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.
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Heather Madrone (heat...@madrone.com)
Blog:http://www.knitfitter.com/category/personal/
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