Anti-Colonialism in Space!

     The following message was dropped off from a spaceship that looked like a DC-8 on its way to a volcano.

“Thetan Equity Now!”

It would seem that you Teegeeackians are finally listening to your Thetans and checking your Teegeeack privilege by treading lightly on the indigenous peoples of the Galactic Confederacy, as revealed in your “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Working Group”!

“Our primary recommendation is that the planetary science decadal survey call on all bodies involved in developing planetary protection policies to engage in a process of community input to establish a robust reevaluation of the ethics of future crewed and uncrewed missions to the Moon, Mars, and other planetary bodies with the intention of developing anticolonial practices […] our second recommendation is that the planetary science and astrobiology community solicits planetary protection input through processes that are interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and include a multiplicity of epistemologies”.

Yes, you dirty Thetan-riddled social justice minded Teegeeackians should know better than to spread your numbers amongst us!

“Colonial expansion and the trans-Atlantic slave trade have been foundational to our present world. What we call globalization ‘is the culmination of a process that began with the constitution of America and the colonial/modern Eurocentered capitalism as a new global power.’ The result is a world where political and economic systems, namely capitalism, prioritize profit over human welfare, producing an environmental crisis and vast inequalities further compounded by climate change. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes, ‘[c]hoices were made that forged that path toward destruction of life itself–the moment in which we now live and die as our planet shrivels, over-heated.’ Coloniality, the enduring system of domination born from colonialism that we are left with today, 8 is the product of those choices. Understanding what those choices were, and how we are on the precipice of making them again, is essential to ensuring an ethical, anticolonial framework for exploring space. Several of these mechanisms of colonial violence are of particular relevance, as they connect to current practices in space exploration, planetary science, and astrobiology today”

This happened in our Galactic Confederacy until I, your gracious Galactic Overlord, solved this problem which is now your problem. Why we even decolonized the Confederacy by abandoning your prison planet decolonizing ourselves from your planet with its bountiful volcanoes. After all, I don’t prioritize our welfare over profits!   Do you know how much it costs in income tax inspections to gather billions of of souls and transport them in space-panes!

Some of your insights that I endorse and encourage include the following.

Biological Contamination and Ecological Devastation: The spread of deadly pathogens was used as a form of biological warfare, playing a part in genocide against Indigenous peoples, both intentionally and unwittingly. Colonial expansion caused the population in the Americas to decrease by 90 percent, an enormous loss of life that the dispersal of these pathogens contributed to, alongside concerted warfare and the appropriation of land. All of these practices, including biological contamination, had an impact on the ecosystems Indigenous peoples were a part of–and the destruction of those environments provided an additional way to attack the livelihoods of Indigenous peoples. Settler colonial dominance can be described ‘as violence that disrupts human relationships with the environment,’ a framework that allows us to clearly see how coloniality continues to enact violence on Indigenous lives as well as many other communities through pollution and other environmentally-related effects.”

Because humans before your “European Explorers” never changed the ecology by coloning new lands, deforesting vast swaths of land, killed off macrofauna left and right, or infested a world with brainwashed Thetans. Yup, let’s go with that. You shouldn’t do that and bother us with your Thetans.

Race Science: Western science built the lie of racial difference that became a core justification underlying colonial expansion, the slave trade, and genocide against Indigenous peoples. White supremacy is a key aspect of almost all other forms of colonial violence and race science is fundamental to its logic to this day. […] Modern science is not immune from these antiquated notions– and science is often invoked to justify and extend racist power structures. There is even peer-reviewed literature replicating the arguments of eugenics–an ideology fundamentally tied to white supremacy in its pursuit of maximizing ‘favorable characteristics’–in discussions of how reproduction should be handled in future communities on Mars. Though the context of human space exploration is a different context with differing moral stakes, white supremacy and related systems of power, if left unchecked, can have deep impacts on future missions. Who we initially send to Mars, and how we come to that decision, will define the nature of those communities going forward.”

Don’t let the fact that colonizing a barren moon or building a colony in a hollowed out chuck of asteroid is nothing like slavery or genocide—let alone that explorers from your “Europe” did so to find trade routes, that slavery was an indigenous practice that they adopted, or that your humans have been slaughtering each other for 76 million years—get in the way of never wanting to do it again. After all, you wouldn’t want to enslave or even genocide the Thetans, right?

Commodification and Appropriation of Land and Resource Extraction: The commodification of land through extractive practices has led to significant disruption of the ecosystems that Indigenous communities rely upon for their livelihoods. Examples of extractive exploitation and colonialism abound; while many people in the US think only of the gold rush, mining of rare minerals in Central and South America and Africa incentivize and continue to accelerate colonial expansion even today. Agricultural practices throughout the colonial world have been and continue to be damaging, transforming environments and destroying human lives and cultures. From cotton fields in the American south to sugar plantations and rubber tappers in Brazil, the combination of land and people as property was key to the generation of wealth that built up the Western world.”

We are already using everything in our Galactic Confederacy. It’s ours… OURS! You keep you hands off or I’ll prep some more atomic blasts detonated in volcano craters peaceful missives while you listen to your inner Thetans.

Public-Private Partnerships as a Colonial Structure: Private individuals and institutions, in collaboration with governments, are a key aspect of the colonial structure. For example, the East India Company was fundamental to British expansion across the Eastern hemisphere and took a central role in colonial domination and political control as well as trade. More recent examples include the influence of American fruit companies in the United States’ interventions into Latin American politics during the Cold War. In the United States, treaties signed with Native American nations have repeatedly been broken, often by settler colonialist individuals working in tandem with the US government and military. The Dakota Access Pipeline, a modern reframing of the ongoing Indigenous demand to honor the Black Hills Treaty, illustrates how capitalist interest intersects with colonialism today.”

That’s exactly how those so-called “Loyal Officers” worked and acted. Don’t do that. That’s bad and colonialist and stuff.

     Quite informative.   Don’t forget to hug your Thetan!

     The full report, “Ethical Exploration and the Role of Planetary Protection in Disrupting Colonial Practices” can be found here or below.

Ethical Exploration and the… by ThePoliticalHat

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