many US states had actual bounties for the scalps of indigenous people. the federal government hired mercenaries to wholesale slaughter entire villages. the eradication of the buffalo was a deliberately strategic terrorist attack to eliminate a critical resource for plains tribes and nations. even if this wasn’t livestreamed on facebook, the op eds and articles of newspapers were absolutely dominated with xenophobic, eurocentric violent languge demanding the eradication of the “savages”…
and also ya chattel slavery was a thing
i think although how we look at state violence and how it is conducted is definitely different now, we really shouldn’t be downplaying the historical settler colonial genociding and enslavement the US is literally founded on by saying fascism is more noticeable now. it’s different, with different margins and peripheries.
I don’t mean to downplay the history at all! It is different because so many people nowadays tends to brush off past atrocities because they happened x amount of years ago and therefore don’t affect what happens now.
How many times have we witnessed someone bringing up how the history of slavery and/or residential schools still affect our society in the present which then almost always results with people getting incredibly defensive because “the past is the past, get over it”.
That’s what I meant by unnoticeable; a lot people brushed it off, treating History like a one and done thing.
many US states had actual bounties for the scalps of indigenous people. the federal government hired mercenaries to wholesale slaughter entire villages. the eradication of the buffalo was a deliberately strategic terrorist attack to eliminate a critical resource for plains tribes and nations. even if this wasn’t livestreamed on facebook, the op eds and articles of newspapers were absolutely dominated with xenophobic, eurocentric violent languge demanding the eradication of the “savages”…
and also ya chattel slavery was a thing
i think although how we look at state violence and how it is conducted is definitely different now, we really shouldn’t be downplaying the historical settler colonial genociding and enslavement the US is literally founded on by saying fascism is more noticeable now. it’s different, with different margins and peripheries.
I don’t mean to downplay the history at all! It is different because so many people nowadays tends to brush off past atrocities because they happened x amount of years ago and therefore don’t affect what happens now.
How many times have we witnessed someone bringing up how the history of slavery and/or residential schools still affect our society in the present which then almost always results with people getting incredibly defensive because “the past is the past, get over it”.
That’s what I meant by unnoticeable; a lot people brushed it off, treating History like a one and done thing.