Forgive this short introduction for there is much to cover; Hawai’i’s nature is certainly one of the most beautiful on Earth. If we want to keep it that way, we must do everything in our power to decolonize the Hawaiian islands that have been under U.S. occupation since 1893. But let’s start with some history. Let’s talk about the illegal occupation and annexation of Hawai’i.

While we should rightly begin where history begins — that is, from the initial Polynesian settlement of the islands to the establishment of the unified Kingdom of Hawai’i in 1795, this is not a history I would be able to tell, because it is not mine to communicate. I could not do justice to the millennia of Hawaiian history and  its language, culture and people. For that, I would instead point to Indigenous Hawaiian sources, such as the Ka Mooolelo Hawai’i — the first history of Hawai’i written by Native students in 1838 — or the Papaliko database which hosts a collection of data on historically and culturally significant events, curated by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, If you know more Indigenous resources, feel free to post them in the comments for our readers.

We will begin shortly before the pivotal event that cemented Hawai’i’s status to the United States: the overthrow of queen Lili’uokalani.

In January of 1893, the queen of the independent and sovereign kingdom of Hawai’i (which had been united by King Kamehameha I in 1795, putting all the islands under one monarch) was overthrown at gunpoint by U.S. Marines. She had ascended to the throne only two years earlier after the untimely death of her brother Kalakaua, and quickly set out to restore power to the monarchy and native Hawaiians with a new constitution after one had been forcefully passed just four years earlier. This effort, however, was quickly opposed by a group of U.S. and European businessmen and lawyers, known as the “Committee of Safety”, who favored annexation with the United States.

We have to understand the context surrounding the United States in 1893 to understand why the U.S. were interested in Hawai’i. By that time, most of the territory that now forms the continental United States had been settled and attached to the Union. In 1846, just half a century earlier, settlers had stolen Texas from Mexico, which led to a war in which Mexico relinquished control of what now forms the southwestern quarter of the United States territory, including California. With this, coast-to-coast imperial ambitions were  achieved.

The following years would be marked by rapid settler expansion to the west, and with it came industrialization — including the building of the transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869 and of which 90% of the workforce was Chinese (on the western portion). They would later be expelled by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 passed by Congress. In Hawai’i, Chinese immigrants were instead welcomed (alongside Japanese immigrants) by Native Hawaiians, though plantation owners instituted a blanket 10-hour work day on plantations under harsh conditions.

This rapid industrialization didn’t please slaveowners in the south who saw their privileges threatened, and led to a civil war that marked the 1860s. The industrialized Union won, and with it came what is called the Reconstruction era: the final rupture of the slaveowning mode of production that remained in the South and towards a proletarianization of the labor force, which allowed manufacturing to become even more productive.

This laid the final brick in the foundation of the American Empire’s hegemonic ambitions, and they could start to look outwards. In 1898, the U.S. declared war against Spain and, in the peace deal, took the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam — the final colonies of the declining Spanish monarchy.

But the Philippines are far away, especially in the age of the steamboat. To pave the way to Asia, a base of operations was thus required in the Pacific, and Hawai’i was perfectly suited for it. In 1898, President McKinley declared “We must have Hawai’i to get our share of China.”

On top of that, Hawai’i’s climate made it perfect for growing cash crops — prior to annexation, U.S. businessmen had already established large sugar plantations on the island chain. And of course, Hawai’i also formed a shield against attacks from the west, seen as recently as the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

All of this leads us to the reasons the U.S. wanted to annex Hawai’i.

When queen Lili’uokalani took the throne in 1891, she had her work cut out for her. A few years earlier, the so-called Bayonet Constitution had been passed in the kingdom, imposed on King Kalākaua on July 6, 1887 by the aforementioned plantation owners. They called themselves the Hawaiian League (despite none of them being Hawaiian) and, through arms, forced the new constitution that they had drafted for the king. This constitution allowed foreign residents to vote — which, to this day, no country offers — and denied over two-thirds of Native Hawaiians from voting.

In 1892, the Legislature of the Kingdom of Hawai’i passed the Highways Act to protect public lands from privatization. At the same time, the monarchy was also trying to push forward a new constitution that would undo the Bayonet Constitution.

As we’ve already seen, all of this came crashing down in 1893. Shortly after the new year, queen Lili’uokalani made her intentions to push the new constitution clear. Immediately, the Annexation Club — composed of six citizens of the Kingdom (specifically not recorded as being Native Hawaiian) and seven U.S. and European foreigners — carried out their counter-plan: with help from the U.S. government, a fully armed warship anchored in Honolulu harbor (a tactic that the U.S. would use several more times in the future, including in 1974 in Portugal). This move initially scared the legislature who withdrew their support for the new constitution.

Lili’uokalani tried to ease tensions by walking back some of the changes she wanted to make, but it was too late and annexation was within reach for plantation owners. On January 16, 162 U.S. sailors and marines landed in Hawai’i and illegally occupied the sovereign and independent nation.

On January 17, the Committee of Safety — the descendent to the Annexation Club — announced martial law and the deposing of the queen. Specifically, they also declared a provisional government until a union with the United States could be achieved.

Queen Lili’uokalani surrendered to the U.S. government and thus came the end of the long-standing Kingdom of Hawai’i.

Before we continue with this important piece of history, we should take some time to understand what life in Hawai’i was like prior to the coup.

The imperial core’s own institutions recognized Hawai’i as a sovereign nation. By 1843, Hawai’i became the first non-Western nation to receive full recognition as an independent state by Western powers. By 1893, the kingdom maintained over ninety consulates and legations (which served the functions of an embassy) worldwide, including in the United States. Only sovereign states maintain embassies abroad to serve as their representatives on foreign soil.

This fact cements that prior to the deposing of the monarchy (and arguably even prior to the Bayonet Constitution), Hawai’i was a fully sovereign nation in the eyes of the imperialists. Thus, logically, the occupation by U.S. Marines on January 16 was an illegal invasion by a foreign state, and annexation by the U.S. was a coup.

By the mid-19th century, Hawai’i had achieved a 95% literacy rate, the highest in the world. The Constitutional Monarchy established in 1840 guaranteed equal voting rights regardless of race, gender or wealth — the first of its kind in the modern world; at the time, most Western countries were still limiting voting rights to landowning males, if they had any at all. The constitution came about on the impulse of king Kamehameha III himself (also known as Kauikeaouli), as part of efforts to modernize the kingdom.

In 1859, the Queen’s Hospital was established and provided free healthcare to all native Hawaiians. Electric public lightning came to the streets of Honolulu in 1888 — before even the White House had electric lightning. Laws on land distribution made by the Declaration of Rights (1839) guaranteed virtually no homelessness. Affordable mass-transit made travel between islands possible for everyone.

All of these achievements were instantly reversed after the foreign coup in 1893, which turned Hawai’i into a plantation colony for the United States.

Hawai’i became the 50th state of the “Union” in 1959. What happened between 1893 and then?

Immediately after the queen was deposed, a provisional government was set up. This government immediately sent envoys to Washington to seek a treaty of annexation — manifesting their desire for the complete destruction of an independent Hawai’i into an occupied colony of the United States. The treaty was delayed by the inauguration of Grover Cleveland as U.S. president however, and stalled there. Because of this, the Republic of Hawai’i was proclaimed by the Committee of Safety in 1894. Sanford B. Dole, a white man born in Honolulu, became its president. He was approved for a six-year term and if the name Dole is familiar, that is because his cousin James D. Dole is the one who started the Dole fruit company (then called the Hawaiian Pineapple Company). James Dole came to Hawai’i in 1899 and developed the pineapple industry which he had started there in 1851 — pineapple, which is used on “Hawaiian Pizza”, is not native to Hawai’i.

The new constitution accompanying this puppet temporary state required voters to swear allegiance to the republic. Strict property requirements prevented most Hawaiians from voting. The U.S. quickly recognized the coup government, despite president Cleveland publicly criticizing the involvement of U.S. Marines, as is usual — to this day we see the same performative criticism of the particular forms brutal occupation takes, but not its end result.

A counter-rebellion was attempted in 1895 to restore the sovereign kingdom, but failed. In 1898, the situation had stabilized sufficiently that then-president McKinley signed the Newlands Resolution, which annexed Hawai’i to the United States. A petition signed by over half the Hawaiian population was presented to the U.S. government protesting the move, but was ignored.

In 1900, Hawai’i became a territory of the United States — the same status that Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and ‘American’ Samoa have today. Stanford Dole, previously the president of the coup republic, was named governor of Hawai’i.

At that point, everything that existed under the late constitutional monarchy was broken and rebuilt. There was no more President or king in Hawai’i, but a U.S. governor — and with it, the laws of the occupier came along too, which is illegal under U.N. Occupation Law.

During that time, sugar production expanded from 289,500 short tons in 1900 to 939,300 short tons in 1930 in plantations owned by white Americans and toiled by native Hawaiians. Pineapple grew from 2000 cases in 1903 to 12 million cases in 1931. Tourism, which plagues Hawai’i to this day, started in 1901 with the opening of the Moana hotel. By 1958, tourists amounted to 171 thousand in one year compared to 25 thousand in 1940. All the while political control remained largely in the hands of the Haole — non-Native Hawaiian, specifically white.

In 1896, the Hawaiian language was banned in public schools — that ban remained in place for 100 years, until 1986. Today, UNESCO still classifies the language as critically endangered.

U.S. businessmen were not the only ones scrambling to the newly-acquired territory, of course. The government immediately set out to fulfill its ambitions and established a dozen military bases in Hawai’i between 1898 and 1922. Since it now considers Hawai’i part of their territory, military presence has only increased, and with it came many scandals and destruction. The military occupies 6% of Hawai’i’s land (illegally), and these bases have displaced many Indigenous Hawaiians and destroyed sacred cultural sites. The U.S. military contributes heavily to environmental crises in Hawai’i, being responsible for example for the Red Hill water contamination crisis.

The effects of the colonization of Hawai’i are still felt today because the U.S. government still considers Hawai’i to be their playground for tourism, army and the mass distribution of pineapple.

Native Hawaiians face higher rates of poverty compared to whites — 15.4% versus 9.6%. Cost of living has soared in Hawai’i with the introduction of a tourism industry (owned by white businessmen); 40% of Indigenous Hawaiian households are cost-burdened by rent prices, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on rent. Indigenous Hawaiians form only 10% of the population of Hawai’i, yet make up 51% of the homeless population. 50% of Native Hawaiians live outside of Hawai’i. The tourism industry pays pittance wages with most of the profits going to the white owners.

More than a quarter of missing girls in Hawai’i are Indigenous, and the average profile of a missing person is a 15-year-old Indigenous girl. Hawai’i is the state with the eighth-highest rate of missing persons in the United States, and 84% of Indigenous women experience violence in their lifetime. In Operation Keiki Shield, 38% of those arrested for soliciting sex from a 13-year-old online were active-duty U.S. Military personnel. 

The tourism industry in Hawai’i has put over 60% of plants and animal species in the ‘endangered’ status, largely due to deforestation to build resorts that make a parody of traditional Hawaiian culture. 44.7% of water on the Big Island (the island of Hawai’i) is consumed by hotels and resorts.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military causes crisis after crisis, and never cleans up after. They pollute potable water through mismanagement. Over several months in 2021, fuel tanks failed one by one at U.S. navy bases at Red Hill (Oahu island) and released tens of thousands gallons of fuel into the island’s drinkable water supply. The U.S. military controls 30% of the land on this island and used it — and the sacred cultural site at Kaho’olawe — as a bombing range for decades. The issue was compounded by the fact that the leaks happened over several months, raising the question as to why the fuel tanks were not inspected and fixed after the first leak. Petroleum contaminated the public water supply for 1 million residents, and the U.S. Navy both refused to help fix the problem and did not notify the authorities when the leaks happened — the problem was reported far too late, when local residents noticed the leak in their tap water. Instead, the Navy ‘promised’ to close the facility by 2027. Today in January 2025, 4,000 gallons of fuel and 28,000 gallons of sludge still remain in the pipes and tanks. In the first weeks after the leak, colonial authorities in Hawai’i even said that the water was safe to drink, leading to the poisoning of thousands.

Pearl Harbor, which we mentioned at the beginning of this piece, was known as Wai Momi (Pearl Waters) by the Hawaiians, and got its name from the pearl oyster diving trade that took place there. The pristine and shallow waters were perfectly suited for that activity, as well as fishing to feed the population — and they did so faithfully for over 600 years. 27 fishponds lined the shores of the Pearl Waters. In 1887, after the Bayonet Constitution, the U.S. gained exclusive rights to the lagoon as a coaling and repair station and from there built their naval base. Today, the water at Pearl Waters is polluted with arsenic, lead and mercury.

In the mid-20th century, the U.S. military detonated nuclear weapons as part of tests in the Pacific, not far from Hawai’i. At the Pacific Proving Grounds — Johnston Atoll, Bikini Atoll, and Enewetak Atolls — nuclear bombs were detonated. As part of Operation Fishbowl, a nuclear test was conducted in high-altitude, which caused an artificial aurora visible from Hawai’i and an electromagnetic pulse that damaged electrical infrastructure on the island chain. Over 100 nuclear detonations were made in the Pacific between 1946 and 1962, and the fallout caused — and is still causing — cancers in Hawai’i and other Pacific Islander populations. Residents of Bikini Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands chain, still cannot grow food locally.

In 2023, deadly wildfires burned on the island of Maui, becoming one of the deadliest natural disasters in Hawai’i’s history. The fires were caused by sparks from broken power lines that ignited dry vegetation. 102 people were killed by the fires, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire in history. As of 2025, only three homes have been rebuilt, out of 2,200 structures destroyed. Landlords immediately sensed a good business opportunity, and rent rose by 44% on the island, further displacing Indigenous Hawaiians from their ancestral home. The only help from the federal government was a FEMA loan that will stop in 2028.

In terms of land ownership, some 200,000 acres have been set aside by the Department of Hawaiian Homelands to be distributed to Indigenous Hawaiians, but long waitlists persist. The U.S. Federal government, in comparison, owns 531,000 acres which are used for military bases and national parks. National Parks in the U.S. (under Roosevelt), as in “Israel”, were mainly established to drive Indigenous tribes away from their homelands — Yellowstone Park, for example, is located on the ancestral homeland to the Shoshone, Bannock, Blackfeet, Crow, and Nez Perce.

Mark Zuckerberg has also been acquiring land on Kauai since 2014. He now holds over 1,400 acres including beachfront and agricultural properties. In 2016, he initiated lawsuits to force owners of kuleana (small parcels with ancestral rights enclosed in ‘his’ property) to sell their property, dragging them in expensive lawsuits that the families could not finance. He is not the only one: other U.S. tech figures such as Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) own mansion compounds of their own in Hawai’i. Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder, owns 98% of Lanai island, one of Hawai’i’s eight islands. Meanwhile, Indigenous Hawaiians pay $3,000 per month in rent for an average of $18 per hour, which is twice as low as the occupation state’s average wage of $32 per hour.

Again, all of this is technically illegal, not only under U.S. law, but also under international law. The U.S. is illegally occupying Hawai’i, an occupation made possible only by their military might and the putting down of independence movements. In effect, the Kingdom of Hawai’i is under occupation and U.N. Occupation law applies to it — similarly as it does to Palestine. More and more organizations are recognizing this occupation status, including U.N. bodies, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the National Lawyers Guild. Under Occupation Law, the occupied population has the right to resist occupation, including by force.

Indigenous Hawaiian groups have been very clear about the effects tourism has on their homeland, and have thus requested that tourists refrain from visiting Hawai’i — not just U.S. tourists, but all tourists. I can only echo their voice and make you reconsider visiting Hawai’i as long as it remains a U.S. colony. 

Like many other countries and territories, Hawai’i is not spared by the effects of ongoing colonization; and all of this is still happening in the 21st century. The only just solution for Hawai’i is the complete expulsion of the U.S. army, the recognition of a sovereign Hawaiian state and nation by the U.S. government, and the relinquishing of its status as a U.S. state or dependency of any kind.

They’re out to save themselves.

Each one of these so-called environmentalists is either a bare-faced liar — someone with a vested interest in destroying the planet — or a monster willing to sacrifice the rest of humanity for their own, post-cataclysm comfort. Climate change — more properly, the ecocide, the knowing murder, of the planet — is something that is already affecting both capitalist bosses and us workers alike, but, critically, not to anywhere near the same degree. Every drought-triggered crop failure causes agricultural capitalists to miss out on their profits, but meanwhile, thousands of workers are laid off or starve. In fact, most capitalists clearly plan to use their stolen and hoarded wealth to protect them from the worst side-effects of the ongoing climate catastrophe. They’re hiring up guards, building fortified strongholds, and preparing for the worst.

From the outset, we need to be clear: even if it were true that the five listed billionaires above were actively trying to save the planet, it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. They’d be outvoted and outmaneuvered by the other capitalists, the ones who aren’t trying to save the planet and who are willing to make money off of climate-destroying industries. Then, once these “saviors” were outmaneuvered in the marketplace by their more ruthless capitalist cousins, they would be relegated to political unimportance by the power of superior money. The fact is that it’s cheaper and more profitable to destroy the environment. As long as we live in a capitalist economy, this is going to remain true. So long as it’s true, it necessarily follows that those capitalists willing to destroy the economy for an advantage will out-compete and out-perform those who aren’t. And hey, we live in a bourgeois republic, where money is power. These ruthless capitalists will simply buy more politicians and legislation than any would-be climate heroes.

But the fact of the matter is that it’s not even true that Buffet, Bezos, and company are trying to save the planet. What they’re doing is paying a lot of lip service to the idea of environmentalism, and then just going about their business. Just like giving to a charity (that they conveniently own, which furthers their political ends, reduces their taxes, and gets cushy contracts for their corporations), climate activism among the ruling class is nothing more than a dodge, a con, a public relations stunt.

What have these men done to earn this reputation?

In 2012, Buffett argued that “what’s bad for the environment is also bad for the bottom line” in what was essentially a fluff piece put out by one of his corporations. “Taking shortcuts is not the pathway to achieving sustainable competitive advantage,” he warned. In 2022 Forbes glowingly wrote that Buffett’s holding and investment company,  Berkshire Hathaway, “escaped ‘The Coal Trap.’” Berkshire Hathaway energy features a large page on their website devoted to the advancement of “Cleaner Energy” and company jargon cheerily mentions PacifiCorp, the Berkshire Hathaway power company in the Pacific Northwest, and its investments in such glitzy-sounding nonsense as “noncarbon generation,” “modernized transmission,” and the Berkshire Hathaway wind and solar plant. But PacifiCorp not only operates over eleven coal power plants; it also operates captive coal mines. On June 12 of this year, a Multnomah County jury returned a verdict against PacifiCorp finding them liable for more than $70 million in fines for its negligent and reckless management of its power lines that caused one of the biggest and most devastating fires in the history of Oregon, the 2020 Labor Day Fires. Buffett’s words to the public are one thing, and his words to his shareholders are quite another. He has called climate catastrophe an overall benefit to his insurance companies. His real view is the view he shares with the rest of his class: that, overall, climate catastrophe won’t be that bad, that they’ll find ways to make money from the chaos.

So much for Buffett. What about Bezos? The bald gnome responsible for piloting Amazon to the heights of the U.S. market founded the Bezos Earth Fund, investing $1 billion to help “transform food systems to feed a growing population,” after all. In 2021, Bezos pledged $2 billion to help protect the environment. At the same time, the Amazon corporation’s carbon footprint grew by 19%. The $10 billion total investment over all his contributions amounts to little more than 17% of his hoarded fortunes. Not only that, but grants from his foundations come with strings attached; do what Mr. Bezos says, print what Mr. Bezos agrees to, or this sudden flood of funding will dry up. This is one of the shady ways billionaire “philanthropy” works.

Bernard Arnault, one of the richest men in the world, owner of brands like Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Fendi, also masquerades as one of these saviors of Earth and humanity, despite the fact that his companies consistently exploit slave labor. But this contradiction — between the supposed philanthropic environmentalist and the slave magnate — is more apparent than real. There’s no real contradiction between capitalist environmentalism and slavery, even if it seems out of place that a so-called philanthropist would rely on exploitation to fuel his supposed generosity. Slave labor is the modus vivendi of the “green” capitalist movement. For those capitalists who buy into their own bullshit a little more than Bezos and Buffett do, their “green” capitalism is actually a kind of fascist vision of the future. They harken back to the Nazi Reichsminister for Agriculture, R. Walter Darré, the man who coined the phrase “blood and soil,” and who envisioned the future of the earth as a kind of vast eco-preserve administered by “racially pure” hierarchs with a mystic connection to the land — after eliminating all “undesirables,” of course. These green fascists have a long heritage; they’ve inherited the self-satisfied attitude of great feudal lords who kept “pristine” forestland for the sole purpose of hunting. For men like Arnault, the environment is important because it exists to serve them. It exists, not for itself, for its own beauty, but rather to be a parkland where they can unwind. That is the future the far-right green capitalists foresee: a parkland earth, a nature preserve, kept empty of other people, for their own pleasure, whose upkeep falls on the slaves they intend to work out of existence. So it is wrong to call all these capitalists little Hitlers — some of them are little Goerrings and little Darrés instead.

Musk, heir to a Zambian emerald mine and a white South African fortune, also falls into the category of a little Darré-like fascist. This technologically-incompetent Tony Stark prances around with his proclamations of “saving the human race,” but what he really means is that he plans to colonize the Red Planet using glorified indentured labor. He has already revealed plans for laborers to take out loans to pay him for the pleasure of moving to Mars, with the principal to be paid back through work. Never mind the fact that his transportation company, SpaceX, so far can’t get its rockets to function, unless their intended function is egregious pollution in the form of concrete dust, which his rockets habitually create. When Musk talks about environmentalism, he’s talking about a red blood and soil — with a Martian aristocracy living off of indentured colonial labor.

As for Bill Gates, he’s publicly copped to his impact on the environment. “It’s true that my carbon footprint is absurdly high,” he tells us. But don’t worry, he’s “buying offsets through a company that removes carbon dioxide from the air and a nonprofit that installs clean energy upgrades in affordable housing units in Chicago.” So he’s pouring money into startups, which is being suctioned off into the pockets of small scale tech capitalists. Gates has always been loud on climate change — loud in the media, loud in personal conversations, loud everywhere but where it counts: with his investments. In 2011, even as he was publicly declaring his dedication to green solutions, Gates invested in NEOS GeoSolutions, a firm that helps gas and oil companies decide where to drill. In 2020, the Gates Foundation Trust owned 17 million shares — some $1.54 billion worth — of Canadian National Railway Company, which transports oil from Canada’s tar sands.

What else does he spend his time saying about the environment? Oh, only that “[d]ivestment… has reduced about zero tonnes of emissions.” Gates has bought his way into the environmentalist media space so he can champion goofy tech solutions that put money in the pockets of greedy angel investors (like him) and fight real climate change solutions — like divestment from fossil fuels or the implementation of the only real long-term answer: the complete and radical alteration of the economy such to remove the profit motive entirely from production.

So long as the economy remains the private preserve of wealthy individuals, and so long as production is designed not to satisfy the needs of individuals and populations but rather to make certain men (and, occasionally, women) obscenely wealthy; so long as the driving force behind all our industries remains the production of profit rather than the fulfillment of needs; so long as we are forced to deal with the anarchic, disorganized, and individualistic whims of the market to determine what is made and what is wasted, the environment can never be truly safe. So long as Capital remains in control of the economic decision-making, there are only two roads down which we can travel: the utter depletion of the planet and environment’s life-sustaining capacity, or the institution of the parkland fascism that certain sects of the wealthy plan in the gilded rooms of their mansions and yachts. These men are not, by any stretch of the imagination, climate heroes. They are champions of nothing but their own vanity and greed. Capitalism, which has given them such wealth, has also mutilated them. They are incapable of seeing the world as anything other than a subject, something to manipulate and control. The only world they’re out to save is their world, the world that exists for their pleasure, the world that is an extension of themselves. The rest of us? Well, to them, we’re just fuel for the fire.