People are so mad at this post for calling militant veganism “a vestige of colonialism” but it’s totally correct
Settler colonialism is literally the idea that you can come into a place and totally destroy all the indigenous knowledges about the land and how to live there, and replace it with your lofty intellectual ideal of What Everyone Everywhere Should Eat.
The point of the post is that what kind of food local farmers produce should be informed by the land they live on and what makes sense to grow there. Farmers should make decisions based on what is environmentally sustainable and ecologically sound.
So if you’re farming land that is naturally suited to producing rich, lush vegetation, by all means! Grow plants! Grow fruits and vegetables!
But if you’re somewhere that is hilly, arid, with scant, rocky, or saline soil, it makes more sense to farm livestock. In those places, producing meat is the ecologically sound choice.
Oddly enough, a farmer’s choice of what to grow, much like a person’s choice of what to eat, is incredibly complex and idiosyncratic and informed by so many variables that NO one-size-fits-all solution could possibly work!
But militant vegans take agricultural analyses that work in California and nowhere else, and ignore the role of water and irrigation to boot, and then claim they know what EVERYONE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD should eat.
Also yeah farming on the current model in California has at last check devoured the entire Colorado River so maybe analyses saying it works there are pretty flawed?
It’s because they know what they did to Americans when they came. Colonizers are so afraid of being treated the way they treated those who lived here when they arrived.
part of me wants to write a post about cryptids and settler-colonialism, but then i think about how incredibly broken my blog is thanks to kardala meta and change my mind
basically there is a difference between “fun weird thing we made up” and “actual being from an Indigenous culture we appropriated as part of the process of destroying their culture” and that’s an important distinction to draw. like, some of the beings that get called cryptids have important cultural context that gets stripped away when they’re shoved into pop culture will-nilly. Navajo skin-walkers are beings that shouldn’t be talked about, unless you want to draw them to you (and you don’t). on the other hand, telling stories about wendigos helps us understand traditional Cree (and Anishinabek) legal orders and customs.
b’gwus/sásq’ets
(sasquatch/bigfoot) stories have been told up and down the coast of the pacific northwest for thousands of years and now tourist traps run by settlers repackage culture and sell it for a profit that never makes it way back to the people they’re extracting stories from. i’m not expecting people to stop playing with “cryptids,” but i do kinda want everyone to be aware of the places and people these stories come from and that, for us, they have meaning.
I genuinely do not understand this unrelenting insistence that we compare every horrendous thing the United States does to the Holocaust, when there are much better comparisons to be made to…well, the United fucking States.
The United States has a long, sordid history of separating families: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the families impacted by slavery for generations after being stolen from their homes and sold to the highest bidder, for one. The Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools, where Native children were ripped from their families in order to have their language, culture, and beliefs stamped out of them through forced assimilation and conversion to Christianity, for another.
The United States has an awful history of putting people in detention centres: Japanese and Native Alaskan internment camps during WWII, Fort Cass, Fort Snell, and other Native American internment camps that Indigenous Peoples were forced into throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, not even to mention Guantanamo Bay, and the camps so-called dissidents in the places like the Philippines, Vietnam, and other nations Americans had occupied were put into.
The United States has always been horrible to its immigrants, specifically non-white and/or non-Christian refugees. My own grandfather, an immigrant form India, couldn’t become a citizen of the United States despite being a college lecturer and the spouse of a US citizen due to Asian Exclusion, and had to continuously enrol in university courses he never actually took despite the fact that he was teaching them, just to stay in the country on a student visa. The one truly valid comparison to the Holocaust era you could make would be to the United States turning away Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe aboard the St Louis and sending them back to their deaths because that same law used to keep my grandfather from becoming a citizen had been put in place specifically to keep more Jews and Asians from coming into the country.
Like, the United States is not “becoming Nazi Germany” all of a sudden. This is not some aberrant “UnAmerican” behaviour. This is the United States being the United States, doing what the U.S. has always done from the moment of its inception.
Also, as one of my FB friends said on this topic recently: “Nazi Germany was not famous for cruelty toward asylum seekers, it was famous for making millions of asylum seekers and then murdering millions including many from my family.”
There is no good reason to constantly trot out bad Holocaust comparisons when we know damn well this is the same inhumane bullshit America was fucking built on. Hitler, Nazis, and The Holocaust are not just shorthand for “the government being really bad.” It was a specific atrocity that devastated the Jewish and Romani communities of this world, and you don’t need to constantly devalue it and re-traumatise Jews and Roma over and over again when you can just as easily condemn the heinous way asylum seekers at the US border are being treated by saying the United States is still in the business of systematic oppression and has not learnt anything from its own appalling history.
So we have to wait a few years instead of preventing this? I’m so tired of the nitpickery.
My aunt came here seeking asylum from Guatemala in 1994. All she really has been able to get is a visa and she has always renewed/extended it. She has children who were born here, but this is what her lawyers have told her to do. In 2017 it was up for renewal and due to one DUI from late 2012/early 2013, which was barely above legal limit (and had it been someone without an accent that had been pulled over, there may have just been a warning). Since 1994 this woman has only had ONE bad mark on her record: that DUI. Her visa was not renewed. She is required to leave the country in 2021. She will not likely go back ti Guatemala. We are currently trying to figure out which country may provide better for her. Because Guatemala is too dangerous. People are still fleeing to this day.
Gues what? PEOPLE ARE FLEEING THE UNITED STATES TOO. Just last year, thousands of people fled America seeking asylum in Canada. I haven’t gotten around to the numbers other countries have seen, but those are American citizens, and scared Immigrants. And yes this has been going on for ages, but not in this quantity and not with the increases seen in the past few years.
Many Latinos are terrified and setting up plans to leave this country even though we are US citizens. Many of us born here.
No, there isn’t really a moment in US history where we are not treating people like shit and separating families, but how much do the common people empathize with those situations? They don’t, because it’s never as deeply talked about. Where in US history were those same people leaving for other countries seeking asylum? If that’s your qualifier: we got it. Murder? Done. Let’s add mass child-trafficking. Is this bad enough for you yet? Are we now being beat up on enough to join your hyper-exclusive club? Or will you not be happy unless we have stood by and let millions of our people be murdered?
You may want to re-read the post there since you seem to be having some trouble understanding the main point.
It is not a matter of ‘better’ or ‘worse’. It is partially a problem of people not making the connection to the atrocities the United States have committed time and time again. Comparing it to a German single incident as opposed to one of the many many US examples is mostly sensationalizing.
The other portion is that people ignore the reality of what did happen to both the Holocaust and what is happening today. It becomes a “hyper exclusive club” of who is treated “badly enough” rather than a specific tragedy that happened to specific peoples. And that is not fair either.
I won’t speak for everyone, but I’ve been making the connections to many, many, many of the atrocities the US has previously committed. But people didn’t listen to me then. The difference is now it is so similar to the preceding events, so horrifyingly similar to pre-Nazi Germany, and this rhetoric is what that finally got white culture to share our plight like a fucking meme. Because it is a history they are very familiar with. Am I happy about it? No. I’m relieved people are finally watching en masse. Do I wish more people knew about US history? Yes. Do I hate having to argue with people daily about what actually happened? Yes. Fix the educational system. In fact, thank you for not stopping at “THEY’RE NOT THE SAME!?!” and going on with “The US actually did way closer”. YES. THEY DID.
THEY DO.
THEY SHOULD NOT.
But not everyone is like that. Now I have to watch hundreds of people getting butthurt that this is the comparison that finally stuck when we shouldn’t be treating this as the main issue. We need to prevent it from getting that bad again. By trying to fight people who are scared instead of acting to prevent it as we are begging you is telling me that you care more about semantics than this potentially happening again. Whether we are comparing it to previous US or non-US historical events.
You aren’t wrong.
But you’re going about it wrong.
First of all, the comparisons are not what got people to finally care. They are just a byproduct of their outrage from caring. People are outraged at what’s happening and they are using the Holocaust as a way to express their outrage. Not the other way around.
Secondly, the imagery of dead Jewish and Romani people is not “semantics.” This is exactly our complaint. The fact that you can boil it down to that is exactly the problem.
WE CAN BE OUTRAGED ABOUT WHAT IS HAPPENING AND FIGHT BACK WITHOUT USING DEAD JEWS AND ROMA AS PROPS AND WITHOUT TRAUMATISING OUR COMMUNITIES WITH CONSTANT HITLER IMAGERY
We’re not “going about it wrong,” we’re asking people to respect our dead and recognise that the Holocaust isn’t shorthand for fascism or atrocities. It’s a specific event that traumatised our communities and people need to treat it as such. The fact that it’s everybody’s generic go-to for every situation around the world and that non-Jewish, non-Romani people feel like they have ownership of it when they don’t is a problem, and it has nothing to do with invalidating the horrific things currently being done by ICE.
If you can’t understand why using our dead as props and acting like “the Holocaust” is interchangeable with the “fascism” then I don’t know what to tell you.
Nobody is downplaying what’s happening. We just want our dead and our trauma respected.
And uhhhh literally hitler was greatly inspired by the genocide committed against natives and was very approving of the Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo concentration camp in particular. We don’t need to look to Germany for comparisons. What the American government is doing now is what they’ve been doing to indigenous children and families since their boats first bumped our shores. They did the same thing to my grandpa, they continue to do it to children on reservations. And they’ve drawn invisible borders across the land to separate native families and then use that to further the genocide.
I think it’s lazy to say “people don’t care unless we compare it to the holocaust so let’s keep comparing it to the holocaust even though jewish people are being hurt by it”
When someone says that this isn’t american or a new low point in America, correct them. Don’t let them export the blame to Germany so they don’t have to confront their complicity in the ongoing genocide of indigenous people across all of turtle island.
Duh… wtf yu think it’s so many Spanish street names lol
^ and whole cities. Los Angeles? San Francisco? lol
^ and states. Colorado? Nevada?
Imagine believing whites are the rightful owners of a bunch of places they cant even pronounce properly
💯💯💯💯🤟👍👍
What gets me about racists living in California is that they hate people speaking Spanish yet the name of state, city and street they live on is completely in Spanish lol.
I love how this post completely erases indigenous people while promoting the idea of a post colonial system as the previous owner of a stolen land.
Gaelic hasnt been lost. It’s never died or been brought back. There’s an unbroken line of native speakers going back to the beginning of the language. That doesn’t seem like a ‘lost’ language to me. Furthermore I’m not sure what ‘artificial life-support’ means in this context. Gaelic is given funding for schools because there’s still native speakers of the language. It’s no more artificial than money being given to schools for English language lessons.
If anything is ‘artificial’ its the imposition of a foreign language
(English) into a Gaelic majority zone and native speakers having to
fight for decades to be able to be taught in their own language. Native speakers being forced to learn English to exist within their own regions because a central government would not allow services to be given in a people’s own language.
But then the clock only goes back so far with people who wish that minority languages would just die. There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?
“There’s nothing artificial about shooting someone but suddenly it becomes an ‘artificial’ act to maybe phone an ambulance?” — THIS RIGHT HERE
Also just gonna point out here:
In the UK, the languages Gaelige, Gaelic, Cymraeg and Kernewek (that’s Irish, Scottish, Welsh and Cornish respectively) didn’t just “die out.” There was a concerted effort by the English to kill them off.
For example, in Wales, if a child was heard speaking Welsh in a classroom, they’d be given a “Welsh Not”, a wooden plaque engraved with “WN” to hang around their neck. They’d pass it onto the next child heard speaking Welsh, and whoever had the Welsh Not at the end of the day was punished – usually with a beating.
Kernewek was revived after a long hard struggle by the Cornish folk, and is now being taught again, but a lot about it has been lost because everyone who grew up speaking it has died.
And languages are never revived “just because.” The language of a place can offer so much insight into its history, so if you’re content to let a language die then you’re content to let history die.
People talk about “dead” languages as if they dwindle away gradually, naturally coming to an end and evolving into something else, but that’s rarely the case. Languages like Cymraeg and Gaelige and especially Kernewek didn’t have the chance to die with dignity, they were literally beaten out of my parents and grandparents.
Is it any wonder every other country hate the English? We invade their country, steal their history, claim pieces of their history as ours or flat out re-write it, and kill every part of their culture that we can.
It’s a miracle that any of the Celtic languages survived, so even if you don’t see the point in keeping them alive, the actual natives of each country we’ve fucked over are clinging onto what heritage they have left through the only thing they can: their language.
Hey OP, póg mo thóin!
*snerk* xD
I would like to point all of these “just let it die” assholes directly at Hebrew.
The language was effectively dead. It had been murdered and forced-assimilated away.
But there was this dude named Ben Yehuda.
And he said “no.”
“The language of my people for four thousand years or more,” he said, “should not stop existing because of a bunch of assholes.” (Okay, this is a dramatic retelling. He probably didn’t actually say assholes.)
So he started an official movement to recreate Hebrew as closely as possible to how it had been spoken about a thousand years prior.
Today, ancient Hebrew is spoken by millions of Jews around the world weekly in our prayers and Torah readings, and modern Hebrew is the official language of eight and a half million people–many of them having been born speaking it as a first language. Many people in the first group also speak at least some modern Hebrew–and it’s possible you do, too! A lot of loan words from Hebrew and Yiddish have made their way into English (like klutz, mensch, and kibitz).
That’s hardly “on life support.” Hebrew is growing, living, and thriving because of the Enlightenment efforts of the 1800s. The same COULD be done for languages like Welsh, Navajo, and Basque if the larger powers that be said “this is important” rather than forcing a giant bastion of culture–the language in which a people lived, loved, thought, told stories, and explained their world–to die.
there is a distinct difference between language that has died because it stopped meeting the needs of the people using it and language that has been deliberately killed by oppressors
I remember reading a linguist’s thoughts on this a while back. They noted that languages are not only an important cultural heritage, but also an important historical artifact that offers a look into the unique perspective of a culture. The things that we name and how we name them reflect our values and priorities. For example, Inuktitut is said to have several different words for snow that categorize them by various metrics. This reflects a need for communication regarding what the snow was like, which naturally would be important to a people who deal with snow on a near constant basis. There are nine different ways to say “you’re welcome” in Native Hawaiian, each responding to a different level of gratitude. You don’t respond the same way to “thanks for giving me a donut” as you do to “thanks for saving my life.” This reflects a culture of accountability and honor.
The study and preservation of indigenous languages worldwide is vital to the enrichment of our global culture. You don’t have to be fluent in multiple languages to be able to understand the perspective that is offered by nurturing this tradition. Our ability to communicate is one of our greatest gifts – what a waste it would be to throw that away simply because providing institutions of cultural heritage is too inconvenient.
I just want to emphasize the cultural component here. Languages die off like this due to people trying to wipe out that culture. Take a look at the Hague’s definition of genocide and see how it talks about trying to destroy that culture through forced assimilation, population control, and theft of children. Language destruction goes hand in hand with all of that.
When you stop to think about it, when do you hear of a language people just stopped speaking? When is it not associated with form of genocide?
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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