Omission
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes emails:
From Ace of Spades on Thursday the 23rd:
**
So I’m going to say something that is considered racially rude, but I’m sick of the bullshit.
Conquest without morality was the rule of all peoples and nations until a couple of hundred years ago. Only in the very recent past has morality become a major consideration in warfare.
And the people most responsible for adding moral considerations to the law of conquest were… Europeans.
People pushing the Victim Narrative pretend that their ancestors were morally superior to their conquerors. In fact, they were not. Their ancestors conquered everyone they could conquer. The Comanche Empire conquered other Indian tribes, which is why Indian tribes allied with the American government to fight the Comanches.
If Indians had advanced shipbuilding, navigation, and steel-working, they would have conquered Europe.
Native Americans’ ancestors did not refuse to do this because they were more moral. They didn’t do it because they simply couldn’t do it. They were not superior in morality; they were simply inferior in technology.
And all of this endless bullshit whining about generations-old conquests is just a nasty cope.
You’ve heard of “Victor’s Justice,” in which the winner of a war can vindictively set the terms for peace…? Well we live now in an age of Loser’s Justice, when the losers of the war can, somehow, endlessly torment the great-great-great-grandchildren of the winners of their ancestors having won in war.
And we’re sick of it, and we’re done with it. We never point this out, because we don’t want to upset people who are clearly insecure about their ancestors’ failures. Who wants to pick on the fat kid?
But by not shutting this bullshit down, we have invited endless demands on us. Endless reparations and payoffs, endless “land acknowledgements,” endless affirmative action programs, endless demands for apologies (which are endlessly offered, and endlessly rejected as insufficient), endless demands we change our lives to “honor” people we don’t even fucking know, endless demands we “center” other people and endlessly think about what we owe complete fucking strangers.
Enough. Enough.
The fact that my ancestors were good at war is no credit to me. I can’t take racial credit for what people that lived 200 years ago did.
But neither do I have to take responsibility for the actions of ghosts.
And the fact that some people’s ancestors were bad at war is not a credit card with no limits entitling the bearers to make endless demands on others.
I’m done with walking around eggshells because some people just cannot get over their distant ancestors having been shit at fighting.
***
Could not agree more. The last man to have clear title to land was Adam, and he lost it when he got evicted for breaking the terms of his lease. Everyone after him has title-by-right-of-conquest (nowadays called “adverse possession” by lawyers and “colonizer” by activists) including Noah, who didn’t do his own slaying but moved into a world where his patron had slain everyone for him.
Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park
I would like to throw in a claim for my Viking ancestors and their history of fomenting what we now call democracy, along with their incredible facility at conquest.
But I can’t, because justice, the sins of the fathers are not visited on the sons, either their achievements.
