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celebratedrecluse wrote

What would giving the land back look like?

How can you gives something like land?

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[deleted] wrote

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celebratedrecluse wrote

Abolishing the state and settler property rights.

It sounds nice, but how on earth can we achieve this in practical terms? The problem with these systems is, you let them survive just a little, and they will reinstate themselves dynamically; it is the nature of colonization. And they are very hard to wipe out, true? I cannot really imagine such a thing occuring without forced removal of settlers; settlers are the consumers which demand colonial governments and property rights, if they do not have these things they will find a way to establish them unless they are completely unable to do so.

How can an anarchist, let alone an anarchist with nihilist affinities, espouse this "give the land back" approach, without endorsing a state to enact such a plan? Even if the problems of ideology are discarded, how would this even occur? There are hundreds of millions of settlers across huge swaths of land.

There is a certain animus toward "worldbuilding" on the board, but what is more ambitious than to build a world without such things?

Decolonizing relationship to land

What does it mean? I could guess, but what do you mean?

More concretely in the short term, there are pretty much always ongoing battles over indigenous land as the state continues to take more of it.

But this is just protecting the land holdings of indigenous people (usually as representated by a "tribal government" "first nation" etc, which is a colonial entity).

While good, this is very different than "giving land back" which would entail having a way to undo ownership of particular lands as well as implying specific people to give it to, in addition to those specific people having rights/ownership over it, either collectively or in the individual/colonial sense, which further has difficulty in reconciling the colonial nature of land ownership as a concept in most places which were colonized by the European.

But also, I think it's nice as a direct challenge to the settler left who ask the question you did.

A recursive discourse which appears to thrive mostly among white people competing to be the least white, no?

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