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PALESTINE | USA | TRUMP
Trump: Globalize Gentrification
American Empire parading in the raw
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Few people remember Trump’s RNC speech last summer. Do you? The pioneer speech? Promising to restore America to its past greatness, Trump gave a vision of “our pioneer ancestors” in their wagons pushing the Frontier across “empty lands”, and “taming the wilderness.” (In the same speech, he condemned the “invasion” at the Southern border about ten times, making me wonder what’s the difference.)
He’s not wrong in viewing American history that way. America’s tale was one of continued expansion and an unquenchable thirst for “territory”.
The “Frontier” was where bands of “settlers”, in the name of “defense” frequently raided indigenous villages to loot, burn, and shoot. As one of Steinbeck’s characters in The Grapes of Wrath says, “‘My grampa fought the Injuns for it.’”
Writes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States:
“The same methods and strategies that were employed with the Indigenous peoples on the continent were mirrored abroad.” (p. 162)
“The architecture of US world dominance was designed and tested by this period of continental US militarism, which built on the previous hundred years and generated its own innovations in total war.” (p. 218)
Since the Louisiana purchase, the US kept adding territory. The Mexican war, the railroad and the conquest of the West, the Spanish-American war, the takeover of Hawaii and Puerto Rico. In the 20th century, American power expanded through aircraft carriers, alliances like NATO, hundreds of bases all over the planet, and into space. No people anywhere could object to the presence of US bases in their countries. Like its veto in the UN, America is here to dictate.
Nothing in American history, or culture, tells Trump he could not take over the Panama Canal, Canada, or Greenland, if he so wanted. Such an expansion seems a natural flow of American history. No negative consequences or accountability ever followed past takeovers. The genocide of the Indigenous peoples of America was never atoned.
