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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Racism, yes. But also most settler colonist states have a history of trauma that drives the actions of the settlers.
The US and the Puritans, New Spain and a bunch of PTSD'd child soldiers fresh from the reconquista, SA and the Dutch refugees, Convict Australia...etc.
The people colonial powers use as settlers are traumatised into leaving by the power, and that trauma weaponised against the existing population. And that traumatic superstructure sticks around for centuries as a mindset of "only oppession is possible."
In Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, he talks about how the conquistadors were at the lower levels of some kind of debt peonage pyramid scheme where the low-level soldiers owed a certain amount of gold to Cortés for organizing and outfitting the expedition, who owed a bunch of money to various creditors including the King of Spain, who owed a bunch of money to various bankers in Venice etc. So they were financially encouraged to be as brutal and extractive as possible when they gained power over the Native peoples. Graeber describes it as one of the first building blocks of capitalism, where those in power had no responsibility other than to extract as much wealth as possible from the people they had power over.
I've heard theory that the reason the US never had a socialist revolution like Europe is that whenever pressure built up too high in the US the government would send waves of settlers out to "seek their forture", luring them with the promise of free land to abandon the cities. In Europe where that wasn't an option labor tensions would built until they hit a tipping point.
Ah yes, the Matt Christman theory on the dialectic of American free real estate
J. Sakai’s book “Settlers” talks about that most excellently.
Another relief valve for those tensions would be importing vast scores of European Immigrants to take up just enough of the backbone labor position to crush any kind of worker revolt, while you further genocide and deport the current backbone of your labor force; Mexicano, Chinese, Japanese, Native, Afrikan, etc.
I’m still reading the book, but where I’m at now discusses how the main purpose of the New Deal was to resolve the contradiction that is inevitable when you do that. The solution was to Americanize the migrant European labor force. Hence the creation of the Middle Class if I’m understanding it right.
The middle class being, a strata of Labor paid just enough out of the spoils of imperial conquest to keep the bulk of Labor from wanting to rock the boat too much. Strikes and other various labor disputes were deemed okay if they were directed internally at getting a bigger share of the loot, and not at overthrowing US imperialism or something similar.
So while during The New Deal the Army wasn’t used as it was historically to break up strikes on behalf of the capitalists, the army was used quite extensively to shut down revolutionary revolt in Puerto Rico.
I think there are lots of psychological things at play. Think about survivor bias and how shitty that is. It's those kinds of things that manifest themselves from individual phenomena into the societal realm as well that contribute to all of it.