"They're the same picture"
"They're the same picture"
“Ah but you see, a long time has passed by! There’s generations [of settler-colonialists] that have already lived through these times, and the people of today have nothing to do with their past!”
Motherfucker, landback means the LAND which is rightfully the Indigenous’ is taken BACK, and it means you GO BACK too, no one should give a fuck about which gen. you’re currently a part of.
They’re going to say the exact same shit for Palestine if it’s allowed to be festered long enough by settler-colonialists, as if it already hasn’t been festered.
and it means you GO BACK too, no one should give a fuck about which gen. you’re currently a part of.
This would mean that like 99.9% of Earth’s population has to move somewhere. Almost all land was fought over endlessly and changed metaphorical hands multiple times over. Sometimes the people that were displaced don’t even exist anymore.
What “landback” actually means is recognizing the systemic racism that was and still is perpetuated against the indigenous people by means of taking away their ancestral lands, slaughtering and enslaving their ancestors, and destroying their way of life; and addressing that racism by giving jurisdiction and sovereignty over their lands back to them. It doesn’t mean that everyone but the indigenous people have to move out; descendants of colonizers born there are technically natives of that land too. The difference is that they get systemic advantages from their ancestry whereas indigenous people get systemic discrimination. This is the thing that ought to be addressed.
In the case of Israel the difference is that a lot of colonizers are first gen, they are not natives, they do have somewhere to “go back to”, and they are actively perpetuating colonization and genocide rather than simply getting an advantage from their ancestors doing so. In such cases it of course makes sense for the decolonization effort to focus on direct expulsion of invaders.
The last will be first. Landback and decolonization means putting the reigns into the hands of the indigenous people’s hands, and letting go of the reigns, not just holding onto the reigns but giving the colonized people some of the reigns. The best settlers can hope for is to be treated kinder than they have treated the people whose land they stole. I myself was born in the US, and am still a settler here, just because I was born here does not absolve my role. It means I have a historic duty to help carry out decolonization and land back, from the back, not as a leading role.
Read Fanon.
While I agree in general, there’s also nuance to be had IMHO.
For example: Russian Empire colonizing Siberia was a bloody affair. Of course it was not anywhere near the atrocities committed in the new world, but still a lot of natives died due to localized warfare and disease. Do you think that when USSR formed, the Siberian peoples should have been given full sovereignty, as separate countries (not even part of USSR), and rule over themselves and the descendants of russian settlers that were left there; or was the actual solution of giving them autonomous republics within the RSFSR the better one? I lean on the latter. I think if a socialist revolution ever happens in the US, this is the way it would happen. Full jurisdiction and sovereignty for indigenous people in certain areas (they need to be much larger than current reservations, though), shared jurisdiction and sovereignty in other limited areas where descendants of settlers live. And, of course, land to the peasants, factories to the workers - I strongly suspect both casual and systemic racism will be much less of an issue once capitalism no longer burdens the working class.