A very long thread about Jeffrey Flynn-Paul’s Spectator essay on the “myth” that the U.S. and Canada are built on lands stolen from Indigenous nations. https://bit.ly/2ER0ozt 
Karl Jacoby and I pitched a rebuttal to the Spectator. Crickets from them, so I guess they aren’t interested in what people who know something about the scholarly literature have to say. (Not surprising, we know.)
The F-P essay is long, rambling, digressive. It sets up strawmen, cherry picks, contains numerous errors/non-sequiturs, overgeneralizes, contradicts itself, misreads our current crisis, and throws out ridiculous bogeyman like “cultural Marxism.” Hard to know where to start.
Might as well start with Columbus. “Try as they might,” F-P says, “historians have been unable to find evidence that Columbus was genocidal, or had any particular ill-will toward the Native Americans he encountered.”
Oh?

Here are some basic facts about Columbus’s second voyage in the Caribbean (1493-96): Although CC’s objective was not genocide per se, as he pursued his objective (get gold), he and his men enslaved Indigenous people, which required violence and terror, including rape.
Las Casas recorded that Spaniards made bets “as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow” or tearing “babes from their mother’s breast by their feet, and dash[ing] their heads against the rocks.”
After fifty years of Spanish colonialism, the Native population of Hispaniola was only 2,000, down from at least several hundred thousand and perhaps into the millions. Clearly genocidal consequences.
But, says F-P, all this and other western hemisphere Indigenous death was just one big accident. It was because of the “natural spread of disease.”
F-P seems to be referencing the virgin-soil epidemic theory, but he seems to have no idea that recent scholarship has substantially qualified this theory. I have written about this here: https://bit.ly/3inCycd 
True, most people in the West Indies 1492-1542 died from disease, but these diseases were not just because of the “accident” of Indigenous people lacking immunity to European diseases, as F-P thinks.
It was because the horrific conditions created by Columbus and the Spanish promoted the spread of disease and its lethality. Genocidal consequences stem from violent colonialism, so it wasn’t just “natural spread of disease” as if a hurricane had swept through.
All of this is well documented, including by Las Casas. Weirdly, F-P uses LC to get Columbus off the hook. He says LC shows “some Spanish people had compassion,” as if this is meaningful.
OK, no one is saying that every single European was the same as every other. A few had compassion and were appalled by genocide, but this would be the same as saying that some Germans were appalled by Hitler. Does this mean the Holocaust was a "myth?" Surely not.
Another bizarre thing about F-P’s Columbus discussion: After asserting there is no evidence of Columbus genocide or ill-will, he pivots to the old chestnut, “but he was no worse than a bunch of other people of his time” and cites the Mongols exterminating a bunch of people.
Non-sequitur! All this means that there were lots of genocidists.
Here’s another good one: We should all keep in mind that Columbus was “first and foremost a merchant” whose purpose was to “open a trade route to China.” OK, then, why didn’t he realize he wasn’t in China and leave the people of the West Indies alone?
Point is CC's initial purpose is entirely irrelevant to what he actually did when he had the chance. (Plus, it does not take a “cultural Marxist” to know that capitalists can be violent.)
What about North America? F-P tells us things like Powhatan wanted John Smith to build him an “English-style house.” Powhatan was a smart Indian and knew that adopting “European ways” would “make his life more comfortable.”
Maybe the house thing happened, maybe not. Either way, it’s part of F-P’s argument that because Indigenous people adopted European technologies, we cannot accuse Europeans of “cultural imperialism.”
But this is a strawman. No one thinks Indigenous incorporation of Euro technology is cultural imperialism.
Cultural imperialsm is when Europeans coercively impose their ways of life on Indigenous people through missions, residential schools, boarding schools, etc. F-P says nothing about these practices of cultural genocide.
Back to Virginia: F-P says Powatan gave John Rolfe 2,000 acres. Therefore no stolen land. Cherry-picking. Does F-P have any idea what happened in Virginia over the next 100 years?
Colonists steadily encroached on Powhatan land, destroying resources. Powhatans rose up and attacked the English (resistance itself is evidence that lands were being stolen) in 1622 and 1644. The English put down these rebellions and imposed formal land cessions.
Without land and resources, Native communities in Virginia suffered malnutrition, starvation, were subject to disease (because of horrific conditions, not “natural spread of disease”). By 1700, Native population in eastern Virginia was around 1,000, down from 13,000 in 1607.
F-P also takes us on a long tour of Pennsylvania, mainly talking about the Moravians who showed up in the 18th century and converted some Lenapes. F-P sneers that “our Liberal friends will glibly dump them into the bucket of ‘European cultural imperialists.’”
This is ignorant. Has he read any of the scholarly literature about the Moravians? None of it describes the Moravians this way. Scholars have been quite respectful of the Moravians.
It is also a red herring and distracts attention from how even in the “tolerant state [sic] of Pennsylvania” there was land left and genocidal killing.
Does F-P even know about the Walking Purchase (1737)? There have got to be at least 50 books that explain what happened. You can look it up on wikipedia, if you want. Spoiler alert: what happened was not actually a “purchase.”
Does F-P know anything about the Paxton Boys and their 1763 massacre of Conestogas? Or, of the impact of that massacre on Lenapes living at Moravian mission towns (they fled to Philadelphia in terror; dozens died under squalid conditions—not the “natural spread of disease”).
Speaking of the Moravians, you would think F-P might mention the Gnadenhutten massacre. Does it matter that a Pennsylvania militia murdered 96 Moravian converts in cold blood in 1782?
So far, we’ve been talking about specifics. Let’s look at F-P’s “general overview.”
Here’s what he says: “After the initial disease-caused die-offs, and in spite of a few sensational wars and small-scale massacres, remaining Native Americans adopted so many Old World ‘life hacks’ that most were gradually assimilated into European culture. . .
. . . Only a minority stayed ‘wild’ enough to be placed on reservations.”

This is so simplistic and wrong that any reputable publication should have refused to touch it.
1. Yes, there were “initial disease die-offs,” some massive, but they weren’t universal. There is a literature on this which anyone writing about this should know.
2. There continued to be disease in the decades and centuries after initial contact. Not because of lack of immunity, but conditions created by colonialism (taking resources, poverty, malnutrition, no clean water). Populations weren't allowed to rebound after initial epidemics.
3. “A few sensational wars and small-scale massacres” grossly understates the extent and relentless of violence in multiple forms, including direct violence and indirect violence (e.g., through coercive removals, which were achieved at gunpoint).
3a. Does F-P have any idea what happened in California, 1848-1870s?
4. A few “wild” Indians left and forced on reservations is ignorant and offensive. F-P has no idea of the multiple economic strategies of Native nations forced onto reservations, nor of conditions on those reservations (many people died of TB, not “natural spread of disease.”).
5. Plus, “forced on reservations” is prima facie evidence that stolen lands are not a myth. How does F-P think the U.S. and Canadian governments got Native nations on reservations. . .
. . . By telling them about the virtues of European civilization and then they all said hurrah, we’ll gladly go to reservations on poor land and send our kids to boarding schools?
5a. No, they used guns and other means of coercion (like threat of starvation) to force through treaties. These created the illusion of consent, but it was only an illusion, and any good historian won’t fall for it.
Here’s some homework for F-P. Watch this map and tell all of us cultural Marxists which of these lands were purchased with the full consent of its Native owners?
Guessing F-P might respond: well, Native people didn’t own those lands anyway. “Tribes were in constant conflict with other tribes,” he writes, “the question of who owned the land was in a constant state of flux.”
Here F-P echoes hoary and yes racist colonial justifications for theft. Everything was a big mess, no one really owned anything, savages were killing each other all the time. It was OK for Europeans to come in and do their thing.
Actually, believe it or not, historians know there were conflicts and contests for territory, but we also know that Native nations had clear understandings of territoriality.
Very clever, though, of F-P to throw this in: “Should we not be grieving for those Native Canadians whose land was stolen by other Native Canadians.”
To the extent that this happened, let Native Canadians work it out. The moral obligation for the U.S. and Canada is to deal with the fact of its own thefts, and they are multiple (and ongoing).
In the end, I’m not convinced that F-P really cares about what happened.
Even if stolen lands and genocide are historical facts, F-P would still not want them known because it would discredit “Anglophone democracy,” leading to “self doubt” and the “breakdown of the Western democratic order.”
F-P writes of riots that had erupted in the U.S. and the “new and unaccustomed boldness that characterizes dictators around the globe.”
Who is to blame? Not authoritarians, not right-wing politicians who want to impose “patriotic” education and shut down critical inquiry, but “a tiny minority of activists who has ‘drunk the kool-aid’ of Cultural Marxism.”
I really have no idea what F-P is talking about. Most scholars I know who have a critical take on European/Canadian/U.S. imperialism/settler colonialism are a bunch of squishy liberals or (gasp) democratic socialists.
There are some revolutionaries, too. The best of them are combining western radical traditions with Indigenous epistemologies and ethics. Their work is important and can’t be dismissed with the manufactured bogeyman of “cultural marxism.”
But, what about the crisis of democracy? To have any chance to repair our deeply flawed democracy, we to have to start with an honest reckoning with its foundational and historical limitations and exclusions.
A starting point: recognizing that the one of the major reasons the colonies declared independence in 1776 was because George III was restricting their “freedom” to steal Indigenous lands. Here's something about the 27th grievance of the DI. http://bit.ly/2Sb9mex 
Another: recognizing that Thomas Jefferson, he of “Jeffersonian democracy,” threatened and was willing to undertake genocidal warfare against Native coalitions resisting the imposition of unfairly “negotiated” treaties.
Another: recognizing that the major agenda of Andrew Jackson, he of “Jacksonian democracy,” was the removal of Indigenous people west of the Mississippi. This required the theft of their lands and had clearly genocidal consequences.
Another: recognizing that even that paragon of American democracy and equal rights for all, Abraham Lincoln, became president on a platform calling for “free soil,” meaning more theft of Indigenous lands and massive violence against Native communities during the Civil War.
F-P wants to protect Americans and Canadians from these truths, fearing they are too weak to confront myths (and lies).
He could be right. Maybe Americans and Canadians are too fragile to face uncomfortable truths and that truth telling will simply provoke violent backlash and feed authoritarianism.
Still, I’d prefer to place my hopes with people who willing to confront the actual past.

/end
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