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RococoBasilica  Actually a Quality Retribution  2yr ago (astralcodexten.substack.com)   1992 thread views

Astral Codex Ten: A Columbian Exchange

astralcodexten.substack.com

Scott wades into the Culture War again with a delightfully dorky dialogue about Columbus Day. Contains lots of references to the other other Scott.

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I yut renaming Columbus Day on the condition it's renamed "William Penn Day" or something. Unfortunately, it will either stay Columbus Day or we see an identarian victory and it's Indigenous Peoples day.

While I strongly endorse the observation Columbus was a terrible human being and have wanted to "cancel" him, so to speak, since before it was cool, I reject the submarine message of the identarians: that settling the Americas was our original sin as a nation. That the USA, Canada etc should be ashamed of their past. I don't agree.

I think the English, Dutch, and French settlement of the New World was conducted with a reasonable amount of virtue given the day and age, and cannot be reasonably characterized as genocide, or even "land theft" in most cases, unless you believe the natives had some sort of spirtual claim to hegemony over the Appalachias because they happened to be there circa 1600. (If you want to see a genocide, look to the Iroquois were doing to the Hurons around them.) And even the Spanish colonization, which was spearheaded by bloodthirsty sociopaths whose basic goal was to enslave the natives, eventually transitioned to more humanitarian-ish administration under Jesuits and the Habsburg crown.

The pattern of North American settlement seems to be that European settlers arrived, settled unused land, and were tolerated and traded with. Eventually the colonies grew to a point to cause border friction with the natives, putting land native used intermittently at a low level of intensity under cultivation. If the tribes were peacable, they would simply be marginalized. If the tribes were aggressive they would eventually attack, be defeated and destroyed or forced to migrate west. This kind of dog-eat-dog geopolitics was no different from the situation before the colonists arrived; the colonists simply had much better economic practices and military technology, so they won the game.

and cannot be reasonably characterized as genocide, or even "land theft" in most cases, unless you believe the natives had some sort of spirtual claim to hegemony over the Appalachias because they happened to be there circa 1600

This is one of the main things that always felt a bit hypocritical to me when people talk about land rights historically. The idea that someone's descendants get to morally own an entire continent forever just because they were there first seems ludicrous to me. If someone today landed on Mars and then claimed to now own all of Mars because they were there first, people would be rightly outraged. And if some one else then forcefully took Mars i don't think the first guy has any grounds to complain while still remaining morally consistent.

I can understand (but not prefer) an argument in favor of physical possession if a person values a survival of the fittest type world, but in that scenario taking land by force is equally as moral as first grab.

Obviously land ownership today can not be separated from history and who should own what is horribly complicated. But it bothers me that claiming land by being there first is somehow seen as good when in reality any first grab claim is still taking land away from all other current and future people on the planet.

just because they were there first

One of the main problems is that no one currently anywhere was "there first"

The proto-groups of what we call the "Native Americans" or "indigenous people" were violent genocidal colonizers who just happened to win prior to contact with recorded history. The ghosts of the Anasazi and all that.

Everyone everywhere is the descendent of violent colonizers, because that's who gets to have territory. The proto-jews got colonized by the egyptians, philistines, assyrians, babylonians, greeks, romans, persians, arabs, persians again, egyptians again, the crusaders, the kurds, egyptians again again, the turks, and the british, and now stand accused of colonizing their own long-ago historical home. Who owns the Levant?

That area got worked over a bit more than most, but this pattern holds true everywhere. The spanish control Spain, but that wasn't true six hundred years ago. Even who we call "spanish" are mostly itinerant "barbarian" tribes who stole big chunks of land off the declining Roman empire, who in turn stole it from previous owners, who almost certainly weren't the "original" inhabitants. Shall we have land acknowledgements in France to memorialize the dispossession of the Gauls by Caesar?

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