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Comment by OfSanguineFire | Hacker News Reader

> Manifest destiny is white supremacist (read: Nazi)

Nazism is a phenomenon of early 20th century Europe. Even if that political movement drew on some older prejudices, it mixed them with new contemporary concerns, and the total aggregate dates specifically to that era. 19th-century North American manifest destiny was racist, and perhaps for certain people its space-colonization echoes today are, but to apply the label Nazi feels very ahistorical, dishonestly so. One might conclude that the author is being provocative for the sake of profitable online outrage.

Labels are getting thrown around too carelessly. I’m reminded of an HN post I once saw where anti-LGBT attitudes in the Muslim world were called literally fascist, even though they often predate fascism (again, a distinct political phenomenon that appeared at a particular point in time and space) by centuries.

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A fascist doesn't bundle an axe into a collection of sticks and then hit you with it either. The nazi party wasn't particularly socialist when it comes down to it, for that matter.

The use of words drifts, calling roughly aligned successor movements "nazi bullshit" is a useful signifier.

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." -Mark Twain

How is useful to refer to attempting to find new homes in places other than Earth "nazi bullshit?"

Whose homes? Under what conditions and decided by which institutions, under what power dynamics? When you elide all that as "find new homes" you are leaving a lot of room for work colonies, extractive exploitation, and eugenics, yes.

"Is having friends a conspiracy?" well... maybe, it depends on what you do with the friends. In cases like this you need to be at least a little specific about the implementation.

If this sort of straightforward rhetoric gets even a handful of people to notice that the concrete plan musk has is at least agnostic towards nazi bullshit then it was precisely useful.

Would it make any sense to describe the Polynesian settlement of Pacific islands as "nazi bullshit"? (Granted, we have little or no access to proto-Maori ideologies of the 13th Century, say, but discussions of what "colonization" is or means tend to be really Eurocentric...)

There's actually quite a lot of scholarship about what empire and colony can mean and look like in non-european contexts. People who do that work define and qualify the terms carefully.

In this case it makes sense to focus on europe, because european colonialism has recently & radically shaped the world we live in a way none other has. To the extent non-euro states are currently attempting or achieving empire, they are doing it based on the model and tools of european colonialism. Right now, as discussions of space colonization are taking shape, they are as well.

A joke I made elsewhere in this thread: when pacific islanders roll up trying to create indentured servitude on mars, we can expand & adjust the models and definition as needed. But for now there's no value in attempting to generalize, the narrow model fits the conditions we are presented with.

_when pacific islanders roll up trying to create indentured servitude on mars, we can expand & adjust the models and definition as needed. But for now there's no value in attempting to generalize, the narrow model fits the conditions we are presented with._

If you could travel to Mars in an open-air vehicle, and then land and survive on the surface wearing nothing more than ordinary clothing, and get your water from local streams and rivers, and grow crops on the surface with no special effort -- _and_ if Mars was already inhabited by human societies adapted to the land, whose food you could eat, with technology roughly equivalent or somewhat below yours, and political divisions you could exploit, and wealth and products you could extract -- well, then your European-colonialism analogies might have some relevance.

The reality is "the narrow model" (of European colonialism) doesn't remotely fit "the conditions we are presented with"... But we seem to be in the mode of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail": when all you know is European history, European history is the only possible model.

(Really, something like the Maori colonization of New Zealand -- which had no pre-existing population, and required the settlers to bring their own crops and scout for resources for making tools -- is _marginally_ more relevant. Even more relevant are things like research stations in Antarctica, where -- again -- there's no pre-existing population, and where you simply _can't_ grow food locally or easily survive outdoors.)

So what you're saying is that The Three-Body Problem, a pro-space colonisation novel is in fact white supremacist and espouses a Nazi ideology, despite being Chinese and written by an overtly pro-CCP author?

As is Dyson Sphere Program, a game developed by Chinese studio Youthcat Studios?

Okay, enough about China, what about Japan? Legend of Galactic Heroes, Xenosaga, Crest of the Stars, Superdimension Fortress Macross, Space Battleship Yamato, Starship Operators, Bodacious Space Pirates, Star Ocean? White Supremacy seems awfully popular among these non-White creators.

As an aside, it's probably for the best that the aforementioned bundle of rods around an axe isn't often used in a pro or anti context these days. Otherwise people might freak out about the design of the lincoln memorial or something. (this thought's been stuck in my head since I noticed them adorning a bridge's sides in a city where I lived next to a 1916 memorial.)

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