Reality of Reconquest

With indigenous people making news from the Caucasus to the Andes recently, we thought it might be a good time to reintroduce Bill Weinberg’s article about the current War on the Fourth World. As Bill observes, the inter-state conflicts in global resource wars often obscure the underlying reality of reconquest of indigenous nations by modern states for the purpose of plundering their property.

While some might argue that the theft of indigenous properties by modern states has been ongoing 24/7 since 1492, the nature of that looming larceny has taken new forms in the public mind, and thus the media and academia supporting such a grandiose criminal enterprise has had its hands full keeping us mesmerized with the free-market mantra. With 500 million people as the target of G8 genocide, obscuring and distorting this reality is no mean feat.

As autonomous zones around the world gain ground in the campaign for independence and subsidiarity relative to criminalized corporate states, the indigenous perspective is increasingly difficult to deny, and ignorance itself in the era of the Internet becomes a willful exercise in self-delusion. With the help of journalists like Weinberg and scholars like Bernard Nietschmann, the ignorance that bolsters neoliberal arrogance has perhaps met its match.