Settler colonialism is generally a brutal affair
JVL Introduction
Richard Shaw’s family, fleeing grinding poverty and near starvation in Ireland, were able to escape to New Zealand in 1874.
Poverty is not ennobling, and these victims of British colonial oppression in Ireland were to go on to become landholders in their own right as the New Zealand government cleared vast tracts of land of their original inhabitants.
Indeed, Shaw’s great-grandfather participated in the destruction of the Māori settlement of Parihaka as a member of the New Zealand Armed Constabulary’s occupying force and later obtained hundreds of acres to farm.
Thus, he says, my great-grandparents were able “to cast off the class strictures of Ireland and become respected members of the coastal farming community [in New Zealand]. And it is all built on land that had been confiscated from its rightful owners.”
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For recent developments see Don Rowe’s recent report Unstoppable movement: how New Zealand’s Māori are reclaiming land with occupations
This article was originally published by the Guardian on Sun 12 Dec 2021. Read the original here.
New Zealand My family history omits all mention of violence against Māori – I want to break the silence
It is a grim irony that my Irish family – paying to live on land colonised by the English – was involved in alienating Māori from their land
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What a really insightful article
Thanks, for a very interesting, and sad, example, of a process that has been repeating itself down millenia.
David Attenborough could draw out these patterns of behaviour, red in tooth and claw just like the struggle for survival in the animal world.
One big difference I can think of being that, as far as we know, animals don’t build mountains of propaganda, myths and religions (ie lies) to justify and mobilise themselves for the slaughter that they commit.
Why is it so difficult for Israel, New Zealand, Britain to apologise and make recompense ? Are the settlers still starving now ?
Oppression turns people into brutes. Just as Victorian colonialists used the Darwinian argument of ‘survival of the fittest’ to explain and justify their barbarity towards others they went on to colonise, so Israel uses the Holocaust and ‘Zionism’ and spurious arguments about ‘their right to self determination’ to justify its colonialism. The brutality is widely known about in Israel and the right wing celebrate it.
See this Haaretz editorial published on 12th December: Israel’s ‘Most Moral Army in the World’ Can’t Keep Running Away From Its Past
An elite professor of politics is a little confused with his nationalist labels, but he is published by the Guardian. It is all the fault of ‘the English;? May I suggest this professor takes a close look at the role of ‘Scottish’ & other ‘Irish’ elites in Ireland before accusations are made about ‘the English’. Religion played a huge part in the land grab & most of Britain is still owned by elite families who were privileged servants of the crown. ‘The English’ people are as much the victims as any other demographic & it continues to this day. Perhaps Richard Shaw would care to make some kind of reparation for the sins of his grandfather? The class struggle is not over.
What’s most shocking is that New Zealand was about as least bad as it got. Maoris are a significant proportion of the New Zealand population – 16%, and together with other closely related Pacific Island groups, c. 25%.
In the United States, a native population estimated at 10 million in 1492 was ‘reduced’ to c. 250,000 survivors by the late 1900s (a c. 98 ‘destruction’ rate), and Native Americans are still less than 1% of the US population (2.9 million, 2020 census).
In Australia a native (Aboroginal) population of perhaps 2 million was ‘reduced’ to c. 30,000 by the early 20th century.
A similar story was published on 9 December in Haaretz under the title Classified Docs Reveal Massacres of Palestinians in ’48 – and What Israeli Leaders Knew
“Testimonies continue to pile up, documents are revealed, and gradually a broader picture emerges of the acts of murder committed by Israeli troops during the War of Independence. Minutes recorded during cabinet meetings in 1948 leave no room for doubt: Israel’s leaders knew in real time about the blood-drenched events that accompanied the conquest of the Arab villages.”
Houses torn down as punishment- where have we heard of that recently?