Colonization Radicalizes

A post not found in the Internet Archive, rescued here.

I can never look upon that Proclamation in any other light (but this I say between ourselves) than as a temporary expedien⟨t⟩ to quiet the Minds of the Indians & must fall of course in a few years esp⟨e⟩cially when those Indians are consenting to our Occupying the Lands. 

- George Washington to William Crawford, September 17, 1767

At the end of my time in Israel and Palestine back in '09, I was wearing a "Gaza, my love" t-shirt (marking the ~1000 Palestinian civilians killed in Operation Cast Lead) outside of our hostel when an Israeli walked over to me and sneered, "Gaza got what it deserved."  A common thing I also encountered was Israelis (not the Shministim we worked with) throwing American genocide of our indigenous populations in my face, to which I generally responded, "yeah, you're right, we suck, and I don't want to fund such evil anywhere."

Colonization is violence, and radicalizes everybody involved.  Of course, that's particularly true for those on the short end of the stick, but the entitlement it engenders in people who happily take part in oppression leads them to feel oppressed when any limits are placed on them.

So here we are, with Israel and Gaza exploding once again, almost exactly 50 years after the Yom Kippur War started, and coincidentally 260 years after what one could argue was a major cause of the American Revolution:

[I]n August 1763, warriors of the Upper Ohio Valley, Wabash River, and Great Lakes nations "entered into a combination against us, resolved it seems to prevent our settling any farther than we have, viz., much about the main Blue Ridge of mountains." Thus participants in Pontiac's Rebellion raided twelve British forts and numerous settlements as far east as Winchester, Virginia.

At the time of the uprising, royal officials in London were already studying a proposal to confine Britain's North American colonies behind a western boundary. They had two principal goals: one was to keep the colonists within Britain's economic and political orbit, the other to halt colonial encroachments on Indian land in order to prevent a costly Anglo-Indian war. The boundary idea came too late to prevent the uprising but carried the day when news of Pontiac's Rebellion reached London.

On October 7, 1763, British officials drew a line along the watershed between rivers flowing east into the Atlantic and those flowing west into the Mississippi. American governors were prohibited from issuing any land grants beyond this line! Most historians deny that the so-called Proclamation of 1763 was a cause of the American Revolution. They ask how the proclamation could have angered colonists when it was only a "paper blockade" that failed to prevent settlers from simply crossing the Appalachian Mountains and establishing farms.

Indeed, as a Virginia Gazette essayist pointed out in 1773, "not even a second Chinese wall, unless guarded by a million of soldiers, could prevent the settlement of the lands on Ohio and its dependencies:' The ease with which yeomen families slipped across the imaginary Proclamation Line has led scholars, particularly "pro-Indian" historians, to assume that the barrier was also ineffective against speculators. That assumption is wrong. Speculators must be distinguished from settlers as a separate class with very different interests.

Speculators could not sell land until they secured clear title to it. Starting back in 1745, the gentry-dominated Executive Council of Virginia gave gentry-owned land companies preliminary grants to millions of acres west of the Appalachian Mountains. Then the land firms' effort to acquire and sell this land was interrupted, first by the start of the Seven Years' War in 1754, and then by the 1758 Treaty of Easton, which reserved the area west of the Appalachian Mountains for the Indians.

During this time, the Virginia land firms' preliminary grants expired, which prevented most of them from securing title to the land they claimed. The companies were barred from renewing their preliminary grants by the Proclamation of 1763. Many years later, a lawyer for two land firms pronounced the proclamation a species of "tyranny" that was "sufficient to prevent the operations of the companies."

Greedy speculators/slavers like George Washington chafed at such boundaries, which inclined them toward resisting the taxation necessary to maintain a colonial empire.  And it was all downhill from there.

I sum up with Surah 5 (The Feast): 

We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being...it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.

Or, to put it another way, we can turn to parallel verse in Sanhedrin 4:5: the world was created for my sake, hence I must be upright.

I have no answers to the current violence.  I only blog so as to not ignore evil in our past and present, and to consider the question, "is it really impossible to make the invisible country visible?"  Perhaps if you will it (a decolonized country), it is no dream.

Selah.