Trail of Tears

More Daydreams with AI

Operation Global Village

Kirby Urner
4 min readOct 22, 2024

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You could call this a political cartoon about ethnic cleansing (gentrification), juxtaposing the Trail of Tears with contemporary urban / suburban development. Kick out the Injuns, build a Holiday Inn.

I contrast ethnic cleansing with genocide, writing elsewhere:

The Brits could have offered their base in Cyprus as a waystation for Palestinian refugees wanting to escape the Gaza situation. We know a lot of them wanted to get out because many eventually did get out. But there was no military Anglo assistance for this. That means they were left in their “open air prison”.

I think people are sloppy about the difference between allowing refugees to escape which is called ethnic cleansing, very close to what we call gentrification in real estate, versus not allowing escape which is called genocide. These two strategies should not be confused with each other.

Prompt: Cherokee Indians on the trail of tears walk in a long line stretching to the horizon, patrolled by military men on horseback. Behind them, in gentrified lands, happy suburbs with malls are under construction. We see construction cranes in the distance.

Epistemologist on Facebook: “Cyprus is a small island. They’d only accept Gazan refugees if in transit to someplace else, and no…

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