DRAFT: It Is Our Business Here in America Not to Repeat Old World Society-of-Domination Mistakes

Musings on Noah Smith's allergic reactions to "land acknowledgements"...

Musings on Noah Smith's allergic reactions to "land acknowledgements"—but below the paywall because it is not yet ready for prime time, & I actually need to do my Day Job now…

San Franciscans, Amerindians, rights of conquest, justice, ethics, & America’s Errand Unto the Wilderness…

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I do not think that living in San Francisco is terribly good for Noah Smith’s mental equilibrium.

He probably needs to live in a place where, instead of being confronted with land acknowledgments, he is confronted with people who eagerly wish to see Netanyahu manage to expel all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza so that Israel can then be destroyed in the Gog-Magog War, the End Times begin, and all uncoverted Jews consigned to the Lake of Fire, which is the Second Death.

Instead, he lives in San Francisco, and is subjected to—Land Acknowledgements:

Noah Smith: No, you are not on indigenous land: ‘Why does being the first human to set foot on a piece of land give your blood descendants the right to dispose of that land as they see fit in perpetuity, and to exclude any and all others from that land? What about all the peoples of the world who were never lucky enough to be the first to lay eyes on any plot of dirt? Are they simply to be dispossessed forever? I have never seen a satisfactory answer to these questions. Nor… a satisfactory explanation of why ownership… should… collectively… [be] racial or ethnic groups…. The ethnic groups who now claim pieces of land as their own did not even exist when the first humans discovered or settled that land….

You can assign land ownership this way — it’s called an “ethnostate”…. The downsides of ethnonationalism have been exhaustively laid out in the decades since World War 2…. And yet these days I am subjected to a constant stream of ethnonationalist claims from progressives in the country of my birth… <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-you-are-not-on-indigenous-land>

I understand and also feel Noah Smith’s annoyance. When one is looking forward to being entertained or educated, thinking seriously for a moment about colonist-Amerindian interactions is a serious downer, against which one wants to kick. And there are lots of ways to kick against it:

Yes, 99%+ of colonist-Amerindian interactions were friendly win-win exchanges of commodities or of useful information about folkways, resources, and technologies.

Yes, the ten million Amerindian population today is twenty times what it was when the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Rock (and twice what it was back in 1500, before the plagues came boiling up from Mexico and from across the sea).

Yes, seen from today’s perspective, the first-order long-run effect of the Columbian Exchange on the genetic lineages present in 1500 in the territory that is now the United States has been the Columbian Exchange’s bringing to this side of the Atlantic ta dōra tēs Athēnās—the Gifts of Athene. Those Gifts of Athene in the form of humanity’s technologies are what make today’s Amerindians fabulously wealthy relative to their ancestors and predecessors of 1500.

But.