True Left

Enemy article:

https://www.amren.com/features/2023/11/did-we-steal-america-from-the-indians/

Scholarship on European colonialism in the New World is now, of course, completely dominated by the Left. Prof. Fynn-Paul writes that such scholarship is animated by a worldview that “is so rabidly anti-white, anti-male, and anti-European that it challenges the idea of human progress itself.”

Yes.

He correctly attributes a kind of “Western exceptionalism” to leftist historians, in that they assume that “Western colonies and colonists were worse than others, that Western ideologies were more cruel than others, and that Western economies were more brutal than others.”

It is no assumption that (post-Renaissance) Western imperialism is worse, for it is unique in choosing colonialism rather than integrationism, but only for those whom it classified as "non-white".

In fact, by the time Europeans began enslaving blacks in the 16th century, Muslims had already enslaved millions over the course of nearly a thousand years.

Yes, but Muslims:

1) enslaved irrespective of ethnic background, unlike "white" enslavers who only enslaved "non-whites";
2) offered all slaves the individual choice to convert to Islam as a condition for citizenship, unlike "white" enslavers wh never offered their slaves any equivalent choice.

And they were particularly brutal about it: Unlike Europeans, the Arabs routinely castrated their male slaves.

.

Whereas "white" enslavers used male slaves to breed the next generation of slaves. Which is the sustainable evil? (And again, slaves under Islam were given the option of conversion as an alternative to castration. Is this brutal?)

Yet, for the Left, Western slavery was exceptionally and uniquely bad.

It was, for the reasons just provided above.

They also apparently think that it is the only slavery anybody needs to hear about.

If so, why do we have the following topic?

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/the-difference-between-islamic-and-europe-on-slave-treatment/

Continuing:

It has now become de rigueur for academics writing about Indians and settlers to employ the language of “stolen land” and “genocide,” even in otherwise objective histories.

Because it is the truth!

The attitude of leftist historians toward the Indians, who they claim they are defending, is also predictably condescending. This seems always to be the case with whomever the Left takes up as a cause célèbre. Essentially, the Left portrays Indians as peaceful, happy-go-lucky flower children, living in harmony with nature and sharing all things.

Hardly. We are perfectly aware that many Amerindians were hunters, and have no problem saying this makes them racially inferior to those (Amerindian or otherwise) who were not. But did life for New World animals get better or worse after Western colonization? Would Amerindians have independently come up with the idea of breeding animals in factory conditions? Would they have used them for experimentation? Would they have polluted their habitats with modern chemicals? I think we all know the answers.

Indians were extraordinarily violent and ethnocentric people, who were busy “genociding” each other long before Europeans allegedly tried it on them. They were also not exactly responsible stewards of the environment; they overkilled North American megafauna to the point of extinction long before Europeans arrived.

Which is worse: being hunted to extinction or being turned into a sustainable commodity?

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-sustainable-evil/

Continuing:

Prof. Fynn-Paul correctly notes that Europe invented “the modern discourse on human rights.”

That is why Western civilization is more evil:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/rights-vs-duties/msg23228/#msg23228

Continuing:

He also correctly states that “We simply do not find such a plethora of humanitarian sentiment in most traditional cultures, where individual human rights are normally subsumed under the rights of powerful men, institutions, and family honor.”

This gave the latter a duty to stand up for individuals under their charge who were wronged. Whereas now, anyone can agree that individuals have "rights" but simultaneously consider it none of one' own concern when they are wronged (since one has the "right" oneself to not be bothered by third-party disputes).

Let us consider what the Indians were really like. The most advanced Indian civilizations in the New World were those in Mexico and Central America. However, leftist historians have made absurd claims on behalf of these people, asserting, for example, that they were “more advanced” than European civilization of the same period. The reality is that the civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas were roughly analogous in their level of achievement to the Mesopotamian cultures of around 3,000 BC.

Would we have any of the following problems:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-a-health-hazard/

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/if-western-civilization-does-not-die-soon/

in Aztec, Incan or Mesopotamian civilizations?

(See also:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/ancient-world/new-world-raft-design-and-colonialist-response/msg4833/#msg4833

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/ancient-world/new-world-raft-design-and-colonialist-response/msg18682/#msg18682

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/ancient-world/new-world-raft-design-and-colonialist-response/msg20492/#msg20492 )

The Aztecs had invented the wheel, but by the time of the Spanish conquest used it only for children’s toys.

How much roadkill is caused by wheeled children's toys? For comparison:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-right/western-civilization-is-a-health-hazard/msg38/?topicseen#msg38

The number of animals killed in the United States has been estimated at a million per day.[10][11]
...
the following animals are being killed by motor vehicles in the United States annually: 41 million squirrels, 26 million cats, 22 million rats, 19 million opossums, 15 million raccoons, 6 million dogs, and 350,000 deer.[15]
...
two insects killed on the license-plate area for every 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) driven. This implies about 1.6 trillion insect deaths by cars per year in the Netherlands, and about 32.5 trillion deaths in the United States if the figures are extrapolated there.[19]

Divide the latter number by the former, and that is the factor by which Westerners are inferior to Aztecs on this one count (wheel usage) alone.

Back to enemy article:

Slavery was widely practiced by Indian tribes. During the 17th century, records indicate that only a few hundred Indians were taken as slaves from New England. Within the same period, Indians enslaved tens of thousands of other Indians.

Yes, but the point is that colonial-era "whites" enslaved "non-whites" while not enslaving "whites". This double-standard is what we despise. No such double-standard existed among Amerindians, as you yourself admit. Amerindians merely did not consider slavery intolerable; "whites" considered it intolerable (for their ingroup) but simultaneously practiced it (to their outgroup).

The Aztecs butchered more than 20,000 human beings a year, cutting their still-beating hearts out of their bodies in the belief that this was what kept the sun shining. Apparently, this practice was sanctioned by “Aztec philosophy.”

Is this not less despicable than the present-day Western scientists who use non-humans for experimentation in order to benefit humans?

Cannibalism is well documented among some Indian tribes.

Are not cannibals less despicable than anti-cannibalistic meat-eaters? The former accept meat-eating; the latter consider it unacceptable (for their ingroup) but simultaneously practice it (to their outgroup).

The Natchez Indians of Mississippi practiced child sacrifice.

Westerners practice a far slower and more torturous form of child sacrifice known as compulsory schooling:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/canada-residential-schools/

Continuing:

European relations with the Indians tended to alternate between periods of peace and periods of war. And, yes, there were massacres — by both sides against the other.

Which side is stealing the land of the other? (Hint: substitute "European" with "Israeli" and "Indian" with "Palestinian".)

However, Europeans frequently allied themselves with one Indian tribe against another.

Yes, we already know "whites" like to use "non-whites" as cannon fodder.

Prof. Fynn-Paul asks, “why does the historical record provide so many examples of Indians voluntarily wandering into English and Dutch camps, and even climbing on board ships,” if today’s leftists are correct about the rapacity with which Europeans went about trying to murder and enslave them?

Experience has already made it clear that staying away from "whites"  does not prevent "whites" from murdering or enslaving them, so why not try the opposite approach?

Now let's turn the question around: if today's rightists are correct about Amerindian savagery, then why did so many English/Dutch/etc. voluntarily wander into the New World?

The really important question is: which side crossed the Atlantic first?

"Whites" started it all; Amerindians were merely reacting.

Did we steal the Indians’ land? Yes and no. First, a plausible case can be made that the forcible relocation of the Indians during the Trail of Tears was theft of land. We had originally agreed that the land was theirs and that we would respect their right to it. But when we discovered that the land was much more valuable than we had thought, Indian property rights suddenly meant little — in fact, nothing. But this was the exception and not the rule.

So do you plan on giving the land back?

In the vast majority of cases, land settled by Europeans was purchased from Indians, who willingly sold it.

After you had already made examples of what happens to those who do not willingly sell?

about 90 percent of the land remained in Indian hands for the first 300 years after Europeans arrived in the New World. Vast swaths of North America remained completely unoccupied by white people.

About 90% of the land remained in Palestinian hands for the first 30 years after Zionist settlers arrived in Palestine. Vast swaths of Palestine remained completely unoccupied by Jewish people.

What happened next (in both cases!)?

the “stolen land” claim rests on the assumption that Indians displaced from their land by Europeans had occupied that land in perpetuity. The truth is that the Indians displaced by Europeans had generally slaughtered the previous group of Indians — who had, in turn, had slaughtered an earlier group.

The burden is on you to provide hard evidence for the claim in bold. Otherwise, that is the actual assumption.

But even if evidence were to turn up in future, that does not exonerate the colonial-era Western colonizers, who did not know about it at the time and certainly did not justify own their actions based on such an argument, but rather on Manifest Destiny which was not intended to be an ethical argument at all. For that matter, the same Western colonial empires had no problem with stealing other lands whose existing inhabitants had definitely never displaced others:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/has-australia-reconciled-with-its-colonial-past/

The bottom line is that Western colonizers were never concerned with ethics, but only with the Doctrine of Discovery:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/colonialism-as-viewed-by-westerners/msg14893/#msg14893

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/colonialism-as-viewed-by-westerners/msg15179/#msg15179

Continuing:

This is why groveling “acknowledgements” such as the one made by the Perimeter Institute are so silly.

Is it silly to acknowledge the unethicality of the Doctrine of Discovery, or of Manifest Destiny?

Since we are not going to give the land back, what purpose is served by cringey “land acknowledgements,” aside from letting affluent white liberals signal their virtue?

Then why not give the land back?

Indians have now been very handsomely compensated for the wrong done to them. Today, the US government spends more than $20 billion a year on the descendants of Indians wronged by our ancestors, which works out to about $20,000 per Indian per year. At this point, we owe them nothing.

At best* the money can be considered compensation for the time you have spent violently possessing the land. You still need to give back the land itself.

(* I myself do not agree with this. I advocate that the colonized should take the Western colonial empires' original lands as compensation. Above all I despise the principle that the colonizers, not the colonized, are the ones who get to decide what the compensation should be.)

Our enemies explain that progressivism is the root of Islamophobia (I agree, which is why I, a regressive, am not Islamophobic):

https://www.eurocanadians.ca/2023/11/islam-is-often-a-predictor-of-stagnation-and-intellectual-barrenness

Recent research asserts that by impeding commerce and self-governing institutions Islam obstructed the demand for education and as such, this led to a negative relationship between Islamic rule and human capital levels
...
In explaining these findings the authors conclude that Islamic regions are worse off because Christians and colonial administrators were less likely to reside in such places. But this is an indirect admission that Christians and colonial administrators would have provided better governance than Islamic leaders since their absence in Islamic spaces lowered performance. The paucity of colonial intervention in Islamic spaces is explained by the conservatism and aggression of Islam. Islamic territories were likely to resist change and could be quite uncharitable to Europeans, so avoiding these areas was in their best interest.

Islam is lauded by politically correct pundits as a progressive religion, but as the evidence indicates it is often a predictor of stagnation and intellectual barrenness. Western countries should be wary of those who obscure the anti-progressive elements of Islam

I do not obscure the anti-progressive elements of Islam; I defend them! Why does everything have to be about maximizing "performance" and "human capital"? What is so bad about simple living? Instead of calling it "stagnation", why not call it satisfaction? Instead of calling it "barrenness", why not call it contentment?

Israelis are just like any other Western colonialists:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/yes-israel-colonialist-state-does-154000577.html

Beginning in the fifteenth century, European states began establishing colonies overseas.
...
Advocates of Zionism can be found in the early nineteenth century, if not before, but the Zionist movement originated in the late nineteenth century. In the 1880s, Britain’s Baron Edmund James de Rothschild established Jewish colonies in what was then referred to as “the Holy Land.” Rothschild’s efforts were organized by the Jewish Colonization Society and were championed by the Lovers of Zion
...
In 1895, Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl turned a long appeal to the Rothschild family into a book, The Jewish State. In advocating for a state, Herzl also sought the support and advice of Cecil Rhodes, who had established British colonies in southern Africa (Rhodesia was the colonial state that preceded Zimbabwe). Herzl justified his efforts on the standard grounds of European imperialism. A Jewish state, he argued, would be “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”

In 1917, Chaim Weizmann successfully lobbied the British to adopt the Balfour Declaration, which committed the British, who were to take over the Holy Land from the Ottomans and establish British Palestine, to sponsor there a “national home for the Jewish people.” The British didn’t commit themselves to creating a Jewish state, but Weizmann and other leading Zionists had exactly that in mind: a Jewish state that would become part of the British Commonwealth along with South Africa, Canada, and Australia. The leading Zionists of the early and mid-twentieth century sought to create settler-colonies within Palestine that would become the basis of a Jewish state.
...
In 1947, on the eve of the United Nations decision to partition the country, Jews still made up only 32 percent of the population. In the partition, which the Arabs rejected, Jews got 55 percent of the land, including the most economically viable areas, and the Arabs only 40 percent
...
the end result of which was that the state of Israel, from which about 700,000 Arabs had been expelled during the 1947 and 1948 wars, now took up 78 percent of British Palestine.
...
The Revisionist Party, led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, got its name from its opposition to Britain’s carving out Jordan (originally Transjordan) as a separate state from Palestine. The Revisionists wanted Palestine and Jordan as a single Jewish state. They made no bones about Zionism’s colonial aims. Jabotinsky, who was a protégé of Herzl, compared the Arabs to America’s Indians and Mexico’s Aztecs. He didn’t see them as junior associates in a Jewish state but as intransigent and unassimilable foes of a Jewish state who would have to be defeated and subjugated by armed force. “Zionist colonization,” Jabotinsky wrote in 1923, “must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.”
...
They formed the bulk of the settlers in the West Bank, where many of them did see themselves as “pioneers” staking out a Greater Israel. They have overwhelmingly supported the political descendants of Revisionist Zionism—the Likud and the national religious parties that make up the Israeli right. They provided these parties with their current majorities in the Knesset.

Previous Helper coverage:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/colonialism-as-viewed-by-westerners/msg13374/#msg13374

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/colonial-era/colonialism-as-viewed-by-westerners/msg21475/#msg21475