The Democracy of the founding fathers was Greek Democracy, predicated upon a slave society, and restricted to only the elite. This is the society we live in today, even with our reforms towards direct representation. The system is inherently biased towards the election of elites and against the representation of the masses. Hamilton called it “faction” when the working class got together and demanded better conditions, and mechanisms were built in (which still exist to this day) that serve to ensure the continued dominance of the elite over the masses. The suffering of the many is intentional. The opulence of the wealthy is also. This is the intended outcome.
Settler-colonialism is a capitalist ideology. It has everything to do with capitalism.
I don’t think that’s an inherent truth. Just look at Koenigsberg/Kaliningrad. After WW2 the local Germans were expelled and the city and adjacent lands were completely resettled by Russian settlers. You could try to justify it in a million ways, although I don’t know if ethnic cleansing can ever have a justification, but that’s what happened in the end, in Communist USSR, under Stalin. The reason why today’s old Prussia is Russian instead of German, or Polish or Lithuanian.
And the USSR did the same thing in many other places like Poland, DDR, Moldova, Ukraine etc. Settler-colonialism has nothing to do with capitalism or communism. It has more to do with power and controlling the land.
I appreciate that insight, and while I don’t agree, it does give me something to chew on for a while, and another excuse to read the soviet archives to see what they were discussing internally at that time. That archive is a godsend, it’s how you can prove definitively that the Holodomor was not intentional, and that attempts were made to not only ease it, but to preempt it from happening. Attempts which were sabotaged by a class of people who wanted to keep their privileges and place above the ordinary people.
This is retribution for an attack and massacre of civilians, not colonialism. Israel doesn’t want Gaza.
Then why do they have over 500,000 settlers illegally living in what is internationally recognized as Palestinian territory? Why are they bombing the exact escape routes they demanded that Palestinians use? Why are they bombing the West Bank, where Hamas has no presence? Why has literally the entire world called this a genocide except for two countries: the US and Israel? Why did the Israelis kill 248 Palestinians, 40 of which were children, just this year, and just prior to the attack? Why do they call their periodic bombing campaigns “mowing the lawn”? You have to be literally delusional to think that THE ENTIRE WORLD EXCEPT FOR YOU is wrong. There’s only two countries that support this horrific genocidal campaign, and one of them is committing it, the other is arming them to commit it.
Edit: The big one, why have the Israelis prevented adequate amounts of food aid to enter Gaza to ensure healthy nutrition? They literally control how much food and water Gaza gets, and have for decades. They control how many building materials get in, they control the border and don’t let people leave. It’s literally called the “largest open air prison” in the world, by international watchdogs and its being called a genocide by holocaust survivor genocide awareness groups.