I originally posted this on OTBM.
As I continue to invite myself and others to break down words such as "citizen", "patriotism", "our", "country", "national", "security", "war"...that's all I can think of right now...
As I encourage myself and others to critically deconstruct the language used to discuss imperialist oil wars, invasions and occupations, I thought that maybe something in this post might come in handy. Cheers.
I was thinking about the flowers I mentioned having given to Ilyria in my last post. Thinking about the fact that those flowers could have been farmed by mexicans or some other brown people denied citizenship - screeched to a halt...
Switch "citizenship" with "settler-ship", settlership - the privilege of becoming a settler on stolen northern lands...
the privilege of becoming part of a stratified labour force designed to support systems of domination that support the ongoing colonization of the land and its peoples, Native people, the privilege of --
Shmolee is frustrated at having fallen...his cries are diverting my attention...he's actually fine, just a little bit pissed...Mr. Snotty Nose. :) Okay, I have him. now, he's doing his usual - tha breast thang.
Settlership...
I'm not a citizen. I'm a settler. A settler who, regardless of whether I'm "landed" (hee, hee, hee...interesting word) or whether I have the paper that says I'm a citizen, I have settlership by virtue of squatting here along with everybody else, even those who squat and are defined as squatting "illegally", "aliens". We're all aliens, except for Native people.
When people try to "get in", when they try to find ways to be allowed to become citizens, they're actually lobbying for settlership.
Settlership...
I was saying to myself that it's not like this is somewhere like ancient Athens...but then I had to stop myself - didn't they, like have a permanent slave class a person couldn't dig themselves out of? Wasn't citizenship and all its perks only accorded to adult Athenian males and through them only indirectly to the wimmin, youth and children in good standing who were parts of an adult male's patriarchal family?
Okay, so citizenship, as it is traced from those times right through to the West/North in present day has always been for a few, always about oppression, with the privileges offered to a few completely predicated on those same privileges not being offered at all, or only being offered sparingly to many, many others.
I think with kkkanada and amerikkka, states actually not being founded on ancestral lands as was the case with Athens, Sparta or even Rome...of course these people's were all imperialist colonizers who also spread out in a really martial, virulent, oppressive version of present day urban sprawl, absorbing the lands and peoples around them in order to access more resources, power and land for settlement reserved for citizens...
kkkanada and amerikkka are states founded on the ancestral lands of other peoples, ancestral lands stolen in a situation quite like that up above where the colonizers came greedy with a mind to dominate, where they did not want to share, only wanting to reserve the right to take everything, every single resource and redistribute it in the form of "settlership" - automatic for those born white to the families of the original genocidal colonizing people (that would be those people/bloggers who habitually say stuff like: "I know I'm white, but what can I do?" or "I know I'm white but that doesn't make me a racist!")...
Settlership is also conferred sparingly to those born while sporting various shades of brown and black, whose labour is purchased at whatever ridiculously low rate (economic and class exploitation) in exchange for their full support of the settler state not for full settler rights, but only for whatever the state deems fit to offer to any given individual or grouping of people who might have to lobby, protest or rebel before accessing even a modicum of the unconditional settlership some are born into...(freed african slaves can have this, south asian indentured workers can have that, chinese rail workers can have this, black caribbean domestics can have that, mexican migrants can have this, filipino nannies can have that...).
Native people, obviously not settlers, cannot be anything but a serious and ever present threat to the validity and power of the racially and economically stratified, settler state...they can only be cast as trouble makers who must be maligned and undermined at every possible juncture.
Other black and brown people who crave even partial settlership will know not to ally with them, will know to stay away from them, shun them, forget them, or to only pay lip service to their causes. We (and I mean that there's a "me" in that "we") will choose not to support their land rights because supporting their land rights would be a clear subversion of the possibility of us constructing colonized crazy ass selves as having even a partial right to their lands, which in turn would undermine the power of the state to confer full or partial settlership on any/all of us who really just want a to have little settler babies, get high paying settler jobs, buy into the illusion of purchasing some real estate (un/settled land) and a build or decorate our little settler homesteads (houses) which stand directly over the bones of millions of dead people...while folks wring their hands over whose front yard has the most fucking curb appeal.
Okay, he's squirming a lot today. I'll have to come back and read this to see if it makes any sense...later.
