Every time someone tries to reduce settler-class status they try to make it as if only "frontier" settlers, those killing-clearing-planting-and-building, were the full extent of the relation. This collapses even that those roles were *classed* and socially divided labor

There is a myth of the "hero settler" that posits one man could do such a thing, that one engages when reducing settler dynamics like this, laundering the "sins" to a make-believe class of actors to disavow. Sure, a few people (hand countable), did all of those things, not alone.

Settlements were always social ventures, and subject to evolution. They were organizations of hundreds to thousands of people bound by business interests, "personal" interests, class interests, bondage, etc. Most warfare was done by settlers of all classes, specifically men.

This is because the settlement is a living expression of the frontier. It is always surrounded by the frontier. The frontier isn't metaphysically a line on a map, it's a projection of force potential across a space and time. Every male settler was required to be a militiaman.

Settlements usually preceded war, they are attacked for stealing resources, or go on the offensive, and use the resulting resistance as justification to eradicate competing powers.

The settlement never goes away. We still have militias (to the furthest extent, the draft retains state ownership over male bodies in the United Settlements). All land is the Bordertown (from Red Nation Rising Bordertowns). Frontiers never close unless by revolution.

The West Bank settlements are not rogue individuals, they are complex formations of global travelers, lines of support within existing settlements, and remote business and familial ties in their true homes and Wall Street. Land in Palestine is being advertised for sale in NYC!

The police and IDF of random towns come over to kill Palestinians on behalf of settlers from all over the world. You cannot distinguish the whole state and civil society from settlement, they are all settlers, not just the bozos who steal warm beds and dinners.

Established settlements invite more settlers as land buyers, builders, farmers, laborers in factories and mills, all of these people are joining established settlements, and then being conditioned and inducted into the state apparatuses through militias and armies. All settlers.

Yapped too long on this but there's exceptionalism to think early Americans were superhuman killers who had superior tech (gun trade was global 100 years before Anglos showed up) and the lack of gunpowder production was hemispheric for centuries (US 1804) https://t.co/EmDCPF4pHL