Imperial violence

"Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries."

The book "brings vividly to life a world in which warmongers portrayed themselves as peacemakers and Europeans imagined “small” violence as essential to imperial rule and global order."
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https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691248479/they-called-it-peace

Benton, Lauren: They Called It Peace. Worlds of Imperial Violence. Princeton 2024
The book analyses imperial violence between 1400 and 1900.
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https://history.yale.edu/people/lauren-benton
#book #history #empires #violence #war #warmongers #massacres #dispossession #IndigenousPeoples #HyperViolentPeace #Pacific #GlobalOrder #peace #TruthTelling

"Fire-resilient landscapes” and “fire-adapted communities” through biocultural restoration as a fire risk mitigation strategy.

A clear-eyed view on historic harms by settler societies: Settler transition to large-scale agriculture (plantations) transformed ecohydrological conditions and introduced weeds. The neglected land and extractive tourism practices drive increases in fire risks.

"We argue that decolonizing postplantation landscapes through the restoration and reconnection of people to land will not only help prevent future catastrophic fires, but also address social and environmental inequities.The connections of colonialism to contemporary extreme fire regimes are not unique to Hawaiʻi. The dispossession of Indigenous communities worldwide has suppressed cultural burning and altered fire regimes that support the production of food and material culture."
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On the anniversary of the Maui fires, a call for Indigenous land care to mitigate future disasters, D. Nākoa Farrant et al
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2401045121
#bushfires #fires #colonialism #SettlerSociety #extractivism #water #plantations #SettlerSocieties #unsustainability #dispossession #IndigenousPeoples #IndigenousKnowledge #BioculturalRestoration #CulturalBurning #restoration

‘Property poetry’?
"Real estate is another way to say Australia."

"Kate Holden connects Turnbull’s persistence in illegally clearing vast tracts of koala habitat, and his murder of Turner, to British Enlightenment theories of property. The English philosopher John Locke, she observes, “placed emphasis on labour to morally justify the owning of property. The more work put into the land, the more settled a man was upon it. Holden traces associations between Locke’s ideas, the history of terra nullius and the “strange, morbid fixation in Australian myth of just how hard a person has to work on this land.”

"[b]y the time of Australia’s settling, the ineluctable mark of a British citizen was land ownership. It enfranchised him, gave him rights […] Land – elemental, foundational – was the desperately prized asset in a new colony. Without it, man was only an object."

"Yet the contradictions and inequities surrounding the trade in stolen land are rehearsed largely without reflection or analysis across contemporary Australian culture."
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https://theconversation.com/property-poetry-real-estate-ads-and-literature-have-more-in-common-than-you-might-think-214835

"It will be a dull march back into history, a return to the denialism and silence that has defined white Australia. Honesty will be torn from the trees. Any notion of shared understanding will be shredded."

"For all the misinformation and deceit, all the lies of the campaign, we will be left with one ugly truth: given the chance, Australia would still sooner destroy Indigenous people than listen to them as equals. The central impulses of colonisation are all still there, brutal and unrepentant."
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https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/editorial/2023/10/14/mothball-politics#mtr
#Australia #culture #denial #dispossession #FirstNationsPeoples #indigenousPeoples #recognition #constitution #democracy #VoicetoParliament #SettlerSociety #TerraNullius #21stCentury

Haaretz:

The disaster that befell #Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin #Netanyahu. The PM, who has prided himself on his vast political experience & irreplaceable wisdom in #security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a govt of #annexation & #dispossession,

#Israel-#Gaza #War
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2023-10-08/ty-article-opinion/netanyahu-bears-responsibility/0000018b-0b9d-d8fc-adff-6bfd1c880000