Check out Coleman Barks “translations” of Rumi for a rage-inducing example of this - basically wrote his own poetry and called it translated.

That’s great!

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That makes sense! I would like to not consider myself Amerikkkan.

I asked for a materialist discussion.

I can’t read this as anything other than condescending. You seem to think your thoughts are inherently materialist.

Please cite the definition of chauvinism you’re using, because I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Disengage is a hexbear thing not lemmygrad.

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This is probably the context: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/7572198

Thanks for weighing in! You’ve given me a direction of study that might be helpful. You’re probably right that an identity would probably built in the act of resistance, something about theory and practice there.

Your tone reads as very condescending and rude to me, and it makes it difficult for me to have a polite conversation with you.

Again, this is just thinly veiled chauvinism imo.

You’re being insulting without understanding your insults. Chauvinism is patriotism, I am specifically opposing patriotism here.

So the black people in the us or the germans who have never understood the us settler situation did not bring any culture to the us.

Stolen slaves from Africa were not settlers, they had their culture and ethnicities taken from them to become part of the black underclass.

German settlers were settlers. They gave up their ethnic identity to become part of the opressive white overclass. The vast vast majority of Germanic descendants in the U$ retain none of their ethnic origin.

Why do you think you understand the material conditions in the U$ more than people here? Would you consider my opinion over yours as to the German national project?

You’re talking past me, it makes me feel like you haven’t read what I’ve written. The vast amount of culture in the U$ is intentionally, verifiably, created as synthetic nation-building propaganda.

What is an element of culture in the U$ that you consider to be real and positive?

That seems reasonable. I don’t think we’ll see a united front against oppression in the U$ that includes a large number of whites/settlers.

Like, we’ll see some with more specific identities (communist/antifascist or whatever).

I think there’s a point in there about not having an identity beyond benefiting from oppression.

I agree

I dont think this is a meterialist view to be frank. The people living in a place are not their ancestors and stating that people have no culture is in itself fascist. Its one precursor to genocide so I think we should take a less chauvinist view on this.

I don’t think that’s a kind way to interpret what I’m saying. The romanticized history of Americans is an intentional propaganda push, and not related to some innate culture. The nature of the settler-colonial project necessitates giving up personal ethnic origins to become a settler.

I’m not saying that Americans have no real culture because they’re innately bad, I’m saying they have no culture because they gave it up (or their ancestors did) to take part in a synthetic settler culture.

People aren’t their ancestors, but they do benefit from the things their ancestors did and took in their name. That has to be taken into consideration.

Thanks for weighing in!

I think they’re pretty apt comparisons. Both were invaded, but a large percentage of the population were active collaborators. I think that collborators-resistance-invaders dynamic could be relevant to any conflict here (like the troops are from out of a given state and supported by local chuds).

But importantly, the U$ is an invaded state supported by active violent oppression. It’s basically an unholy amalgam of Vichy France and the Nazi government, and only held in place by violence over the oppressed groups.

(Edit - also those two are just what I read about most recently, not really intentionally strategic examples)

If you strip the settler state of imperialism, mcdonalds and other usually american values, what remains?

I don’t think there’s anything left. Every single element of shared American identity comes back to something horrific, or the intentional exclusion of people based on race (e.g., the “founding fathers” slavery while professing liberal values).

was the later us full with people or are some of the stories of wagons through dusty landscapes real and did some of these people actually struggle against nature to build up something?

The Eastern U.S. was mostly peopled by native groups in static settlements. While they died to disease, iiirc groups like the Taino were directly genocided and worked to death.

The diseases the Europeans brought had more time to work their way across the continent, and by the time large groups of settlers made their way into the interior of the continent, a massive amount of people had died already. In the plains, what was left were smaller groups living in a post-apocalypse. They still directly genocided them (for instance, by killing all the buffalo to destroy their ability to feed themselves), and destroyed static settlements on the west coast.

Even more fucked up, they drove the Cherokee from the Missouri region to reservations in Oklahoma ( the trail of tears), then drove them off the reservations when white people wanted the land.

The romanticized history of brave frontier farmers is a history of the dumbest people in the world claiming land that was used by nomads, fighting the nomads for it with the full support of the state, deciding they didnt even need any of the community farming conventions used in Europe, and fucking up so hard they almost destroy agriculture in the region (the dust bowl). They’re basically the same as the Isra*li settlers.

Idk, there’s a lot of history, and it’s all pretty dark.

The white supremacy makes cascadia a non-starter

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