Displacing and destroying peoples by colonisation is not just a historical Western evil but a global and contemporary one
In 1931, Japan invaded northeast China and established a client state called Manchukuo (Manchuria). To secure control over Manchuria, over the next 14 years, the Japanese government lured 270,000 settlers there by offering free land to ordinary Japanese households. Japanese propaganda stressed, importantly, that this colonisation scheme was not inconsistent with Japan’s commitment to racial equality. Japanese farmers would bring new agricultural techniques to Manchuria and ‘improve’ the lives of native Manchus, Mongols and Chinese by way of example.
Japan’s settlement of Manchuria represents a case of settler colonialism, a concept that was initially developed in the humanities to explain the violent history of nation-building in North America and Australasia. Unlike traditional colonies such as India or Nigeria, as Patrick Wolfe explained, settler colonies do not exploit native populations but instead seek to replace them. The key resource in settler colonies is land. Where Indigenous land is more valuable than Indigenous labour – often because Indigenous peoples are mobile and cannot be easily taxed – native peoples are killed, displaced or forcibly assimilated by settlers who want their land for farming. Settlers and their descendants then justify these land grabs through discourses that both naturalise the disappearance of Indigenous peoples (it was disease!) and stress the benefits of the civilisation the settlers brought with them.
Although settler colonialism has become a valuable framework for explaining the history of Western countries like the United States and Australia, the dynamics that it describes are clearly quite general…
https://aeon.co/essays/settler-colonialism-is-not-distinctly-western-or-european
After the truth-shower 