the frontier, settler colonialism, the united states

settler colonialism, imperial wars, patrick wolfe

Macaes - History has Begun, rooted in fantasies of a “frontier”

boogaloo boys blog post
previous imperial wars?
- vietnam, george kennan “complete withdraw, followed by complete silence”
it’s not rome, it’s not the hundred years war, it’s not even really institutional rot
the core of american settler colonialism upholds the midwest as an unique american ideal
- native americans
- slavery and blacks
lack of transitional justice
selling of frontier culture, merging of american frontier culture onto the wars
- television and technology made wars simultatnously more real and more livable
  - @tactikurd
settler colonialism has always been alive in america, “blank slate” of iraq, “blank slate of the afghanistan”, “blank slate of westward expansion”, even as it was blind to the remarkable human suffering
slaves were imported instead of using native americans as labor sources because the natives had no plausible claim to the land
american amnesia

thesis: it’s not imperial wars that come home, technology and social media + failures of the US have activated a latent libertarianism/strain