History is replete with the invasions and wars seeking to take territory from existing inhabitants. However, when the action is more recent, such as at World Wars I and II, the practice has been to recount details of the personalities and battles making up the war rather than recognising capture of land, resources or ascendancy from others. We fail to admit to Middle East incursions in these terms.

In retrospect, we’re able to see that colonisation amounted to the seizing of land, usually entailing terrible atrocities, from first nations peoples. A small rump still manages to ‘justify’ historical murder and violence on the basis that the native peoples were ‘uncivilised’. Even though recent ‘cowboy and Indian’ movies may have become more nuanced and moved onto cattlemen v. settlers, the intense irony that cowboys needed to defeat the Indians because they were savages still eludes this particular cohort. Though the precise wording may be disputed, the Speech of Chief Seattle in 1854 undoubtedly establishes which party had the superior grasp on the commonality of land to humanity.

To this day the ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality prevails in respect of the commodification of land for speculative purposes. An unspoken war exists between those who ‘own’ land and those who must rent. The savagery remains veiled as governments and central banks generate deep socio-economic distress as they wrongly act to inflate land prices, thereby dispossessing an increasing proportion of the citizenry.

Although the case for payment of the land rent to be paid has become urgent, technical econospeak has managed to bury it. It needs resurrecting.