Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

carpenter would earn in a day. When new communities of
invaders were started on the edges of conquered areas, the
settlers simply divided up the land. For example, when
Wallington, Conn. was founded in 1670 each settler family
got between 238-476 acres. This amount was not unusual,
since colonial Amerika was an orgy of land-grabbing. In
fact, much of the land at first wasn't even purchased or
rented-it was simply taken over and settled. As much as
two-thirds of the tilled land in Pennsylvania during the
1700s was occupied by white squatters, protected by settler
solidarity .(6)
So central was the possession of land in the personal
plans of the English settlers that throughout the colonial
period there was a shortage of skilled labor. Richard
Morris' study of labor in colonial Amerika concluded: "In
the main, the ultimate economic objective of colonial
workmen was security through agriculture rather than industry..
.As soon as a workman had accumulated a small
amount of money he could, and in many cases did, take up
a tract of land and settle on it as a farmer."(7)
Where land was not available, settlers refused to
come. Period. This is why the British West Indies, with
their favorable climate, were less attractive to these settlers
than wintry New England. As early as 1665 a member of
the Barbados Assembly complained, noting that the
limited space of that island had already been divided up:
"Now we can get few English servants, having no lands to
give them at the end of their time, which formerly was their
main allurement." And British servants, their terms up,
would leave the Indies by the thousands for Amerika.(8)
It was this alone that drew so many Europeans to
colonial North Amerika: the dream in the settler mind of
each man becoming a petty lord of his own land. Thus, the
tradition of individualism and egalitarianism in Amerika
was rooted in the poisoned concept of equal privileges for
a new nation of European conquerors.
2. The Foundations of Settler Life
The life of European settlers-and the class structure
of their society-was abnormal because it was dependent
upon a foundation of conquest, genocide, and
enslavement. The myth of the self-sufficient, white settler
family "clearing the wilderness" and supporting
themselves through their own initiative and hard labor, is a
propaganda fabrication. It is the absolute characteristic of
settler society to be parasitic, dependent upon the superexploitation
of oppressed peoples for its style of life. Never
has Euro-Amerikan society completely supported itself.
This is the decisive factor in the consciousness of all classes
and strata of white society from 1600 to now.
Settler society was raised up, above the level of
backward Old Europe, by a foundation of conquest. This
conquest was a miracle drug for a Europe convulsed with
the reaction of decaying feudalism and deadly capitalism.
Shot into the veins of the Spanish feudal nation, for instance,
the miracle drug of "New World" conquest gave
Spain the momentary power to overrun North Africa,
Holland, and Italy before her historical instant waned. For
the English settlers, this conquest made real the bourgeois
vision of building a whole new European society. Like
many such "fixes", for Euro-Amerikans this conquest was
addicting; it was habit-forming and rapidly indispensable,
not only culturally, but in the mechanism of an oppressor
society whose lifeblood was new conquest. We will examine
this later, in the relationship of settlerism to imperialism.
For now, it is enough to see that this conquest is
a material fact of great magnitude, an economic and social
event as important as the emergence of the factory system
or the exploitation of petroleum in the Middle East.
We stress the obvious here, because the Euro-
Amerikan settlers have always made light of their invasion
and occupation (although the conquered territory is the
precondition for their whole society). Traditionally, Euro-
pean settler societies throw off the propaganda
smokescreen that they didn't really conquer and dispossess
other nations-they claim with false modesty that they
merely moved into vacant territory! So the early English
settlers depicted Amerika as empty-"a howling
wilderness", "unsettled", "sparsely populated H -just
waiting with a "VACANT" sign on the door for the first
lucky civilization to walk in and claim it. Theodore
Roosevelt wrote defensively in 1900: " ... the settler and
pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great
continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game
preserve for squalid savages. "(9)
It is telling that this lie is precisely the same lie put
forward by the white "Afrikaner" settlers, who claim that
South Africa was literally totally uninhabited by any
Afrikans when they arrived from Europe. To universal
derision, these European settlers claim to be the only
rightful, historic inhabitants of South Afrika. Or we can
hear similar defenses out forward by the European settlers
of Israel, who claim that much of the Palestinian land
and buildings they occupy are rightfully theirs, since the
Arabs allegedly decided to voluntarily abandon it all during
the 1948-49 war. Are these kind of tales any less
preposterous when put forward by Euro-Amerikan settlers?
Amerika was "spacious" and "sparsely
6 populated" only because the European invaders destroyed