Don't forget the Russians.
On December 23, 2023 8:02:09 PM PST, Heather Madrone via Silklist <[email protected]> wrote: >Alok Prasanna Kumar via Silklist wrote on 12/23/23 7:25 PM December 23, 2023: > >> The first lesson that comes to mind >> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Palestine>is "don't trust the >> British <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Independence_Act_1947>" but >> that is of low value in resolving an existing situation. >Isn't that how Israel/Palestine got into this mess in the first place? By >trusting the British? > >Unwinding colonialism/imperialism is tough. It probably can't be done. All we >can do is start from where we are and try to build a better future out of the >good we can piece together. > >I'm fairly confident that basing a nation on elevating one style of human >being over another (by race, culture, creed, sex, or what have you) is going >to, by its very premises, produce an unjust government. We don't learn to live >together by increasing balkanization; we learn to live together by facing our >issues and hammering out solutions that work for almost everyone but that >leave everyone somewhat unsatisfied. > >At some point I realized that the history of California is one layer of >colonialism on top of another, and it's still going on today. > >My Dellaguerra ancestors were of a people who wrote that history in Spanish. >When the next layer moved in, they wrote the history in English and ignored >the history of the people before them who had themselves worked to erase the >history of the indigenous people who had lived on the land before them. The >people who wrote/write the English history established California as a >colonial property of the Northeast and they have not lessened their grip in >the century and a half that has followed. > >So maybe add "Don't depend on Washington to solve local problems" to "Don't >trust the British." Every colonial/imperial power acts in their own interest >and not yours. > -- Silklist mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist
