Forced Indigenous Exodus: The Marshall Islands
Only some of the root causes responsible for the disproportionate impacts of climate change are obvious because the plumes of carbon emissions jettisoned behind the industrial transit pumping the globe’s capital bloodstream blot out the sun on particularly profitable days. Old world pollutive technology is marketed as innovative by green capitalism, fraudulently sold as clean because it is marginally more so than the last most profitable one. The likes of EV batteries are still charged with power from greenhouse gas (GHG) producing energy infrastructure. A select number of the world’s most polluting multinational companies and countries supplement fracked natural gas to shift away from coal and oil while precious metals for technological development remain extracted under conditions nearly identical to slave labor in the Congo. Capitalism’s feedback mechanism extracts profit by creating consumer demand to constantly grow the market faster than it can be made sustainable. As the system scrambles to appease an ever more unified working class, a high-risk group of Marshallese Islanders on the front lines of the climate crisis continue to flee their poisoned and shrinking ancestral home. By exploring more abstract, invisible and radioactive sources of their intersectional plight, a deeper complexity arises to reveal the simultaneously nuanced and holistic approach necessary to respond to all peoples’ needs instead of profiteering.
Part I: Notes on Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic structure that artificially sets a Darwinian survival of the richest system as the foundation for its functioning. The cut throat competition of capitalism is supposed to stimulate innovation, but it is not always the most innovative products with the best profit margins.
The speed of development and distribution of for-profit covid-19 vaccines in America is notable, but I can’t help but recall how there was no Ebola vaccine necessary.
It is not paying workers a living wage that makes the most profit, or minimum wage workers would not need to work multiple jobs. It is not paying them at all when the machine runs the smoothest. The information age of the internet has not allowed our society to hide from the reality that slavery and genocide is the most efficient way to power the global economy that sold us smart phones. All operations under this structure extract the life or life-sustaining resources from one group of people and region and sell it as a luxury or need to another peoples.
The fundamentally extractive process of capitalism is reliant on an owner of capital and a workforce to provide the labor to generate profit, or any net positive investment on the capital. The capitalist has no vested interest in the “wellbeing” of their capital investments or labor force so long as they can turn a profit. Capitalism has always required the exploitation and extraction of life itself to function, where once people were openly bought and sold until deemed unjust, so too are the trees, air, ocean and all that inhabit it subject to play their “essential” roles in the ends to generate profit.
When every square foot of usable land on Earth is taken, the capitalist will sell the healing properties of asteroid chunks for that sick feeling of being stuck on a planet you couldn’t help but kill.
The inherent nature of capitalism places capitalists above workers in a class hierarchy, where value is solely determined by the means and/or ability to generate profit. However, it is the capital and labor itself that is necessary for life-sustaining functions, not ownership of either. Land is used to house and feed the laborers, sustaining the cycles of nature that have insofar permitted the growth and evolution of our brains and thumbs to destroy it. Even if capitalists take none of the profit, their maintained ownership prevents its acquisition, disallowing workers confronted with growing wealth inequality from ever competing. The denial of the capital necessary for survival of the laborers also allows for their control at threat of the dissolution of opportunities to provide value generating labor, especially when the capitalist’s survival no longer depends on the generation of value from their capital.
This structure necessitates capitalists as either benevolent rulers that allow serfs and peasants to live off their land, which they hold ultimate ownership and rule over, or the inequitable wealth extraction and exploitation of workers that gain rights and/or capital, but endure an accelerating widening of wealth inequality. The means of production are squandered by the most powerful capitalists on a death for profit system. The spectrum of capitalism we live in today exists somewhere between monarchy and slavery, or rather, is varied on a regional spectrum with shades of grey by regulations of profit margins inversely proportional to the amount of rights given to the laborers.
In Britain the contemporary monarchy does not have supreme power, but presides over a parliamentary system of government that allows capitalists to use residents as labor until popular unrest elects a fascist head to address the problems that arise as a side effect of capitalism. When Britain was facing an influx of refugees, British populism voted in favor of a Brexit, levying centuries of wealth accumulation from the spread of Imperialism and Colonialism against any responsibility to respond for their part in inflicting white supremacy on the world. The UK rejected refugees to create a crisis and enemy to nationally rally against to continue a slow and steady approach to changes in general governance, including the crawling reduction of the use of GHG producing fuel. Conserving the institution prolongs the daily crises threatening the lives of people made into refugees. Their need of humanitarian aid after the market demands their displacement or death is blamed for the dysfunction of priorities that is disguised as a government’s inability to simultaneously meet the needs of domestic well-being and continual economic growth.
In the US, an ideologue and political leader is the face of a nation that allows capitalists to use residents as labor until popular unrest elects a fascist to address the problems that arise as a side effect of capitalism by rallying behind a common enemy to blame. The first European steps onto America preceded indigenous genocide and enslavement. Landing on occupied land, colonizers used an alien arsenal of language, weapons, and disease to cleanse the land of her indigenous inhabitants and make way for their white manifest destiny. Once the land was awash with sin, the toil of profit was not taken up by the new owners of the land, but instead brutally forced upon enslaved Afrikans and remaining American Indians. The long term detrimental affliction of this pattern of behavior to the land and her people has festered into “green” capitalism. Greening is the next step in sustaining the growth of profit, lest the impending and human-accelerated approach to the collapse of biodiversity slows societal development.
The contradictory western system oppresses militarily, if not democratically, onto “savage” or “primitive” indigenous people for white profit. Capitalism creates a population for value generating labor by separating the population into owners and workers. By displacing people and removing their ability to repatriate, their only means of survival are to work within a disproportionately life threatening structure that perversely extracts their labor and graciously provides the means to some to afford meals and/or shelter. A captive population is pacified and made complicit in their own objectification and exploitation, or killed outright if unwilling to be profited off.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Belgian colonialism and decades of political unrest left the nation to fall into domestic warfighting over territory. White capitalists necessitate themselves to buy the rich Afrikan resources extracted by slave labor since they are not given the investments, education, or opportunity to construct the infrastructure to compete with western interests before another alien “market fluctuation” deprives their communities of the means to survive.
None of the profits generated overseas “naturally” return to benefit the enslaved Black Afrikan peoples, damned to break rocks and fill white pockets until they fill mass graves.
Part II: Weapons of Existential Destruction
What is a weapon? What is death?
The centuries widening racialized wealth gap from the accumulation of wealth to white powers generated a trickle-down effect of cis white male privilege as a form of capital. The technological innovations of society are disproportionately granted to countries historically ruled by white men that have taken the side of democracy. Through selective international cooperation in the EU, UN, and NATO, economic favoritism is denied to nations outside of western influence, a rule defended by a US-Allied nuclear umbrella. The naturally self-preservative institutions of control work to prevent the equitable adoption to the means of coequal competition, leaving the non-western world disadvantaged from what was stolen by western whites for their industrial revolution and still withheld through a nuclear weapons superiority.
Nuclear weapons serve both to compel and deter adversary action. Any oppositional socioeconomic system becomes a threat in this framework. Forces competing on uneven ground must also become capitalist to compete, or capitulate to western interests and “protection”.
The industrial “revolution’s” explosion and rapid Euro-American adoption was accelerated by the trans-atlantic trade producing rapid economic growth due to slavery in all emerging industries. Profits fueled the development and expansion of white owned capital that is denied equitable distribution across the class, race, and sex boundaries that exist within the rest of the global working class.
With all their god given power, white men in America secured Congolese Uranium from enslaved miners and used it to develop the most devastating weapons ever used in human history. The American victory in Japan had to be decisive to affirm American global dominance, and leave the US as the largest economic and technological benefactor during a segregated nuclear-powered renaissance in the 50s. The economy would continue to fluctuate while tending towards growth; repeated recessions inflicted human suffering and exacerbated social problems. The voices of the antiwar and civil rights movements, like the revolutionaries before them, reveal inequalities intrinsic to the institutions of capitalism. State responses have historically ranged from violent suppression to reversible appeasement before populism positions authoritarian capitalists in power to return to the economic growth that is slowed when accountability to human rights is demanded.
The socioeconomic health impacts from this constant instability are felt most so by those with the least social safety nets. Economic growth can serve to meet short term needs of the impoverished, but within this structure it is inevitably stripped away from some “external” event due to the othering required to sustain it. Poverty is weaponized and threatened to compel the working class to act in a certain way, and policing is used as a deterrent to not act another way. The cyclic reiteration of fascistic control to reprimand revolutionary cries of the oppressed working class is the terminal tumor preponderant to the fundamentally self-destructing construct of Capitalism.
Fascism is the only immediate remedy to the material survivability of a people or nation threatened by capitalism. Genocide is committed repeatedly for any centralized institution to remain in power when its survivability is threatened by “the market”. The planet and her inhabitants will continue to reject industrial development on the terms that they are constantly at existential threat to be poisoned, exploited, and/or killed, to benefit the other. The tank that drives capitalism is powerful enough to drive the whole planet to its death before most humans will get a chance to breathe.
Part III: Disarmament
UC Berkeley’s intimate involvement with the development of the mass-murdering nuclear bombs leaves the institution complicit to genocide and slavery with no real repercussions to its credibility. Any punitive responses will serve to perpetuate the system instead of uprooting or dismantling its white power.
In a Nuclear Weapons policy class while at Berkeley I was denied points by a GSI on a midterm for not regurgitating the lectured rhetoric that Truman was justified in his decision to drop the nuclear arsenal on Japan to end the war.
I was told he made a pragmatic decision to drop the bomb, Goldman School of Public Policy Professor Michael Nacht recounted:
“estimates were that if the US invaded the Japanese islands, it would cost a million men and [Truman] said … ‘if I had a weapon that could end the war earlier I would use it, and if I didn’t use it and it later became known I had a weapon that could have ended earlier they’d have hung me in Washington.’ ”
Nacht on Truman’s decision to not use nuclear arms in the Korean War:
“during the korean war, which is 50 to 53, there were a couple of times when Truman considered using the atomic bomb, but Truman’s view again was very practical. He said these are weapons of mass destruction that should only be used in case the homeland of the united states is being threatened, not in case of just what was called a ‘limited war,’ a war with limited aims, limited weapons, and limited geography, which was the Korean war, so Truman rejected the idea of using the weapons against the Koreans, but I don’t think it was for racial and ethnic reasons I think it was because of just practical and strategic reasons.”
Since its inception, the Anglo Saxon protestants that would occupy Turtle Island have always used their plight to assume a position of power to create a practical and strategic reason to inflict violence. The capitalist response is modeled on how to profit off the violence it inflicts instead of preventing it. It cannot be denied that capitalism is efficient in stimulating productivity for economic growth, but demanding violence to inform a response in service of its remediation removes the net benefit of any productivity. If what can be defined as a “limited war” and a world war are between essentially the same adversaries in the same region that pose no immediate threat to the homeland of America, the fluid logic of the system is laid bare: the growth of the economy did not demand that Korea be nuked like it did for Japan.
Part IV: The Marshallese
Communities on the front lines of climate change cannot hold any illusions about their path forward; indigenous people of the Marshall Islands are at an intersection of global crises caused by their dehumanization to maintain capitalism. Micronesians had lived on the islands and atolls for thousands of years before a Japanese military base was established in 1914. Once the region entered US military control during WWII, its remote location was deemed perfect for large scale nuclear weapons testing. It was later revealed that some scientists had explicit goals of studying the impacts of radiation on present victims of massive radioactive fallout. Cleanup efforts poisoned the military veterans sent to cover up the offense, while entire atolls are still too contaminated to return to, leaving islanders radiologically displaced.
Radiocarbon dating marks the arrival of Indigenous Micronesians to the Marshall atolls, settling atop coral reefs and islands poking no more than 6–20 feet above sea level, between 50 and 30 BCE. US accountability has been lacking for decades since the ending of all nuclear weapons tests. The Marshallese are, from many avenues, forced to move from their ancestral birthplace to seek refuge, work, healthcare, and their families in the affordability of the continental US midwest, away from the extensive radiation contamination and encroaching sea level rise.
“Recent studies show that damage sustained to fresh water supplies and to food crops due to salt water inundation pose a more eminent risk than recently believed. Some estimates show that many lands will be uninhabitable within a generation”
As for the radiation…
-Marshallese Education Institute, 2021-
The US has taken a sort of responsibility over the defense and repatriatiation of the Indigenous Marshallese in the creation of the Compact of Free Association. Despite well intended appearances by the US regarding the “special relationship” between the RMI (Republic of the Marshall Islands), the agreement’s terms are not indefinite.
“The U.S. provides Compact funding to the RMI and FSM to assist in their efforts to promote the economic advancement, budgetary self-reliance, and economic self-sufficiency of their people, and in special recognition of the special relationship that exists between them and the United States. Current Compact assistance is provided on a sector grant basis until 2023. The sectors are: Education, Health, Private Sector Development, Capacity Building in the Public Sector, Environment and Public Infrastructure.”
Will an agreement to support the people from the RMI stand when it is beneath the ocean? Will they have enough social and legal capital to continue pursuing multiple lawsuits against the government by 2030? The Marshallese face total displacement and disenfranchisement, and with the roots of their ancestral home soon severed, there will be no way to follow up on US promises of repatriation without reversing the effects of global warming. The RMI has already “filed the ‘Nuclear Zero Lawsuit,’ claiming that the countries [in the Non Proliferation Treaty] have failed to move towards nuclear disarmament,” but were denied justice. Their fight is the same on all fronts, thousands of people unified fighting against ultimate weapons, to save and secure their sovereignty from the destructive force of global capitalism. Their movement seeks to castrate the power that keeps the dominance of a death-based economy before they are made refugees of both the Climate and Nuclear Weapons Crises.
The Marshallese and their remaining sovereign lands are at a point of high tension in the battle, on the verge of losing more indigeneity by the most prescient issues threatening the well being of all people’s lives. In time, more profound impacts of increasingly irreversible climate change will arise out of the global instability seeing increases of climate and war refugees. Participating in the sustainability of the institutions that make up our entire way of life perpetuates them and all the harm they cause. Continuing on the terms and policies of the world governments and multinational corporations that have had decades to do the right thing, but have not only refused at every turn, instead decided to take every opportunity to secure profit instead.
Only in whiteness is the pride of man shone off his skin so clearly, reflecting the sun through the trees and savannahs, burning under the very life giving rays of the sun that allowed us to be here at all.
The Soviets almost had it right…
“Early French and English settlers at first were both startled and horrified by the game.” Almost everything short of murder is allowable,” one noted. “If one were not told beforehand that they were playing,” another wrote, “one would certainly believe that they were fighting.” Soon, however, they fell under the spell of the game, learning to watch (and place side bets) among themselves. So much so that lacrosse played a role during the period of Pontiac’s Rebellion in which several Indian nations fought to reclaim lands from occupying British forces in what is now the Midwest. In 1763, during King George III’s birthday celebration, Indians staged a game outside Fort Michilimackinac on Lake Michigan. While His Majesty’s soldiers were caught up in the game’s progress, warriors took the fort.”
