An excellent post. I’d like to add that Hawaii is already a grossly expensive place to live, so much so that many native Hawaiians have been forced to move to places like Nevada while what was once their home has become the playground of the extremely well healed. A large influx of people simply wouldn’t work.
Maybe in the same sense that newly freed slaves in the American south were part of the “we” that implemented Jim Crow.
That’s basically correct. It’s how imperialism works. I’m sure there were native Hawaiians who benefited from the rise of white-owned plantations on the islands, but they would have been exceptions and not rules.
Western countries liked economic imperialism because it was relatively bloodless compared to more aggressive colonialism (unless you’re the King Leopold sort), but the end results were still the destruction of culture and agency.
[quote=“Johnny_Bravo, post:42, topic:963908, full:true”]
Maybe in the same sense that newly freed slaves in the American south were part of the “we” that implemented Jim Crow.[/quote]
Are you saying that things were/are as bad for Hawaiians as they were for African-Americans under Jim Crow?
Are you saying this based on specific knowledge of Hawaiian history, or are you more extrapolating from general truths about imperialism?
I have to a certain extent read about the perspective that portrays Hawaiians as complete victims of the US, but my impression has also been that most Hawaiians don’t feel that way. My knowledge is limited, however.
I’m saying that an oppressed group is not necessarily complicit in the way their oppression is legislated.
Both, although I’ll admit that while my historical knowledge is very broad, it’s also shallow in some places. I do have a working understanding of the motive and means by which we took over the islands.
I know very little about how modern-day Hawaiians feel about that era.
It would be fair to say that, compared to the other native groups we interacted with, native Hawaiians did pretty well. But that’s a really, really, really low bar.
What I don’t think has been demonstrated here is that there was legislatively mandated racism against the Hawaiians or that most Hawaiians were unhappy with how things went.
I am perfectly willing to assume there were injustices–there always are–but I need more evidence before I believe a completely negative take.
I think what clearly a problem now is what Jasmine said: that the rich are pushing people out, an injustice which would apply both to native Hawaiians and other ethnic groups that have established a history there.
I didn’t think anybody was from California. Everybody I ever met there was from somewhere else.
I’m not sure what you mean by “a completely negative take.” I’ve already said that economic imperialism is relatively bloodless and that we did somewhat better by them than we did other native groups. That doesn’t mean we did right by them. As you say:
Everything after that is just degrees of shittiness.
I am/was a second-generation Californian who moved to Montana in 2008 to get away from it all. California in the 1950s and 60s was idyllic and a great place to raise a family. Very little crime, no pollution, and no traffic jams. Today California is a nightmare. Almost every farm, ranch, and orchard in Northern California have been paved over. Nearly 8 million people live in the SF Bay Area and nearly 24 million people live in Southern California. A little over 1 million people live in the entire state of Montana, which is roughly the same size as California, and that’s too many people for me.
I think that degree is important, however, especially if one is considering living in a place.
I’m a Liberal, and I support Liberal causes. But people are bored, and there is always someone out there raging about something that isn’t that big a deal. Further, humans in general like having a cause, and a lot like harboring grievances. Thus it can be difficult to calibrate one’s own thoughts on a matter simply by listening to the loudest, angriest voices, and the same is true of listening to the apologists.
The overthrow of the existing regime and illegal annexation of Hawaii (that is, without any concurrence or referendum of the natives) was done at the explicit behest of the Citizen’s Committee of Public Safety, a group of seven foreign businessmen (five of them Americans) and six non-aboriginal Hawaiian subjects and which was casually known as the “Annexation Club”. There were abetted by pro-annexation politicians in the US Congress who had obvious ties to business interests, and of course they put Sanford Dole in charge of the new government, first as President of Hawaii and the Territorial Governor. If the family name seems familiar to you it should as you’ll see it on any pineapple and of course many other food products produced by the eponymous company founded by his cousin, James Dole.
As for the actions and public disregard for Queen Liliʻuokalani it is a non sequitur; the US did not engineer the coup that removed her in order to secure the islands for democratic rule by the natives, and it is not as if the United States has ever had any problem supporting autocratic regimes that aligned with its interests (or more properly, the business interests of powerful political sponsors) nor been recalcitrant in overthrowing elected democracies that opposed said interests as can be seen in the history of Central and South America. The United States annexed Hawaii for business and strategic interests, engaged a few privileged native people to help manage the lands at the expense of ineludable poverty for the majority of the aboriginal population, and has taken and used lands for its own purpose without regard to the impact upon the resident populations going forward to the present as can be seen with the current kerfluffle with groundwater contamination from leakage of the US Navy Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility at Pearl Harbor.
The idea that the US annexation of Hawaii was some kind of beneficence bestowed upon the natives by the graces of America seeking freedom and liberty is at such odds with the actual history (and not even in a Howard Zinn fashion of having to revise history as written by the victors to favor themselves; just the history straight as proffered in history textbooks) as to be an obtuse absurdity. There was actually a presidential investigation at the time (seemingly one of the first of its type) which concluded that military and diplomatic figures had exceeded their authority and abused their positions to foment and enable the coup, and later refusal by then-President of the Republic of Hawaii Sanford Dole to reinstate the Queen per demand from US President Grover Cleveland, essentially making the Republic of Hawaii an outlaw state. Of course, this was all later recognized in US Public Law 103-150 which the reader may read for themselves.
Stranger
About the Hawaii importing 90% of food part…
Could Hawaii become self-sufficient if a good chunk of its land became intense-agriculture farmland? Along with hydroponics, indoor farming, everything?
They could always eat the rich. Sounds like they’ve got a bumper crop of them.
Hawaii is already intensively farmed for fruit crops, coffee, and animals (dairy and beef cattle, hogs). The notion of “hydroponics, indoor farming” replacing conventional cropping is one of those technofabulisms that falls apart once you start looking into the economics of it; it is great for producing delicate and seasonal crops like tomatoes year round but would be prohibitive for staple crops like wheat, rice, and potatoes on a large scale basis. Much of Hawaiian land is not readily suitable for conventional grain agriculture, and plowing it level and sowing the volcanic ground with artificial fertilizers that will produce toxic runoff into the ocean is probably not something that the current residents of Hawaii would be enthused about just for the purpose of being able to take on hordes of political refugees who can’t or won’t deal with their own problems.
As I keep pointing out, “the rich” are mostly older and kind of stringy looking, not really good roasting material and one quickly gets tired of long pig stew. Better to grind them up as base material for nutritious fungi or as hog feed.
Stranger
True - not much meat on Zuckerberg or Ellison.
I guess you could strap them in a tank and force feed them. It seems inhuman…to the people who have to take care of them, though.
Stranger
The annexation of Hawaii was not illegal. There is no law extant in the United States that would have made it illegal in 1898. In fact, under prior precedent, if we had simply outright declared war on Hawaii for the purpose of territorial conquest, won, and forced annexation, it would have been entirely legal under the U.S. Constitution and existing laws. See: the Mexican Cession.
Various international treaties that establish any potential international law claims that might be relevant to the Pacific were not in force in 1898.
“Illegal” doesn’t mean “something you don’t like”, it means something that violates a law. The annexation of Hawaii did not violate U.S. law, and Hawaiian law was not relevant to the matter anymore than Mexican law was relevant to the Mexican cession.
(Munching popcorn)
One of the most enjoyable threads I’ve read in a while here.
SLO? I didn’t know it was called that, but immediately understood when I saw. (I have a colleague who attended Cal Poly)
Also speaking as a resident of Indiana (odd mix of liberal and conservative but mostly red), who also lived in Japan (as a non-Asian), lived for years in the CA bay area, and has even visited Hawaii’s big island, let my contribution to this thread be:
If all hell breaks loose, maybe your best bet is to sit tight and try to make the best of where you are, if that’s an option. Going to some place that might be better could easily, in fact, be worse. I mean, look what is happening with rich techies buying escape homes in NZ. Sounds like the same kind of idea, and the New Zealanders don’t like it.
Hello, Hoosier! 
I am from Indy but don’t want to buy a house there, so I am thinking of moving to Evansville. I think that might be a good place to wait things out, plus houses are cheap.
Although there is no specific statute in United States Code that then prohibited the unilateral annexation of Hawaii as a US territory, not everybody agrees that annexation of an existing sovereign state is a power that either the US Congress or the President are granted by the Constitution. Public Law 103-150 (cited above and again here for your perusal) explicitly acknowledges the “historic significance of the illegal overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii”. The principle of Westphalian Sovereignty has, of course, been a guiding principle in relations between sovereign powers and international law since the mid-17th Century and is widely cited by the United States and other nations as the benchmark for identifying an “illegal” occupation or annexation even as the same powers routinely violate it when it is in their interests to do so.
Stranger
I mean Public Law 103-150 isn’t even that relevant if you just want to say, “this was bad.” Grover Cleveland and the Blount inquiry were skeptical of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the Blount investigation showed serious derelictions of duty / abuse of office by American officials on the island. This was in 1893, by 1898 when the Congress agreed to annex under William McKinley it was still strongly opposed by the anti-Imperialist faction, on moral grounds.
Saying it was immoral is something many would have agreed with back to the 1890s. But that does not make it illegal.
The Peace of Westphalia and its two treaties, while certainly a watershed in international relations, was never really held to seriously restrict the conception of wars of territorial conquest, it certainly established some broad agreement that you should at least try to come up with some other veneer of support as casus belli, but we know that even that was not lived up to for most of the 300 years that followed. There was also a lesser-known Treaty (Treaty of London 1518) some 120 years before negotiated by Henry VIII’s representatives that outlined some of the same principles, but of course that did little to stop the 30- and 80-years wars.
The issue of “right of conquest” territorial expansion was never uncontroversial in the United States, and had opponents as far back as the late 18th century, but that does not a law or a crime make.