Occupied Palestine = Slaveholder America
The end goal of every empire is enslavement. What happens to those who refuse to be in chains?
For many, it is shocking just how far you must go to tell the whole history of colonialization and the development of the behemoth called, sometimes sanctifyingly, Capitalism. In the United States as it is embordered today, it clearly has its roots embedded deeply within the vile institution of slavery: the first recognized trade of African slaves in the future-country being traced to the exchange of twenty Ndongo prisoners for supplies in Virginia (1619); for Indigenous Americans, the enslavement begins wherever Europeans planted themselves liberally along the ~45,000 miles of potential landing area that makes up the US East and Gulf Coasts(1,2,3).
US “patriots” hide their European ancestry behind a strangely religio-nationalist understanding of the “Revolution” from those powers, somehow distancing the atrocities of the colonists from those of their immediate successors. And so the landed gentry “bravely” threw off their chains, becoming the same despicable rent-seekers but in hats of “Life, Liberty, and Property” as they realized their European Lords, inbred and degenerate under the foundational throes of capital-centralization in their own lands, had allowed their hard and soft power in the colonies to wane to near-obscurity. It must be remembered, of course, that what the Founders kept and cherished most was the underlying system that made American Capitalism work in the first place: chattel slavery.
Indeed, the use of disposable human labor was essential to jump-starting the economic engine that would come to all but own the world by the end of the twentieth century. And having seized the means of production (read: slaves), they would still trade with these economically deposed Kings, Emperors, and Lords in near the same capacities as before; the squabbles as Europe attempted to reorganize itself to compete providing more than enough opportunity for the burgeoning Americas to further entrench slave-labor as an economic edge, each buyer seeking the artificially low prices that stealing labor value wholesale provides.
As slavery fell out of vogue, politicians and slaveholders realizing the very real danger holding any people in such a condition as chattel slavery held for their prospects of living in the near-term, the United States found itself faced with two options: the total annihilation of the population who refused to bargain their lands, families, and lives away to foreign actors already known to rarely bargain in good faith at all; or a less forceful, hands-off economic slavery found through the alienation of workers and the propagation of perpetual debt upon them.
In terms of the former, the many “lost” Tribes and Peoples of the Americas provide evidence enough of the efficiency with which the European colonialist could engage in wholesale genocide against an insubordinate indigenous population; the many Tribes of today who are still confined by artificial borders enforced upon them by the same bad faith “bargaining” mentioned above, who are enduring the slow death by ethnic cleansing at the hands of an American political apparatus that is largely ambivalent to the cries of the Tribes who are disappearing, generation by generation, into memory alone.
The latter, a carceral capitalism, ghettoization, and panem et circenses to keep the population docile under the ever increasing demands of entropic Capitalism (i.e. wage slavery), is the reality of the day for the majority of Black and Brown descendants of slaves in the Americas – the reality for virtually all workers now alive – and was born of the need to maintain, control, an industrial workforce that was skilled, organized, and known to be capable of extreme acts of violence against both property and aristocrat if pushed too far.
If you read the above-informing Brown article, you will know that the enslavement of the Indigenous Americans and imported Africans happened in parallel in the proto-United States; the knowledge, health, and spirits of these peoples being taken with the same rapaciousness that any Capitalist will exhibit when in possession of a particularly lucrative “commodity”.
The primary difference between the two - the reason one group is remembered in the US primarily for their greatest degradations and the value they provided while the other is taught of as brave, but uncivilized people who somehow got sick and/or disappeared over time - is that many Indigenous Peoples waged a war and would not be displaced without the most devastating of force while many ex-slaves were sold a bad faith deal of American Capitalism following hollow promises of Presidents Lincoln and Grant, and the Republicans at-large.
For the native resistance, who were fighting for the very earth beneath their feet, the memories and experiences tied to the spaces around them, they could not be so easily corralled and isolated; they knew of their relatives who had been sent to Caribbean plantations by British colonists, they could not trust the European “laws” that assured them fair treatment. The Africans imported to the Americas were at an inherent disadvantage in terms of waging resistance and, like the bastards who held them enchained, were foreigners to the land; they could not depend on pre-existing community ties and histories to maintain communications, community aid, and wage wars of resistance on their behalf.
Soon, the Prairie Wars would end, the guerilla battles of the Southwest would come to a close, and the attention of the imperial United States would begin to focus on how to police the next internal enemy: the miners, railroad workers, washerwomen, and teamsters.
Today, Palestine finds itself in the same position after decades of apartheid have rendered the land itself inhospitable to the indigenous populations. Israel has tried to follow in the path of Segregationist United States, enforcing apartheid through physical domination and political subversion in the hopes of maintaining an exploitable workforce of Palestinian slaves from the Occupied West Bank and Gaza. And similarly to their slaveholding antecessors, they have failed.
Like the Angolans rising against their English enslavers during the Stono Rebllion (1739), the slaves of the German Coast plantations of Louisiana (1811), the uprising by Nat Turner and his followers against the slaveholders of Virginia (1831), and John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry (1859), Palestine has made a multitude of efforts to break free of the chains and ever-shrinking walls which take away their lands and history; and like Pontiac’s Confederacy at Bloody Run (1763), the Indigenous Confederacy at Wild Cat Creek (1812), and the coalition of Northern Cheyenne, Arapaho, Dakota, and Lakota Peoples at Little Big Horn (1876), they have shown Israel the futility of keeping them in chains.
The dream of the Zionist is an ahistorical Palestine that they can romanticize into a brave, but anachronistic people who were minor elements in the Manifest Destiny of an Israel that occupies all the land “between the Sea and the Jordan.” Now the occupying power has been forced into a choice, reaping the gruesome rewards of their hybrid reservation-plantation system of exploitation; seeing that the only way to ensure their dominance in the region, to halt resistance to their injustice, is to eradicate the indigenous population entirely through either bombs, poison, or exile into the Sinai Peninsula.
I can only pray that the ceasefire holds. Free Palestine.
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Photo: Newmila, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons (Cropped)
