It's why as much as I detest the State of Israel I don't use "stolen land" rhetoric against them; if they can conquer the Palestinians, it's their land.
If savages (and our primary enemies who are enabling them) can re-take America and remove me from my own home without me being able to stop them, they have earned it. The problem is our people forgot this and are still making legal arguments hoping invaders and bandits can be persuaded.
Force is all that matters, "property rights" and constitutions are gentlemen's agreements on already conquered and defended land.
Two wolves fighting over territory don't debate right and wrong, or who's the rightful owner of anything. This is the underlying barbarism of reality that much of the world is already in the mindset of that decadent people thought we somehow progressed out of.
Whoever can conquer, is the heroic victor. Moral arguments have their place within civilizations among countrymen, but don't really matter in war.
In other words, it's time for the White man to conquer, and be the fucking "bad guy."
"Stolen" actually is somewhat applicable to Israel even though I agree it is overly simplistic as an explanation. The people the Jews displaced were civilized and had created a functional society largely bereft of barbarism. It was more akin to traditional conquest than to theft. As an aside, it is not without irony that Jewish producers of pop culture in the United States largely are responsible for the Noble Savage lie and the claims of theft. Projection, I suppose.
I have been reading a biography of Samuel Untermyer, "Hitler's Bitterest Foe." As an individual civilian (albeit fabulously wealthy), Untermyer "declared war" on Germany with the goal of "destroying Germany economically" thereby toppling the German government.
An individual person took it upon himself to "declare a war." He organized like-minded. individuals around him (i.e. a criminal gang) and prosecuted that economic campaign for several years. Others of his mindset became adjuncts of the State in producing mass propaganda to incite the populace to attack Germany. Consequently, a State with extraordinary power was coerced/connived into physically attacking Germany, killing hundreds of thousands of its citizens and destroying (by criminal means -- firebombing) its cities.
It can be argued that the German government was defending its territory from encroachments by a force that sought to take control of it.
The Germans who were defending their 'territory' were themselves conquered but, pertinent to the argument of this essay, were harshly punished and perpetually vilified for their acts in defense of their territory.
It was an attempt to verify that oft-noted connection that resulted in deep-dive into that odious man. But I have not yet found solid evidence (i.e. a document) that Untermyer was, indeed, the financier of the Scofield bible.
It IS the case that Untermyer and Scofield both had presences in Lynchburg where both engaged in supplying Civil War fighters.
There are some animals who are NOT "savage," and NOT predators.
If force is all that matters, then a government of whatever form is irrelevant. In fact, Joe Biden more or less told the "people" that: go ahead, keep your AK47, Fed gov. has F15s. Trump echoed Biden in talking to Iran: Do what I say or we will kill you (unleash the F15s Lockheed Martin gives to Israel).
Moreover, such an argument -- that animals do it so humans should also, rather negates millennia of "human" culture, and debases the quixotic notion that the human has a spirit of higher quality than a wolf.
Jim's argument, and Israel's fight, points to another disequilibrium: Israel fights with weapons -- those same F15s, in fact: a machine war -- while Palestinians fight with their human bodies. It's not a fair fight, therefore not honorable. It is based on lies and lies and more lies; in every way an undoing of culture and civilization -- not to mention the "Ten Commandments" that Jews claim as their contribution to civilization.
"t's why as much as I detest the State of Israel I don't use "stolen land" rhetoric against them; if they can conquer the Palestinians, it's their land."
An excellent piece, Mr. Crowley! I discovered your excellent Substack yesterday and read your piece on how the American Southwest was NOT stolen. I will admit that I don’t always agree with your views but I nonetheless have great respect for you and that you challenge politically correct historic myths that everyone these days just takes as gospel. I also wanted to mention you may not agree with everything I write in my comment here either but I hope you will give me a fair hearing because I think you make an excellent point here.
Indeed there is a BIG difference between conquered and stolen. But white Europeans and Americans did NOT steal the Americas from its Indigenous people they conquered them in war often with the help of other indigenous peoples. For example, the Tlaxcalans assisted the Spanish in fighting and defeating the Aztec Empire and helped Spain to conquer the Philippines. Columbus and his men were assisted by the Tainos in fighting the Caribs. General George A. Custer had Kiowa scouts assisting him and the U.S. Army in fighting the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho. Just to name a few examples. It’s not like the Indigenous people all liked each other. Each tribe was a nation unto itself and they fought each other in bloody wars and conquered each other’s land long before and long after the white man showed up on the continent. The Chickasaw and others drove the Sioux from their native lands in Minnesota.
The Sioux then conquered and massacred the Ponca, Oto, Kiowa, Omaha, and Pawnee without mercy and took their lands. The land in the Black Hills where Mount Rushmore currently stands? The United States took it from the Sioux who had previously taken it from the Cheyenne who had previously taken it from the Crow. Conquest is just a part of human history and they did it to each other all the time. The Native Americans were not idyllic hippies who spent all day dancing and lived in a pristine utopia until the white man came along and ruined everything. They practiced not only conquest and fought wars but also practiced human sacrifice, cannibalism, head hunting, chattel slavery, sexual slavery, environment destruction, and torture of prisoners.
Yes, there are individual cases where white settlers through chicanery and trickery stole land from Natives and that was of course wrong. But most of the land in this country was acquired via conquest or in peaceful trade with the Native peoples. By the way, conquest has been the norm throughout human history until it’s formal reputation in 1949. But for most of human history if you had the military strength to take and hold a piece of land you got to keep it. The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are far from the only ones who that happened to and they did it to each other all the time. Indigenous peoples around the globe like the Aboriginal Australians, the Māoris and the Native Hawaiians were not angels who spent all their time holding hands and singing kumbaya before the Europeans arrived.
The Nobel Savage trope is complete nonsense and if you truly want to respect Indigenous cultures and people and not infantilize them you need to stop repeating these myths. There are many other examples of conquest from history I can think of where it would just as ridiculous to claim the land was stolen. The English conquered the Scots and the Irish, African tribes conquered and enslaved each other, the Romans brutally took over Gaul and massacred one million of its people, the Japanese brutally tyrannized over the Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Filipinos, Indonesians, and Burmese, the Haitians took control and ruled over the Dominicans, so on and so forth. The Comanche Empire and the way they ruthlessly took the land of other Native American tribes shows that the Native people were just as land hungry, greedy and power hungry as any other group of people. No, America is not a stolen country and this myth is absolutely ahistorical and ridiculous. I recognize the grave injustices done to the Native Americans by the U.S. government. But they don’t change the fact that the things that happened between white settlers and the Indigenous people is the same things that human beings have done to each other for over a millennia.
Logic and terms must be used carefully. This is about conquered land and holding it. White people and the West shouldn't waste time responding with norms, ideas, or history. And they have nothing to complain about or feel sad about against those who are conquering them today and taking their lands and women. It's not fair; it's just the way it is.
Spot on. The attempted historical erasure of native barbarism and savagery is a transparent attempt to memoryhole an argument against displacement of Western peoples from the lands they civilized. And let's be clear: "civilized" is the correct verb here. Even "settled" ignores the reality of the positive benefits of what happened. Whatever short-term misery was inflicted was subsequently and vastly exceeded by life without constant rape, torture and murder at the hands of fellow
"noble" savages. There was a reason competing tribes cooperated with the Europeans to subdue sociopaths like the Comanche.
Along these same lines, we see an attempt to erase from history the fact that Europeans are indigenous peoples in their own homeland. The purpose behind this deception is to justify and obfuscate the ongoing genocide against Europeans. After all, if the barbarous savages of Australia, New Zealand and North America are noble solely because they are "indigenous," the same descriptor (which in this case is accurate) cannot be applied to Europeans lest sympathy be extended to them.
Finally, as to the conservation and environmentalism claims, those are inherently and almost exclusively white qualities. Indians would exhaust their fisheries and hunting grounds and then invade and commit genocide against other tribes, and outside of ritual, cannibalism was commonplace when they were unable to steal new lands to replace their depleted resources. I would submit the only non-whites who respect nature are the Japanese, and that is mostly confined to their homeland since, for instance, they engage in whaling in international waters. You only can have a clean and safe environment for the most part if you have a majority white population.
The strong conquer the weak. It’s been like this since man first walked the earth. It was going on in the Americas long before Columbus set sail. Conquest is not the invention of the European white man. But the woke can’t handle the truth. If they could they couldn’t be victims anymore.
I agree with the essence of this, but it's the kind of agreement I give when you take away basically every other factor and boil everything down to Hobbesian brutalism.
Most societies avoid the violence inherent in that by having some sort of narrative legitimacy. In the West, it's very often been predicated on religion: God wills it. Before that, it was MY gods will it, and your gods are puny and have small sexual organs. It sounds stupid, but religion is how an individualist society makes its social institutions sacred. People participate willingly because of them, and it's a very good idea, because making a society work by holding everyone to the barrel of a gun is extremely inefficient.
Present-day Western legitimacy comes from increased quality of life, a product of Enlightenment philosophy and rational self-interest. Combine this with an egalitarian ideology where society is governed by elected bureaucrats with a mandate that benefits everyone, and bam, modernity. The obvious problem is the continued existence of the lower classes, who aren't going anywhere. Digging in gets you the noble savage myths you were talking about, the result of Western civ being convinced by Christian means that violence and power are corruption, and innocence is good because... reasons.
To be fair, it does encourage the people on the bottom to minimize their own violence. The real problems crop up when they get self-righteous. When the people believe in legitimate violence, you get collapses, and they don't subscribe to violence due to an excess of ideology but because of an incompetently developed ideology. That's the real problem: we need a new one, badly. Conquest as a basis for cooperation is a philosophy that can only be loved by honorable poet-warriors, and this society has very few of those.
I get that there's almost no historical precedent for acknowledging the reality that "conquest is theft." But that doesn't meant that it isn't. It's dishonest to claim that there's some all-important difference that dismisses any moral judgement of Conquest, while reserving moral disapproval for Theft. Conquest is a form of armed robbery, and it differs from Theft only in scale. I get that Conquest is a common feature of human history all over the world. So is rape, torture, murder, plunder, massacre, and genocide. But the past historical record doesn't mean that those actions aren't moral atrocities. If you only recognize the essential injustice of those actions when you're on the losing side, you have no integrity.
If humans don't acknowledge the essential malum in se character of those actions, we'll stay stuck at the same static level of stupidity as rival baboon packs. It's probable that we'll outsmart ourselves with our weapons technologies and leave our species in a condition much more miserable than we are presently. With no reset, of the sort found in videogames. I get that some self-ordained "alpha male" humans are craving the chance to find out. I find it pathetic that that's the best that someone can do with their gift of consciousness. To be so inflated with robotic power fantasies that they squander any higher purpose. https://adwjeditor.substack.com/p/13-choruses-for-the-divine-marquis
In case anyone here is interested, the vast majority of EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON was lifted from T.R. Fehrenbach's THE COMANCHES -- a far better book.
What is your position on the common rebukes: "conquered" = "stolen", and the idea that this land is "stolen" specifically because peace treaties were broken?
It's why as much as I detest the State of Israel I don't use "stolen land" rhetoric against them; if they can conquer the Palestinians, it's their land.
If savages (and our primary enemies who are enabling them) can re-take America and remove me from my own home without me being able to stop them, they have earned it. The problem is our people forgot this and are still making legal arguments hoping invaders and bandits can be persuaded.
Force is all that matters, "property rights" and constitutions are gentlemen's agreements on already conquered and defended land.
Two wolves fighting over territory don't debate right and wrong, or who's the rightful owner of anything. This is the underlying barbarism of reality that much of the world is already in the mindset of that decadent people thought we somehow progressed out of.
Whoever can conquer, is the heroic victor. Moral arguments have their place within civilizations among countrymen, but don't really matter in war.
In other words, it's time for the White man to conquer, and be the fucking "bad guy."
"Stolen" actually is somewhat applicable to Israel even though I agree it is overly simplistic as an explanation. The people the Jews displaced were civilized and had created a functional society largely bereft of barbarism. It was more akin to traditional conquest than to theft. As an aside, it is not without irony that Jewish producers of pop culture in the United States largely are responsible for the Noble Savage lie and the claims of theft. Projection, I suppose.
I have been reading a biography of Samuel Untermyer, "Hitler's Bitterest Foe." As an individual civilian (albeit fabulously wealthy), Untermyer "declared war" on Germany with the goal of "destroying Germany economically" thereby toppling the German government.
An individual person took it upon himself to "declare a war." He organized like-minded. individuals around him (i.e. a criminal gang) and prosecuted that economic campaign for several years. Others of his mindset became adjuncts of the State in producing mass propaganda to incite the populace to attack Germany. Consequently, a State with extraordinary power was coerced/connived into physically attacking Germany, killing hundreds of thousands of its citizens and destroying (by criminal means -- firebombing) its cities.
It can be argued that the German government was defending its territory from encroachments by a force that sought to take control of it.
The Germans who were defending their 'territory' were themselves conquered but, pertinent to the argument of this essay, were harshly punished and perpetually vilified for their acts in defense of their territory.
Didn’t Untermeyer have some connection in funding dispensationalist evangelism
It was an attempt to verify that oft-noted connection that resulted in deep-dive into that odious man. But I have not yet found solid evidence (i.e. a document) that Untermyer was, indeed, the financier of the Scofield bible.
It IS the case that Untermyer and Scofield both had presences in Lynchburg where both engaged in supplying Civil War fighters.
There are some animals who are NOT "savage," and NOT predators.
If force is all that matters, then a government of whatever form is irrelevant. In fact, Joe Biden more or less told the "people" that: go ahead, keep your AK47, Fed gov. has F15s. Trump echoed Biden in talking to Iran: Do what I say or we will kill you (unleash the F15s Lockheed Martin gives to Israel).
Moreover, such an argument -- that animals do it so humans should also, rather negates millennia of "human" culture, and debases the quixotic notion that the human has a spirit of higher quality than a wolf.
Jim's argument, and Israel's fight, points to another disequilibrium: Israel fights with weapons -- those same F15s, in fact: a machine war -- while Palestinians fight with their human bodies. It's not a fair fight, therefore not honorable. It is based on lies and lies and more lies; in every way an undoing of culture and civilization -- not to mention the "Ten Commandments" that Jews claim as their contribution to civilization.
“It’s not a fair fight, therefore not honorable.”
Life’s not fair, and war is a bloody business, there’s little honor in it to begin with.
"t's why as much as I detest the State of Israel I don't use "stolen land" rhetoric against them; if they can conquer the Palestinians, it's their land."
And I detest you, Jim.
An excellent piece, Mr. Crowley! I discovered your excellent Substack yesterday and read your piece on how the American Southwest was NOT stolen. I will admit that I don’t always agree with your views but I nonetheless have great respect for you and that you challenge politically correct historic myths that everyone these days just takes as gospel. I also wanted to mention you may not agree with everything I write in my comment here either but I hope you will give me a fair hearing because I think you make an excellent point here.
Indeed there is a BIG difference between conquered and stolen. But white Europeans and Americans did NOT steal the Americas from its Indigenous people they conquered them in war often with the help of other indigenous peoples. For example, the Tlaxcalans assisted the Spanish in fighting and defeating the Aztec Empire and helped Spain to conquer the Philippines. Columbus and his men were assisted by the Tainos in fighting the Caribs. General George A. Custer had Kiowa scouts assisting him and the U.S. Army in fighting the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho. Just to name a few examples. It’s not like the Indigenous people all liked each other. Each tribe was a nation unto itself and they fought each other in bloody wars and conquered each other’s land long before and long after the white man showed up on the continent. The Chickasaw and others drove the Sioux from their native lands in Minnesota.
The Sioux then conquered and massacred the Ponca, Oto, Kiowa, Omaha, and Pawnee without mercy and took their lands. The land in the Black Hills where Mount Rushmore currently stands? The United States took it from the Sioux who had previously taken it from the Cheyenne who had previously taken it from the Crow. Conquest is just a part of human history and they did it to each other all the time. The Native Americans were not idyllic hippies who spent all day dancing and lived in a pristine utopia until the white man came along and ruined everything. They practiced not only conquest and fought wars but also practiced human sacrifice, cannibalism, head hunting, chattel slavery, sexual slavery, environment destruction, and torture of prisoners.
Yes, there are individual cases where white settlers through chicanery and trickery stole land from Natives and that was of course wrong. But most of the land in this country was acquired via conquest or in peaceful trade with the Native peoples. By the way, conquest has been the norm throughout human history until it’s formal reputation in 1949. But for most of human history if you had the military strength to take and hold a piece of land you got to keep it. The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are far from the only ones who that happened to and they did it to each other all the time. Indigenous peoples around the globe like the Aboriginal Australians, the Māoris and the Native Hawaiians were not angels who spent all their time holding hands and singing kumbaya before the Europeans arrived.
The Nobel Savage trope is complete nonsense and if you truly want to respect Indigenous cultures and people and not infantilize them you need to stop repeating these myths. There are many other examples of conquest from history I can think of where it would just as ridiculous to claim the land was stolen. The English conquered the Scots and the Irish, African tribes conquered and enslaved each other, the Romans brutally took over Gaul and massacred one million of its people, the Japanese brutally tyrannized over the Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Filipinos, Indonesians, and Burmese, the Haitians took control and ruled over the Dominicans, so on and so forth. The Comanche Empire and the way they ruthlessly took the land of other Native American tribes shows that the Native people were just as land hungry, greedy and power hungry as any other group of people. No, America is not a stolen country and this myth is absolutely ahistorical and ridiculous. I recognize the grave injustices done to the Native Americans by the U.S. government. But they don’t change the fact that the things that happened between white settlers and the Indigenous people is the same things that human beings have done to each other for over a millennia.
Logic and terms must be used carefully. This is about conquered land and holding it. White people and the West shouldn't waste time responding with norms, ideas, or history. And they have nothing to complain about or feel sad about against those who are conquering them today and taking their lands and women. It's not fair; it's just the way it is.
Which is why they must be killed. It’s what needs doing.
Spot on. The attempted historical erasure of native barbarism and savagery is a transparent attempt to memoryhole an argument against displacement of Western peoples from the lands they civilized. And let's be clear: "civilized" is the correct verb here. Even "settled" ignores the reality of the positive benefits of what happened. Whatever short-term misery was inflicted was subsequently and vastly exceeded by life without constant rape, torture and murder at the hands of fellow
"noble" savages. There was a reason competing tribes cooperated with the Europeans to subdue sociopaths like the Comanche.
Along these same lines, we see an attempt to erase from history the fact that Europeans are indigenous peoples in their own homeland. The purpose behind this deception is to justify and obfuscate the ongoing genocide against Europeans. After all, if the barbarous savages of Australia, New Zealand and North America are noble solely because they are "indigenous," the same descriptor (which in this case is accurate) cannot be applied to Europeans lest sympathy be extended to them.
Finally, as to the conservation and environmentalism claims, those are inherently and almost exclusively white qualities. Indians would exhaust their fisheries and hunting grounds and then invade and commit genocide against other tribes, and outside of ritual, cannibalism was commonplace when they were unable to steal new lands to replace their depleted resources. I would submit the only non-whites who respect nature are the Japanese, and that is mostly confined to their homeland since, for instance, they engage in whaling in international waters. You only can have a clean and safe environment for the most part if you have a majority white population.
Great points! Reminds me of this clip.
https://youtu.be/MN90wZRnyM0?si=cAah3OsTUTyNBk8w
Timely and true! Thanks, Chad
Very well done!
Thank you for reminding me to write an article on American scalping laws! Will write a response to this soon. Great topic.
I would agree with the "stolen land" rhetoric on wrt Israel. (likewise with the same view on the State of Israel).
For me its the unsufferable faux religious claim to land.
The strong conquer the weak. It’s been like this since man first walked the earth. It was going on in the Americas long before Columbus set sail. Conquest is not the invention of the European white man. But the woke can’t handle the truth. If they could they couldn’t be victims anymore.
So we just let things happen? Resign that nothing can be done and nothing can get better?
I agree with the essence of this, but it's the kind of agreement I give when you take away basically every other factor and boil everything down to Hobbesian brutalism.
Most societies avoid the violence inherent in that by having some sort of narrative legitimacy. In the West, it's very often been predicated on religion: God wills it. Before that, it was MY gods will it, and your gods are puny and have small sexual organs. It sounds stupid, but religion is how an individualist society makes its social institutions sacred. People participate willingly because of them, and it's a very good idea, because making a society work by holding everyone to the barrel of a gun is extremely inefficient.
Present-day Western legitimacy comes from increased quality of life, a product of Enlightenment philosophy and rational self-interest. Combine this with an egalitarian ideology where society is governed by elected bureaucrats with a mandate that benefits everyone, and bam, modernity. The obvious problem is the continued existence of the lower classes, who aren't going anywhere. Digging in gets you the noble savage myths you were talking about, the result of Western civ being convinced by Christian means that violence and power are corruption, and innocence is good because... reasons.
To be fair, it does encourage the people on the bottom to minimize their own violence. The real problems crop up when they get self-righteous. When the people believe in legitimate violence, you get collapses, and they don't subscribe to violence due to an excess of ideology but because of an incompetently developed ideology. That's the real problem: we need a new one, badly. Conquest as a basis for cooperation is a philosophy that can only be loved by honorable poet-warriors, and this society has very few of those.
I get that there's almost no historical precedent for acknowledging the reality that "conquest is theft." But that doesn't meant that it isn't. It's dishonest to claim that there's some all-important difference that dismisses any moral judgement of Conquest, while reserving moral disapproval for Theft. Conquest is a form of armed robbery, and it differs from Theft only in scale. I get that Conquest is a common feature of human history all over the world. So is rape, torture, murder, plunder, massacre, and genocide. But the past historical record doesn't mean that those actions aren't moral atrocities. If you only recognize the essential injustice of those actions when you're on the losing side, you have no integrity.
If humans don't acknowledge the essential malum in se character of those actions, we'll stay stuck at the same static level of stupidity as rival baboon packs. It's probable that we'll outsmart ourselves with our weapons technologies and leave our species in a condition much more miserable than we are presently. With no reset, of the sort found in videogames. I get that some self-ordained "alpha male" humans are craving the chance to find out. I find it pathetic that that's the best that someone can do with their gift of consciousness. To be so inflated with robotic power fantasies that they squander any higher purpose. https://adwjeditor.substack.com/p/13-choruses-for-the-divine-marquis
In case anyone here is interested, the vast majority of EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON was lifted from T.R. Fehrenbach's THE COMANCHES -- a far better book.
Really well written but a shame it has to be written at all
What is your position on the common rebukes: "conquered" = "stolen", and the idea that this land is "stolen" specifically because peace treaties were broken?