That Settler-Extremist Rebellion of 1776

... and what it can tell us about America, Israel, and the world today

The abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass memorably asked, back in 1852, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Today, we should also ask, “And What to the Native American is the Declaration of Independence?” An exploration of this latter question can illuminate both the nature of the rebellion that the White Supremacist settler extremists launched here in Turtle Island (North America) back in 1776 and also what the Jewish Supremacist settler extremists have been doing in occupied Palestine for the past 33 months—or, indeed, the past hundred-plus years…

Here are two key items from the sharply worded list of accusations that the American settler extremists laid out against King George III in their “Declaration of Independence” of July 4, 1776:

• He has endeavoured to prevent the [colonial settler] population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

• He has… endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

Hmmm.

Today’s Washington Post contains an excellent article in which a very smart Native American journalist there, Dana Hedgpeth, explores the impact that the second of those items— especially its reference to “merciless Indian Savages”— has had over the years on young (and not so young) Native Americans. Her whole article is worth reading. One thing she writes is that some scholars have judged that Thomas Jefferson, the chief drafter of the Declaration, was actually “very sympathetic” to Native people— but that in the Declaration, he was eager to “paint the worst possible picture” of them, in order to bolster the case for the settler extremists’ rebellion.

Hmmm.

Hedgpeth also notes that in 1776 many of the colonists had, “opposed King George III’s Proclamation of 1763, which barred settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains.”

George had issued that Proclamation as a spinoff from the Treaty of Paris, an arrangement he concluded with the monarchs of France, Spain, and Portugal at the end of the “Seven Years’ War,” during which the British forces in North America fought and roundly defeated the French forces there.

This was the territorial aspect of the Treaty and George’s Proclamation in North America:

Source

Visible in that map is the “Indian Reserve” that George agreed to in 1763. However, in 1748 his predecessor, George II, had already given a massive “land grant” within the northern part of that reserved area to a new privately funded body called the “Ohio Company”, that had been formed by financiers and colonists from Virginia and London.

So of course those colonists and investors were upset when, just 15 years later, George III tried to stop their colonial expansion activities…

The Anglo colonists’ mid-18th century push for colonial expansion was just one step in a much broader process that, as we know, ended up taking them across the whole continent and over to Alaska, Hawai’i, and other islands even further west in the Pacific.

In 1646 CE, back in the early days of the Anglo settler project in North America, the settlers in tiny Virginia had concluded a peace treaty with the local Powhatans in which the settlers agreed to restrict their land-grabbing to just a tiny area around the mouth of the James River…

But the settler movement was so powerful, so well-armed, and so very profitable for everyone who invested in it or participated directly in it— that time after time after time the settlers literally and figuratively rode roughshod over all the constraints that a whole series of treaties with the Indigenes sought to force upon them. The fact that, in the treaty he’d concluded in 1763 with a bunch of fellow European monarchs, George III had tried to restrict the settlers’ areas of colonization and to reserve to the Indigenes a special stretch of land for themselves, infuriated them.

Those accusations against the Indian Savages

In addition to explicitly labeling the Indigenous peoples of this landmass as “merciless Indian Savages”, the Declaration of Independence also specified that their “known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” There is a clear parallel there with some of the more gruesome— and equally false— accusations that the Israeli government and its acolytes worldwide launched against the Palestinian resistance movements after the resistance stunned the Israelis with the incursion of October 7, 2023. Reading that portion of the Declaration of Independence today, one almost expects it also to include accusations about “40 beheaded babies” or the “mass rapes” of the colonists’ women…

But in both cases, those completely unsubstantiated accusations served two key purposes:

1. They served to yet further de-humanize, diminish, and “other” the members, leaders, and activists of the Indigenous communities in question, and

2. They also served to give permission to the authorities and fighters of the colonial entity to treat the Indigenes in that exact same (or an even worse) manner.

… Many commentators have said that the accusations about Palestinian misdeeds on October 7 could perhaps be read as “confessions” regarding what the Israelis had already done. For my part, I think they are better read as clear declarations of intent.

And, as any reading of Native American history will show, the Declaration’s accusation that the Indigenes’ “known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions” gave a very similar permission to the settler extremists to— in woefully many cases— treat the remaining Indigenes here in just that same same violent and inhumane way, here on this landmass.

Settler-Extremist Rebellions in a historical context

The SER pursued here on this landmass in 1776 was in many ways one of a kind. (And here’s my place to acknowledge that as a British-born White immigrant/settler in this country I have benefited very greatly from the generally White-Supremacist set of norms, laws, and expectations within this society.)

The Anglo settlers’ SER of 1776 had these distinctive features:

1. It was conducted as a rebellion directly against the colonizing power that had earlier violently stolen and then protected the spaces within which the settlers had built their colonies, and thus constituted a form of parricide.

2. It was remarkably successful. It stabilized its form of governance, and proved capable of mobilizing all the resources and the armed forces that were needed to continue the expansion of that rapacious, violent colonial project ever further westward. Yes, there was a violent internal division among the settlers in the 1860s over the issue of slavery. But after that conflict was resolved the project of expending ever further west while subduing, marginalizing, and in many cases genociding the natives was resumed. By the beginning of the 20th century CE, the USA was emerging as world power, with considerable influence across both Americas and in both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean basins.

We can contrast the SER of 1776 in these respects with several other similar rebellions in more recent times. Of these, I can note:

1. Various phases of the Zionist project in Palestine:

The Zionist project received a huge initial boost from Lord Balfour’s declaration of 1917 and until 1947 received considerable support and protection from the British Mandatory power. But the Zionists started chafing at the restrictions the British placed on them and increasing numbers of them turned to anti-British activity. By 1947, the British were exhausted and fed up and dumped the whole issue of Palestine into the lap of the still-young UN Security Council which then, in November 1947 simply gave the Zionists a large proportion of the land of Palestine. That was not enough for the Zionist mainstream which from before the date of the planned “independence” of the two states decreed by the Security Council started working to grab even more land…

Ever since 1947-48, the Zionist have worked to increase both the physical extent and the violently repressive nature of their control. They have done this across all of Palestine and also in Lebanon, Syria, and (earlier) Egypt. These expansions always violated key principles of the UN Charter. Those violations and now, increasingly, the actual rhetoric of Israel’s leaders and representatives constitute a clear form of parricide against the UN, the body that gave “Israel” its (highly contestable) birth certificate in the first place.

Regarding the success of this project: It has had great success thus far. But it can never aspire to become a continental power on the scale of the USA, or Australia. But the successes it has had thus far remain very fragile. It is still deeply dependent on the continuing support in many arenas (military, intel, diplomatic, financial) of the USA and other “Western” powers; and it has meanwhile been unable to inflict decisive defeats on some notable Indigenous resistance movements in Palestine, Lebanon, and elsewhere in West Asia.

2. Ian Smith’s “Rhodesia” project in Zimbabwe

This one was clearly parricidal in that it was mounted directly against the control of the main colonizing power, London. The climax of this movement was Smith’s issuing of a “Universal Declaration of Independence” (UDI) in November 1965.

The UDI’s text clearly borrowed several rhetorical flourishes from Jefferson’s text!

The movement it represented inflicted considerable pain on communities across Zimbabwe over the 15 years that followed. But in 1980 Smith and his colleagues had to accept defeat. The nation of Zimbabwe finally received its independence in 19780. Ian Smith died in South Africa in 2007.

3. The Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) in Algeria and France

This rebellion grew up in the early 1960s among many French army officers and many of the French colons (settlers) whom the French had implanted in Algeria ever since they’ first conquered Algeria in 1830.

The OAS was formally founded in 1961 with the goal of preventing Algeria's independence from French colonial rule “by all means necessary.” It carried out bombings, assassinations, and acts of torture— mainly in Algeria but also in France— that resulted in over 2,000 deaths. Several times, as France’s President Charles De Gaulle proceeeded with negotiations for a peace agreement with Algeria’s national independence movement, the FLN, OAS members attempted to assassinate him, too. Many OAS operations in Algeria were designed as provocations or false-flag attacks that would spur the FLN to increase its level of violence and thus abort any move toward a negotiated peace…

Until that time, Algeria had been ruled and administered as an integral part of the French state— though with almost no rights for the Indigenes. The main motto of the OAS was L’Algérie est française et le restera ("Algeria is French and will remain so.")

But De Gaulle was resolute, and the FLN did not over-react to the OAS provocations. In the Spring of 1962 De Gaulle reached a far-ranging peace+national independence agreement with the FLN.

FLN soldiers in the field, 1958. Source.

Some early conclusions

This quick survey of other Settler-Extremist Rebellions of modern times shows that of the three surveyed, only the Zionist SER has survived thus far; and it indicates fairly clearly that this survival is highly dependent on the continuing support the project receives from the USA, which is the product of the grand-daddy of all SERs, back in 1776.

Both Ian Smith’s “Rhodesia” movement in Zimbabwe and the OAS in Algiers sought above all to influence/affect the decisions of the colonizing power/metropole rather than, for example, to undertake the hard task of suppressing the natives directly, themselves. And both those SER’s failed to achieve their goals. De Gaulle was more stalwart in resisting/opposing the OAS’s plans than was Harold Wilson’s government in London. But at the end of the day both Paris and London did the right thing (and/or, bowed to the inevitable.)

What might this tell us about the future options/choices for the leaders of the (now very hardline) Zionist settler-extremist movement in Palestine— and about how this movement might be most effectively resisted? I think this indicates two things:

1. Given that the United State today continues to function as the (supportive, permissive) “metropole” for the Zionist project in Palestine, then if Washington should start to take steps to curb or constrain the hardline Zionists’ pursuit of their project in Palestine, we might certainly start to see actions in this country analogous to those that the OAS took against De Gaulle and other high-ranking targets in France. (I note that the Zionist hardliners are also extremely happy to engage in directly eliminatory actions against the Indigenes in West Asia. But their ability to continue to do this is directly dependent on the continuing cooperation of Washington ion this effort.)

2. All the above indicates that anti-genocide, anti-occupation, and anti-colonial activists here in the United States have a special responsibility to work to cut, once and for all, the violent umbilicus of support upon which the settler extremist movement that is Zionism is nearly wholly dependent. In doing this, those of us U.S. citizens who have been beneficiaries of the settler-colonial project here can do something significant to undercut the whole White Supremacist concept on which the West’s hegemony in the world has long been built. But this does not absolve us from also seeking to build right relationships with the Indigenes of this land, too.