this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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Transpeople should be socially accepted and supported.
Settlers; any suggestion for a particular reading strategy? As a soon-to-be-former Leftypoler, I'm way too familiar with a pessimistic view to history, so the notion of Americans dehumanizing, decimating， and displacing Amerindians is a bit trite. What elements should I focus on to expand my understanding? The psychology of colonialism, like the self-defense mechanisms settlers used to consider themselves human despite the violence they inflicted on other human beings? The seguing of violence: how by dehumanizing and committing atrocities on others, the inhibitions against violence on one's own ingroup was reduced? The anatomy of moderate defeat: how humanists tried and failed to stem the tide of their less humane countrymen, and were ostracized in turn for opposing "progress"?
Ah:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlers:_The_Mythology_of_the_White_Proletariat
Looks way more interesting (IIRC I had confused it for some other history of American colonization), and the questions I have for reading it (i.e, psychology and sociology of a labor aristocracy) are better.
Edit 2:
This is very, very good.
https://readsettlers.org/ch1.html
Ah, I'll keep my reading to myself, was aiming to lurk anyways.
I don't think it's worth overthinking - you'll spend more time worrying about how to read it that you could spend reading it.
Settlers reads to me like a history, with some editorializing sprinkled in. Critics almost solely focus on the editorializing.
My read is that settlers, as a group, have interests that oppose the freedom of colonized peoples in the U$. They have, as a group, historically opposed freedom for their "fellow" colonized workers. You're welcome to your own interpretation.
I'm up to Chapter 4, after having preread Chapter 14 (last chapter).
TBH, honestly, it sounds like the cultural DNA of the United States is extremely diseased (being based on bourgeois settlers living off enslaved Africans on land expropriated from Amerindians in a most brutal fashion, and having voted, similar to the current Israelis, for a monster). I wonder if having done a decent course in Marxist American studies would have saved the Soviet leadership from attempting to negotiate with the Americans, and when that failed, to have the Soviets commit suicide in an attempt to bring peace.
I mean, I'm mildly familiar with other histories of demographic expansion, but you can draw a straight line from the genocide of Amerindians to modern American imperialism. Some things never change.
Wonderful! I think pre reading the last chapter is a good idea. Glad it seems helpful!
Just saw the edits, glad you were able to find it!