Reading Group Week 17 - "Settler Militarism"
Hello. Thanks for being here.
This week we're starting a new book: Settler Militarism: World War II in Hawai'i & The Making of US Empire by Juliet Nebolon
If you haven't bought the book yet, please do that ASAP at the link above.
Readings
This week we'll read the Introduction and Chapter 1.
(At the end of this email I lay out the reading agenda until the end of the book, as well as the next book and future plans, so please read to the end)
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Reflections
Introduction: Settler Militarism, Racial Liberal Biopolitics, and Social Reproduction
Hawai'i took on dual functions as both "home front" and "war front" during World War II: Hawai'i's location at the intersection of these spaces is illustrative of how the islands constituted both a US settler colony that was "included" in the US nation-state and a vital military outpost that connected the United States to the rest of the Pacific Theater.
I use the term settler militarism to refer to the dynamics through which settler colonialism and militarization simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another during World War II.
... military documents of the period professed triumphantly that during World War II, Hawai'i "became a laboratory for the study of martial law," connoting imagery of the islands as controlled environments in which experiments were conducted upon bodies, populations, and landscapes in order to boost military strength and productivity. Describing Hawai'i as a "laboratory" suggests that this "experiment" concerned the extent to which these protracted conditions of biopolitical control and racial liberalism in Hawai'i could serve as a successful model for other current and future US military occupations in the Pacific Islands, Asia, or, indeed, throughout the world.
... as capitalism produces unsustainable dynamics of inequality and scarcity that eventually hinder its reproduction, it seeks to remedy its own insufficiencies through military expansion, war, and the colonial appropriation of additional markets, labor, land, and natural resources, as well as through the reiteration of these forms of expropriation within.
I've been thinking a lot over the past few months (years?) specifically about a relationship persisting between military, academia, and private industry in technology. Something I haven't really been able to put succinctly or convincingly has been exactly the nature of the relationship between these bodies - how they work together to advance collectively toward a common agenda - but the definition of settler militarism Nebolon provides stood out to me. The observation that these dynamics between militarism and settler colonialism specifically perpetuate each other, legitimate each other, and work to conceal one another has me thinking about how this framework explains what's so hard to pin down about the relationships between private tech, academia, and military/government funding. All this is to say that I felt like a light turned on in my head when I read this definition, and I wanted to call it out.
I also wanted to call out something I'm noticing in the introduction that I suspect will come up - it's an observation that maybe has a loose parallel to Palestine. The simultaneous conflicting status of "home front" and "war front", the use of this place and the people who have lived there for generations as a "laboratory".
In some ways, the parallels are extremely straightforward (authors have written books about how Palestine has been turned into a "laboratory" for Israel to test and export military and surveillance technology. In other ways, the characterization of this land as both "home front" and "war front" taps into the contradictory and sometimes incomprehensible, incoherent nature of the project of settler militarism, but one that we've seen Israel use to "rationalize" taking land and denying Palestinians basic human rights.
It's upsetting, but shouldn't be surprising, that Nebolon observes that militarism and capitalism work together to create an unsustainable status quo that is painfully familiar for those of us who have been paying any amount of attention to Palestine - "military expansion, war, colonial appropriation of markets, labor, land, and natural resources".
Also... this is a pretty conceptually dense book. I just want to acknowledge that I'm personally moving through it more slowly and deliberately. Re-reading paragraphs more often than usual, for instance. If you're worried that you're slower than with some of the past books we've read, I'm right there too.
Chapter 1: "National Defense is Based on Land": Landscapes of Settler Militarism in Hawai'i
At times, the federal government argued that the US military presence was beneficial because it would "improve" upon and industrialize the lands that it acquired, even as these so-called improvements inevitably desecrated natural landscapes for military purposes. Conversely, when the federal government seized land via lease, license, and permit for categorically environmentally destructive activities such as military training and bomb testing, it claimed that the land was too rugged for inhabitation or not profitable for agricultural industry, and thus not worth preserving.
It is vital to emphasize again that US legal jurisdiction over land policy in Hawai'i is itself predicated on an extended military occupation and an unlawful annexation of the islands. All property in this space—whether condemned, purchased, compensated, or uncompensated—is predicated on colonial dispossession. The Second War Powers Act merely reinforced and expedited the settler state's mechanisms of primitive accumulation, and it is the capitalist regime of property and exchange—that is, the conception that if the land were purchased fairly, then US military occupation would be acceptable—that rationalized this repeated act of dispossession as "just."
it is not surprising that most arguments against land condemnation during the war were expressed through tropes of monetary or property loss. Yet both the acquiescence to land condemnation and its contestation via federal lawsuit reified the myth of fair exchange, upheld the rehearsal of primitive accumulation, and contributed to the social reproduction of settler militarism. This is an example of how liberal resistance performs contestation without disengaging the system of violence: settler colonial property law left space for some forms of injustice to be legible and disputed while it marginalized others—such as Hawaiian dispossession—as a logical impossibility.
... the federal government used the fact that it had established and funded modern installations such as airfields to rationalize the US military's extended presence in Hawai'i and the transformations of the landscapes that it occupied. But in many cases—such as the dredging of the ocean floor, the storage of explosives underground, or the clearing of land for military housing or installations—these supposedly benevolent "improvement" projects displaced communities and harmed local environments in irreversible ways.
I knew in very broad strokes about the United States's project of dispossession of land and autonomy in Hawai'i, but I didn't know anywhere near this level of detail, and I think I didn't map so much land theft that happened so recently in particular.
Reflecting on the observation I made in the introduction chapter - namely, parallels to Palestine - I kept thinking about the legal system Palestinians are obligated to parse through when their home is marked for destruction or stolen by settlers - things that we've read about through Refaat Alareer's prose and caught glimpses of in Mohammed El-Kurd's writing. The preposterous, lopsided court systems that have utterly foreclosed on justice, and only mete out remuneration according to a liberal capitalist paradigm that in its own way is already a concession to occupiers' logics.
All this is what I was taking away from Nebolon's point about how this entire idea of US legal jurisdiction over land policy in Hawai'i is predicated on unlawful annexation. That is, I don't think I was bringing anything specifically new to the table, except that as I was reading about the utterly fucked system through which people had to trudge in order to get a reassessment of the economic value of their land (a form of assessment that wildly favored military installations like air fields, or vast hotel and resort facilities, or plantations; and that totally devalued the relationship that people had with that land for generations).
But I was taken aback by this point Nebolon made about the US military making these duplicitous, self-contradictory assessments of land to serve their purposes. Saying the land was worthless for anything because they couldn't drive a jeep through it safely, or land a helicopter. Then dredging the entire coastline, or using it for munitions testing, or building military housing on the land; and then turning around and saying that by their accounting (by their colonial logic) they've improved the value of the land that had previously been worthless by millions of dollars. It's a dizzying, galling kind of logic... but how far removed are we from standard Israeli practice?
In the same way that America used Hawai'i as a "laboratory" to experiment in annexation, land theft, dispossession, and lopsided legal frameworks that favored settler militarism (and, when conflicts came to a head, were between the settler and the military - never the indigenous people who actually had any relationship with the land)... Is it fair to surmise that America exported the lessons from those laboratory experiments?
Germany and South Africa infamously were keen students of Jim Crow and the broader apartheid system that characterized and characterizes the United States - one that we have scarcely disassembled, let alone reconciled. How closely does yet another regime have to match the movements that the US engaged in before we say there was probably some exchange of ideas?
How many times have American political leaders looked at Gaza and said that there aren't enough hotels there, or that the indigenous population are not using the land efficiently enough, or that colonizers and the military could use the land more effectively? How closely does it match the ethos and the framework that apparently animated the history of condemnation, annexation, theft, etc... in Hawai'i? And how often have we had to debunk and rebuke Zionists who claim that the military installations or the non-native Pine tree forests or whatever else they build on stolen land has "improved" the land that had once been part of a sustainable relationship with the Palestinian people for generations?
Share your reflections
This book is kind of a first for us in a number of ways (maybe most notably, that it doesn't name Palestine in its analysis, and it's not "about" Palestine). For that reason as much as others, I'd like to hear what connections you're making in reading this book.
If you'd like to chat with me and/or the rest of the people in the Signal group chat, I'd love to see you there.
Otherwise, let's chat on Saturday at 12pm ET, during the weekly video call.
Other news
Reading schedule
I can offer a preview of the reading schedule/pace now if it helps. I'll also send reminders of that week's reading, so don't sweat it, but if you like to be able to plan things out, you'll have as much info as I can offer:
| Week | Date | Reading | Call | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | May 12 | Intro + Chapter 1 | May 17 | |||
| Week 2 | May 19 | Chapter 2 | May 24 | |||
| Week 3 | May 26 | Chapter 3 | May 31 | |||
| Week 4 | June 2 | Chapter 4 | June 7 | |||
| Week 5 | June 9 | Chapter 5 + Conclusion | June 14 |
We'll start the final chapter of Settler Colonialism the June 9 (and have our last discussion on June 14).
Next book
Our next book will be Riot. Strike. Riot by Joshua Clover 
I expect us to start reading the week of June 16, so please put in an order soon.
If you buy the book from Open Books, the proceeds will go to Palestinians in Gaza via The Sameer Project. If you can't buy these books via the Open Books shop, please consider donating directly to The Sameer Project.
As I write this email, I'm seeing that the death toll of a recent Israeli attack on Nasser hospital has killed at least 39 people. This is immediately following Hamas returning an American who graduated from high school in New Jersey and volunteered to serve in the IOF, and was captured while he was occupying Gaza.
The new pope called for a ceasefire. Pen America reiterated their support for nonviolent protest. I apologize if a spiritual leader wishing for a return to the ongoing state of apartheid elicits too much disdain for me to hide it, just as I apologize if my eyes roll out of my head too violently at Pen America's bewilderingly conditional support of resisting your own annihilation.
More than a million Palestinians in Gaza, tens of thousands of children, are at risk of starvation at this moment due to Israel's inhuman blockade. If you have time, please read this essay from Hala Al-Khatib, a writer in Gaza.
Two books?
I'm thinking about starting a second book that we would begin reading within the next few weeks, that might thematically be an opportunity to underscore the conditions of famine that Israel is creating in Gaza - The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey by Laila El-Haddad & Maggie Schmitt.
I'm thinking about formats that would be compelling. I've got photography and video gear, so I'm not averse to recording or photographing dishes. I realize "the algorithm" favors photos and videos. I'll appease the algorithm if it gets more people to pay attention to the catastrophic conditions in Gaza right now.
If you'd be interested in joining me by making a couple of Palestinian dishes from this cookbook (or you'd just really like to see me struggle - totally fair), please @ me on social media with a screenshot of your order of the book, or a donation to the Sameer Project, or something to get my attention.
I'd like to believe that I can get people to buy the book, raising money for the Sameer Project. If I can do that, I'll happily do it. If there's interest, then I'll follow up next week with plans.
Support people in need
If you have extra funds, please donate directly to the Sameer Project.
Support the reading group
You can also support the reading group if you have a few dollars to spare per month. Don't worry if you can't support, but if you can, it would help.
Thanks
Thank you for reading to the end. Please take care of yourself, and if you have the capacity, check in on someone this week.