Mastodawn

Syltti Jul 3, 2023

Qasim Rashid, Esq.

A Republican got offended I called the founding U.S. citizens "colonizers,"—rebuking me that “the original 13 colonies were beacons of freedom.”

I asked him to repeat that part...slowly. Apparently "colonies" is respectful—but calling those who built colonies "colonizers" is not.🤔

Also, I'm sure the enslaved, Native Americans, women, and anyone not a WASP wealthy land owner would likely disagree with that whole "beacon of freedom" part.

Bill Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid sometimes freedom means different things to different people

Bill Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid for example my great great grandmother only spoke Cherokee so freedom to her was a meaningless collection of phenomes

Bill Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid her great grandson my uncle believes freedom is the ability to spend as much money as you want and never see a credit posted to your bank account

Bill Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid for me freedom means a lack of incarceration

TheAnymouseProphet Jul 3, 2023

@quetz @QasimRashid I think in reality, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. Nothing ain't worth nothing, but it's free.

Oregon Animal Lover Jul 3, 2023

Sounds like you were talking to an idiot. He can call them beacons of freedom if he wants, but of course colonizers create colonies. Anyone who made it past the 6th grade knows that. America was colonized (by colonizers) as was most of the rest of the world.🤦‍♀️

Angry Centrist Jul 3, 2023

@dswidow @QasimRashid Qasim did say it was a Republican who was all up in his feels about it. Considering what the Rs and their pet judges are doing to our country, only idiots still call themselves Republicans.

Oregon Animal Lover Jul 4, 2023

@dkbgeek @QasimRashid

I pretty much agree. The party of grifters and griftees.😁

Kiera Jul 3, 2023

@dswidow idiot is implied when you're talking about republicans.

Oregon Animal Lover Jul 4, 2023

Point taken.😊

Devil Doll, Esq.Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid A Republican would do that.

An American wouldn't.

Rob 🏳️‍🌈 Rartsy Humanist Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid
How do words work?
Yeah, this keeps happening where a familiar term suddenly makes my whites go crazy. “Privilege” is a great example. A word so nice it was in the slogan enticing folks to get American Express cards. But if used to describe systemic inequality it’s now offensive.
Here,
Colonial and colonies 😀
Colonizer 😡
Colonist 🙂
Hmmm 🤔
Some white folk are children. You see it’s the verby one that’s least liked. Implies agency, responsibility 🚨🙅🏽‍♂️

Texty the Bard Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid I always ask: freedom for whom? Literally the only people the founders wanted to set "free" were white male commoners. The injustice they opposed was monarchy and nobility by birth. That other people might also deserve freedom wasn't part of their worldview.

JMcD Jul 3, 2023

@textualdeviance @QasimRashid And by white, they meant British, Scottish, French, and maybe Dutch. The Irish, Germans, Italians, etc. were considered undesirable.

Texty the Bard Jul 3, 2023

@McD1979 Yup. My Irish and Italian ancestors who came here in the mid to late 1800s weren't exactly treated well. Damn shame so many of them and their descendants were racist asshats to other groups. The Irish ones got mad about emancipation because it supposedly meant more competition for jobs. I'm in the first generation on both sides of my family to reject that stuff (and a lot of my cousins are still racist, too... Sigh...)

DB Schwein Jul 4, 2023

@textualdeviance @McD1979
Yeah. I have a cousin who cries out "the Irish we're enslaved too!" no matter how many times she gets shut down. I'm incredibly lucky that she's a minority in the family - but generations of being civil servants and social workers definitely helped bend that curve faster than for most families :-/

John O’Donnell Jul 3, 2023

@textualdeviance @QasimRashid
As far as the British Puritans disliked monarchy, they only disliked Charles II because he wouldn’t hang Catholics and allowed the theatres to stay open.
They wanted a very specific sort of freedom, which was the freedom to be absolute bastards to everyone.

Philipp Suessmann Jul 3, 2023

@textualdeviance @QasimRashid

"The injustice they opposed was monarchy and nobility by birth."

That was certainly a step in the right direction, wasn't it? I find the lack of perspective on history here rather questionable to be honest. History moves incrimentaly, one step at a time. Individual freedoms had to be gained step by step, you don't get the whole package for everyone all at once.

Texty the Bard Jul 3, 2023

@philsuessmann Ehm... do you think white Christian men are the ones who get to decide who should be free?

Michael Helm Jul 3, 2023

@textualdeviance @QasimRashid I dunno. I have ancestors on all sides of the fence but some of them were enthusiastic colonizers (the whole package, slaves, rum, tobacco, taking land from Indigenous, not paying taxes). That lot did seem to be concerned about religion - some of them might have been hidden Catholics. If they were concerned about freedom it was mostly about their own.

Some high mindedness did creep in later, so let's cut them a little slack from 300 years out.

Texty the Bard Jul 3, 2023

@mwhelm I don't even cut my own ancestors slack. Columbus was prosecuted within his own time for his atrocities. Abolitionists existed. And of course persecuted groups were advocating for themselves right from the start. Ignoring that was a conscious choice, and it's reasonable to judge people on those choices.

Toni Aittoniemi Jul 3, 2023

@textualdeviance @QasimRashid Excellent answer!

It’s not as if freedom from one tyranny has to automatically mean other tyrannies are magically resolved in one go! 😃

Narratives for #freedom are problematic in that way. They need to be powerful in order to captivate people to rise up, but to be powerful they often need to simple. Too simple.

dibi58 Jul 4, 2023

@textualdeviance @QasimRashid

a bunch of slaveowners that wanted to be free to exploit everybody else ...

Anne Norton Jul 7, 2023

@textualdeviance @QasimRashid depends on which “Founders” you mean. Tom Paine was better than that, as was Sam Adams. Have a look at Langston Hughes’s poem Freedom’s Plow. He has a different -more democratic, more anarchic, more just-view of who the founders were. What Wild Democracy is about

stoicmike Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid If you can't say "colonizers" what would you call citizens who move from a mother country to one of its colonies? I suppose you could say "colonials," but that might include natives and immigrants from other countries...

jordan Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid words are hard

antipode77 Jul 3, 2023

@wagesj45 @QasimRashid

Words are social creatures. They are dependent on the meaning of other words to describe their own meaning. Literally a web of meaning.

Open up any dictionary and you can confirm this.

Words are like bricks in a wall. Remove bricks from the wall and it might fall apart.

CJ Paloma Jul 3, 2023

@antipode77 @wagesj45 @QasimRashid

almost like recognizing that interconnection is an essential part of being able to make meaning of… anything!

I have noticed that most of the dudes and dudettes who have bought into the "competition is the key to life" kool aid, WILL argue that certain words (ones they don't like) do not mean what …dictionaries... say they mean.

I once had a guy tell me that because he was not frightened of the gays, he could not possibly be homophobic. He thought he was objective and rational. Of course.

ninavizz Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid Thank you for standing-up for our First Nations people! I so dearly wish that more people with a platform, did. 🙏

beingextorted Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid Aside from those wealthy grant holders and adventurers, very few who arrived here were actually "colonizers" in the strictest sense. Most were criminal exiles or simply emigrants due to religious persecution. Much the same as other "colonies" around the globe.

benazirs_blog_Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid asalamualaykum i follow you on Twitter belated eid Mubarak to you

M4rtin__Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid yes definetly, i think „beacon of freedom“ was the first thing that came in the mind of the native americans when they first saw them 💀

Ozkatz Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid America was a magical place – 13 colonies and ZERO colonisers.

Libertylad Jul 3, 2023

I'm also sure this person complains about how "no one can take a joke anymore," or how "people are too sensitive about what words we use" 🙄

David Wayne Thompson Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid They think "colonizers" is a term used in Critical Race Theory as an insult.

mustangdave65 Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid The 13 colonies were not beacons of freedom. A very good book that discusses the subject is White Trash by Nancy Isenburg. The king emptied the prisons and enslaved the street people of London as indentured servants, ie slaves, of the colonists. They were called “Rubbish People” in London. THEY built the colonies. Even their offspring were enslaved. It wasn’t just skin color. It was a crime to be too poor and the punishment was a life of slavory.

JMcD Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid The “original” 13 colonies should have a clue as well. Pretty sure the natives didn’t just show up and say “Hey, I see you guys just moved in. We’ve got a lot more land over here. Would you like to have it?”

@QasimRashid as we all know colonies and colonizers share a common base world colon, that is full of shit.

Kerri Levine Jul 3, 2023

For every idiot Repub there's two or three people like me who've been shocked by our true history (because that ain't what we were taught in school) yet not only want to learn more of, preserve & pass on, our history but are pissed off by what we have learned & want to do something to change it.

No matter how whiny, how loud some idiot GOPer is, remember we outnumber them.

It's our turn, peeps. Let's save our history.

ShaMana Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid well, they freed millions of actual Americans from their lives...

David Zanoni Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid That republican is probably a person who despises someone being"woke".

EllenInEdmonton

@QasimRashid
It didn't feel much like "freedom" either to my Loyalist ancestors who had already fled one regime and then had to flee north after losing all of their possessions.

Kancept Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid reminds me of this gem.

Lyle Solla-Yates Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid I’m sure the early Jamestown settlers would have loved to learn that they were all beacons of freedom. I assume they are referring to #thestarvingtime ? https://historicjamestowne.org/history/history-of-jamestown/the-starving-time/

The Starving Time | Historic Jamestowne

Visit the real thing at Historic Jamestowne, explore the actual location and active archaeological dig, Jamestown Rediscovery, home of the first successful English settlement.

ara Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid bahahahahaahahaha 'beacons of freedom'! how i wish ppl understood that this continent was born and bred on wyt supremacy after the king of the vatican/catholic pope said it was ok to enslave and colonize. dyk kanada's first p.m. bragged about starving the first nations; that the first nations needed written permission to leave their land & communities, even for the day? wyt ppl like using pejorative terms, they call our communities "reserves" and call us 'savages' & 'indians'

Dobermanpure Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid you should see Texans heads explode when i explain how it was illegal immigrants to Texas being the reason for the Texas revolution. Then to add spice, remind them how the Alamo is a bastion of white supremacy. Heads fucking explode.

SLCW💥Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid They can't tolerate their manufactured worldview being confronted with reality.

RobCornelius Jul 3, 2023

A lot of the "Pilgrim Fathers" left England so they could carry on persecuting people they didn't like and England was a bit anti-persecution at the time. History say they left to *escape* persecution.

When the political landscape of England changed for a while during the Civil War a lot of people came back to England from the colonies so they could persecute people in England once more.

antipode77 Jul 3, 2023

@robcornelius @QasimRashid

The freedom to prosecute those one disagrees with.

Ahh, those were the golden days. Nowadays everything is so much saner. 🤡🤬

Except there are a number of misguideds trying to turn the clock way back.
Their freedom will turn out to be our unfreedom.

Jon Sparks Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid You might have expected them at least to know how the English language works.

Mx. Aria Stewart Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid Massachusetts, "beacon of freedom" was the first colony to legalize slavery. (as in, wrote down how it should work and enforced it)

Increase Mather (an early president of Harvard University, and father of Cotton Mather, who was involved in some of the Salem Witch Trials) was a slave owner.

It's slavery, colonization, religious conversion and force from the earliest days

Carlos Garces Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid Hi all! Just wandering around this maze. I like to read and write about politics, history and philosophy. Any suggestions of cool profiles to follow?

#JustMigratedFromTwitter

Sterling Baldwin Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid but all the people that voted at the time said it was great!

isaac Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid weren’t some of the “colonies” explicit penal colonies? like “Mary”land to lock up Catholics?

Michael Helm Jul 3, 2023

@Zekethedrifter @QasimRashid Not exactly, the Calverts set up Maryland partly as a refuge for Catholics from England. There was also a penal colony system - the beginning of the "transportation" sentencing. I don't know a lot about that.

isaac Jul 3, 2023

@mwhelm @QasimRashid right on. I’m not super well read on the 13 colonies period. I was thinking about something that I read, I believe it was called “White Trash” by Nancy Isenberg? I thought she said that about Maryland but I read it a few years ago.

Lemondoor Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid
Conversation that never happened for $5, please.

William Conner Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid What does this idiot you are dealing with think the colony founders should be called?

Orc Jul 3, 2023

@QasimRashid I think I can follow their "logic" here; they don't think that colonies have anything to do with colonizers because old white people call them the 13 colonies but the blahs call their occupants colonizers.

Thus they are completely different things! QED(tm)