with their murders (is that even possible, though?).
The notion that the murder itself is the rot never seems to be a consideration when regimes go full fascist. When your soul is gone, how do you get it back? If you’re one of these entities, I suppose you try to hide the death from your own, which is, of course, being done with the systematic slaughter of journalists in the area. With this method, your soul is irretrievably gone, but you can pretend it still exists.
In this current horror, we have the continued dehumanization of Palestinians—even infants are swallowed up as causative agents of their own doom. Americans reacted with rightful disgust and revulsion at events like 9-11 or the Oklahoma City bombing, conveniently ignoring that the Israeli military is parroting the very same types of legitimacy for targets such as these. If your perceived enemy is hiding in a place or occupies it (or you just make up a tale that they are hiding there), go ahead—the thinking goes, kill civilians to get to them. Those nutcases who did Oklahoma City were upset about what they perceived as the federal government killing civilians with issues like Ruby Ridge, and in their addled minds they thought it was fine to attack a government installation that just so happened to have a daycare center in it. When you let loose the notion that it’s okay to kill innocents because of the “reasons” you have concocted, then any type of sickness and murder becomes just fine with that mentality. The thing is, we as Americans are paying for this in the case of the Palestinian genocide At least none of us funded McVeigh and Nichols.
Americans would never stand for their hospitals being bombed, their doctors and nurses being murdered and removed from patient care because a pretend underground Doctor Evil lair is said to be under these places. Comically, it’s even being discussed that a bunch of gold is under a hospital in Lebanon, so I guess that means it needs bombing? It’s insanity.
This mirrors the United States settler colonialism mindset that decided to exterminate the bison. You see, that animal made a life with quite a lot of free time and abundance available to the tribes who lived in the same area. As most of you know, at least Americans reading this, by removing the bison, you took the means to live with dignity away from the tribes and made eradication and relocation more easily reached. It’s what they are doing when they stop aid shipments to Gaza when they bomb hospitals when the orthodox settlers burn down ages-old olive trees. Of course, this is nothing but genocide and taking ancient cultures and making their continuation impossible. The very behaviors we were horrified at by ISIS in terms of destroying cultural landmarks is going on as we speak. Then you can claim the people were savages anyway–look they don’t even have any impressive buildings or ways to sustain themselves. If that very predictable, essentially prison break/riot raid last October hadn’t happened, it would have to have been invented to achieve this sort of expansionist wet dream. Individuals like Jared Kushner and his oceanfront development plans need space to grow, like an infection in a Petri dish culture.
Many will say this is all quite terrible, but it is the way of things. Societies move in this direction and the “strong” overtake the “weak”. To that, I say, when you have a healthy individual, one able to thrive in the community and assist others—if that person becomes ill with a bacterial agent that leads to their eventual demise, would you call that biological agent the strong, overtaking the weak? No, you would rightly view it as a parasitic invader that disrupted the healthy equilibrium of that individual. This is what we have going on with settler colonialism. The mindset is toxic and like a germ that runs out of biological agents to feed on, it will ultimately die as well. There’s no eventual success or inevitability about it. It’s all malady and decay.
The notion that we can own each other or steal the ability to live and thrive from others is, of course, a civilizational sickness. Going full on epidemiological, it’s difficult to get a society healthy again when a toxic agent is let loose. In this case, we’ve been dealing with an ongoing contagion of mental derangement in the form of settler colonialism for such a long time. But to say this is the only way to live is to disregard the vastly longer time frames that humans lived in smaller collective groups and if the behavior was similar in those small groups we would have died out long ago. No, this is a creeping illness spread by the need to control and to steal. There is nothing inherently human about it; it’s simply the most sociopathic of us has been able to take over the mechanisms of power and have brainwashed the masses that this is simply how things work. Ted Bundy as Emperor. There are other ways to live; this is a rich and beautiful planet willing to allow us abundance and life, but one thing it isn’t open to is billionaires, wanton murder, and short-term thinking. That’s gonna get us all killed. The only pragmatic mindset is to realize the status quo is not tenable.
Truly, to accept that this is simply the way of the human is to sign off on our demise and I’m not quite ready to do that. I Have people that I love and I want better for them and I want better for the people across the world I don’t even know. With every plague, there are individuals for whatever reason that are immune to the agent. Outliers, if you will. I think those who fully understand the toxicity of the current system are those outliers, and it will fall upon us to continue to expose the rot and place it in sunshine and clarity.
Because deep down we all know we are living in sickness–of the soul, of the system, and the only way out is a disavowal of it all. Our empathy and true pragmatism needs to spread in just as aggressive a manner as the toxic settler colonialists spread death, contagion, and despair.
posted by Satish Sharma at
14:20
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