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May 2, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:57
220 Immigration, History and Genocide
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It is 3 o'clock on the 2nd of May, 2006.
I hope you're doing well.
I finally broke through the logjam this morning.
I had wanted to post a couple of podcasts Earlier this week, but I had to finish off doing some minor edits on the hour-and-a-half-long 35-meg call-in show from this weekend, so it took me a little while.
Maybe it's sort of anal, but I wanted to keep things in sequence.
That seemed to be a better thing all around.
But in order to keep things in sequence, I had to finish off the Sunday one before publishing today, so I hope that it wasn't too awful for you to be without a couple of Freedom Aid Radio podcasts earlier this week, but...
You know, that which does not kill us makes us stronger, baby!
So, I hope that that's alright.
Now, I did get a suggestion today, and I've talked about this before, but I'm going to revisit the topic sort of very briefly today.
Well, briefly. Semi-briefly.
Well, quick for me. Anyway.
So, the question is around the issue of...
Immigration and sort of the original situation that occurred in America during the settlement and sort of the original expansion of the white settlers or the Western European settlers during the colonial and post-colonial period.
Basically from about the 17th century to the last sort of major battles in the late 19th century.
The question around immigration is one that's very interesting.
And I don't believe in any sort of collective unconscious or any sort of racial memory, but I do believe that guilt and sort of moral horror is passed from generation to generation.
And it either becomes acknowledged or it increases, right?
So this is sort of my basic philosophy of this.
And it occurs very much in the realm of families, right?
So if you have a sort of drunken, child-molesting, beating kind of whatever parent, then the children either acknowledge that this was a moral evil or they end up repeating it.
That's sort of the basic choice.
The reason for that is that what we don't acknowledge we end up recreating because the truth has to come out.
I mean, this is the basic thing about human life.
The truth will out, right?
And you have all these sorts of stories about you.
You kill someone and then they come back to life and the ghost is not put to rest until the truth comes out, until the murderer...
Until the murderer victim exposes the murderer, then everything just sort of keeps going and keeps going and keeps going, and the ghost is never laid to rest.
This is the sort of metaphorical way of pointing out that we either have to acknowledge moral evil or moral horrors that have occurred, or...
We end up repeating them and escalating them, and there's a lot of reasons for that.
We can go into another time, but the truth will out, and if it doesn't get out, then things just keep getting worse until it does get out, right?
So, Americans have lost, and Western Europeans have lost the idea of freedom, and now turn to the state for all solutions, which is a lesson that needs to be learned, it seems, over and over again in history.
The state will then expand, destroy society, and then people will go back to some sort of freedom, It's just that our goal here in this conversation is to give people something a little bit more sustainable than, let's make the state smaller, something that can actually be sustainable, which is no state.
So that's sort of our idea here.
Now, the issue of the founding of America in terms of the relationship between the settlers and the native population is complicated.
I mean, some people simplify it like they get this Rousseau-y and 19th century noble savage thing.
If you've watched the film Dances with Wolves, you get this sort of peaceful, nice, wonderful, socialistic, kind, friendly group of Indians.
And then you get these sort of cold-blooded, wild-eyed, sociopathic Americans and Westerners coming over and killing them for no provocation and so on.
I mean, and that's nonsense.
Or you get this sort of more traditional Western thing where you get these sort of hullabaloo-ping kind of Indians who are just coming charging homicidally over the crest and killing the women and children for no provocation.
I mean, both of these situations are propaganda, of course, because the general course of human relations is just a little bit more complicated, especially the course of violence between sort of adults, not sort of adult to child.
The course of violence between adults is usually pretty complicated, and the history is not something that you can sum up in sort of victim slash non-victim kind of thing.
So, I won't go into a huge amount of detail, but the central question is what happened to the native population and how and why.
Well, the how is not that complicated, right?
It's biological warfare, but the why or the motive is something that is complicated.
So, just to take some statistics that are all hotly contested, so I'm not going to say that any of these are final figures.
But there are some estimates that range from a couple of million up to 12 million of the sort of Native Americans who were part of the sort of ecosystem of North America before the white men came.
And then at the end of the 19th century, you have generally accepted figures of a couple of hundred thousand, maybe 250,000.
Now, of course, people look at that kind of reduction of life, right?
Let's just say 10 million to 200,000, where you have, what is that, 2% of the population remaining after a cultural interaction, let's say.
And the first thing that they'll do is spring to the idea of genocide.
And that, of course, is a very tempting thing to come to, and it's a very sort of damn America kind of thing to come to.
And on the other side, all we wanted was peaceful expansion.
We were more than happy to trade with these people, but they kept riding into our peaceful homesteads and hacking us with tomahawks and scalping us and torturing us and so on.
And my particular perspective is that...
There is no such thing as the noble savage.
I'm very much with Hobbes in this, that life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, and nature is red in tooth and claw unless civilized by particular moral philosophies that are generally adhered to.
Fortunately, human beings are incredibly motivated and driven by the argument for morality, so it's not the end of the world to civilize.
It's actually pretty easy, but it's also easy to use the argument for morality to uncivilize it, so a lot of the Native American cultures, as most primitive cultures do, We're good to go.
A brief but terrible tragedy, after which I would be as if I blinked, right?
I mean, it doesn't really matter how long you're dead for, right?
I mean, your atoms are going to end up coming back to life in some manner, some place, somehow.
These atoms are going to come back to life, not in the same configuration, probably, but this is sort of a natural fact of...
Everything that we are is created from some sort of atom that was a part of a star or something and it sort of came to life in us and we'll sort of go back to this sort of non-alive atomic stuff and then we'll sort of come back to life again at some point.
At least the atoms that compose as well.
I mean, there's nothing mystical about it.
It's just a matter of probability that within this universe or some other universe we're going to be back to life in some way.
So the native culture as a whole...
Has this lack of fear of death that comes specifically and directly from this lack of pleasure in living.
I mean, this life of savagery, of barely having language, of complete mysticism, this sort of pre-Cambrian mindset before the rise of consciousness, or certainly of conscience, where you are undifferentiated from nature in any fundamental way, where you have no where you are undifferentiated from nature in any fundamental way, where you have no sense of thought processes that are different from the stimuli which is
So, of course, to take an obvious example, the world being round, and us understanding it being round despite the fact that it looks flat, is one of the ways in which we know that we have thought processes that are separate from, though the principles are derived from, but the thought process is separate from, the direct stimulation of our senses, right?
So we can reason things out that through a logic and a scientific method derived from the senses and validated by the senses through reproducibility of experimentation, but not simply a direct conduit from the senses, right?
So, for instance, when you're a child, you're probably frightened of thunderstorms, right?
Because they're loud and they're noisy and flashing and so on.
So, you know, the sky gods are angry is something that you probably would not be that irrational in feeling as a child.
But then you learn about what actually is going on and you understand things.
So you're not just a direct conduit to stimuli response based on your emotional faculties and your concepts are not completely enslaved to direct sensual stimulation.
That is post-savage lifestyle.
You have to think about things.
And of course, post beyond that is where you're no longer just thinking scientifically.
But You're also doing that with yourself, so not just with nature, but also with yourself, so that when you receive a stimuli, like I'm angry at this person, then you can express it as just your own feelings and not something directly provoked by the other person that's worth discussing that may be helpful or not helpful, but your feelings then also are not directly...
Determining your reactions to reality.
So there's lots of gradations on this, but the Native Americans were very much in the first gradation where they had no capacity really culturally to reason outside of direct perceptual and cultural stimuli.
So the brutalization of their minds, which occurred as part of their cultural horror.
All culture is a kind of horror in my book, but there are still degrees of horror.
And so, of course, the average Native American child has bloody rituals and sees a lot of violence and impermanence and so on.
And so they don't generally grow up with any kind of rationality.
And of course, it's my particular opinion that there's no significant intellectual problem with Native Americans, no intellectual problem at all.
And so the only reason why they were still savages was because they were brutalized, right?
I mean, Everybody wants to sort of be healthy and everybody in a natural state of things wants to have progression and growth and capitalism and all these kinds of things.
But the reason that they don't is because some sort of brutal intervention is occurring, right?
So we've talked about this in terms of black families, particularly in the welfare state, and we've talked about this in terms of our own childhoods and so on.
And this is a very common phenomenon, that wherever you see a society that is backward, so to speak, It is that way because of brutalization towards the children.
So I don't have any particular friendliness towards Native American culture.
I do view it in its original state as brutal and transient and violent and empty-headed and sort of just brute reactionary stuff.
So, you know, that's sort of my perspective on these sort of savage cultures that there's not some place I'd want to live and it's not something that I have any respect for.
Now, that having been said, I'm not sure that millions of them should have been killed.
I mean, that doesn't seem to me to be a particularly moral solution either.
So, the question of what happened is, again, hotly contested.
There's lots of arguments from either side.
I think that the most sensible approach, in my humble opinion, is...
And the reason I say my humble opinion is I'm far from a learned scholar in this area...
But there are a number of factors that occurred around the sort of deaths of millions of Native Americans that need to be understood before we cry genocide or accident or whatever.
The first issue, of course, is that about 90% of them died as the result of a variety of Western European illnesses appearing in their midst or occurring for them.
Primarily smallpox, but also syphilis and typhus and cholera, things like that.
Of course, they didn't have the antibodies that were slowly built up after successive waves of horror in Western Europe.
They didn't have the antibodies, so About 90% of them, it's estimated, who knows, right?
But about 90% of them died of that.
And so a lot of it was just starvation as well, because when 90% of your tribe gets wiped out, then, I mean, especially if you're a kid, nobody's going to bring you any food, so a lot of them died that way.
The question then comes up, was it a deliberate process of biological warfare to hand over the infamous smallpox-ridden blankets to the native population in order to kill them off so that you could take the land that they wanted to use for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle?
Well, there's evidence both ways.
The one thing that is pretty clear is that the Western Europeans pretty much understood that if you had something that made someone sick and you handed it to them, that they would get sick.
I mean, one of the things that occurs in the Middle Ages, early Middle Ages, during the Crusades, is I can't remember which city it was, somewhere in the Middle East, I think, that they were trying to take the city and they had it under siege, but the inhabitants had a lot of food and water and so weren't going to give up anytime soon.
But what they did was they took some plague victims and catapulted them into the city, hoping to spread the plague within the city.
So there was not a complete misunderstanding about the issue of the transmittability of illness.
So given that anytime anything was handed from the Europeans...
To the Native Americans that the Native Americans died in droves, this was not something that was lost on the European settlers, not something that was lost on the Western settlers.
And there are some indications...
That at certain forts and in certain situations, and there are letters to this effect, they basically say, well, if you want to inoculate the problem, then the problem of the Native Indians, give them some blankets with smallpox, take them from someone who died of smallpox, give them the blankets, and your problem will be solved relatively quickly.
So there was some indication of knowledge about this.
Was it a consistent policy?
Well, no, not so much.
I mean, in the 18th...
I think it was 1802, the president...
ended up trying to get an inoculation program going towards the Native American population to get them inoculated against smallpox, but sort of a combination of the feeling from the Native Americans that this was a trick to make them sick, combined with the fact that a lot of the local authorities combined with the fact that a lot of the local authorities really didn't care that much about this inoculating the population of Native
It didn't really get very far, so they continued to die pretty consistently from smallpox and these other kind of Western European ailments.
The other thing to remember is that the violence that was perpetrated, and we'll just talk about the violence perpetrated against the Native Americans, was perpetrated not solely by the U.S. military, by U.S. militia, There was lots of sort of private militias cooking around the frontiers and so on, and lots of sort of, I guess, instigations of violence that are lost in the midst of time.
So... Of course, you'll hear certain kinds of attacks like, well, we were just lying peacefully in our beds and the Native Americans came through our windows and killed our children and, you know, they had the most horrifying kinds of tortures that they would perpetrate.
I mean, stand someone up on a stake and flay them alive for three days.
I mean, just absolutely nightmarish ways of killing people.
And of this, of course, you can say, well, the Native Americans started it and then it spread to the white population and so on.
But there really were no rules of war in these kinds of engagements.
And, of course, the instigating factors are always lost to the mists of time.
Because whoever survives in any conflict always says that we were responding to an unprovoked attack.
I mean, that is just so much part of human nature that all you need to do is separate two dysfunctional children who are fighting to find out How innate that is.
Somewhere from the age of three or two and a half onwards.
He started it. I was just sitting here and he came up and punched me and I was just defending him.
I mean, this is just so much part of human nature that it's common to all conflicts that the instigating incidents are almost always lost in the midst of time.
I mean, especially when you're talking about frontier situations a couple of hundred years ago.
So we don't know what happened, right?
We don't know if it was a misunderstanding.
We don't know if there was a rape.
We don't know if somebody drove somebody away from their hunting grounds and then they came back.
We don't know what caused it to escalate.
But we do know that pretty continually there were these savage conflicts, usually along the frontier towns, but sometimes further back.
We have huge and savage conflicts between the Western settlers who wanted to farm, right?
I mean, and so would enclose land and would strip it and cut down the foliage and cut down the forests and so on, thus stripping the natural habitat for a lot of the game that the Native Americans were interested in catching and eating.
These two lifestyles, I guess you could say, were naturally going to come into conflict.
So where you have no property and land, which is generally the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, versus where you have fixed property and land, which is generally the agricultural lifestyle, when these two cultures interact, then there is simply no possibility that there is not going to be some pretty brutal conflicts coming out of it.
I do believe that property rights exist and that to enclose a property has some legitimacy to it in terms of making it your own property.
However, it's tough to say that things are in a perfect state of nature when you have people hunting game that travels through the land, which you have now enclosed, and if you are trailing after, say, a herd of bison or buffalo, and that's your foodstuff, and somebody then shoots them all, can it be said that the herd of bison was your property because it's something that you were sort of harvesting?
It's all very complicated, and I don't know that there's any particularly clear answers.
There's nothing that I can come up with, which just means that I can't come up with it.
It doesn't mean anything else. But I think this issue of the clash of cultures between fixed agricultural fenced property and roaming, no-property kind of hunter-gatherer lifestyles, these things are going to cause huge amounts of problems, of course.
Now, another issue that occurs, of course, with the settlers, the Western settlers, is that there was an enormous amount of proselytizing that was going on between the Western settlers and the Native Americans.
So, of course, one of the things that the Jesuits and the priests and so on who landed with the colonists wanted to do was to convert the Native Americans to Christianity.
And They originally sort of said, hey, they're our brothers in Christ, they have lived in the darkness of no Christ, and now we can get them back to buddy Jesus and so on.
And they didn't have much success with this, of course.
I mean, Christianity, for all of its faults and flaws, which, as you're aware, I think are considerable, is still a step up from pure nature worship.
It is a step in the conceptual development of man from pure nature worship.
So in pure nature worship, the trees are alive in the druidic sense, and you worship the trees because there is an invisible tree dryad or something in the tree.
So you're worshiping something tangible, and it is infused with emotional energy and concepts and projections and fantasies, but they're directly tied into something that is physical.
It is to me...
A direct step forward in conceptual development to no longer worship nature as if nature were inhabited by ghosts, but to worship ghosts completely independent of nature.
It's a step forward towards the separation of fantasy from sensual reality.
Instead of looking at sensual reality and infusing it with ghosts directly, you are at least separating ghosts from sensual reality, which means at some point you can just say, well, if we drop the ghosts, we still get to keep the sensual reality, and you can end up with scientific rationalism and so on.
So, The more abstract a religion is, the more that it tends to be an advance, to my way of thinking, in human thought.
Because you really want to separate what is fantastically imagined from what is sensually perceived.
And the more you can separate it, the thinner that line combining the two becomes, and the more closely you can end up being able to More closely you can end up being able to end up separating the two sort of for real.
And so you want to sort of break that bond, I think, pretty closely and as quickly as possible.
You want to stretch that line until it snaps.
And Christianity was a pretty good way of stretching that line.
And then when the scientific revolution came along, then it sort of snapped.
And so this is sort of my...
I don't know, it's my hat tipping towards Christianity, that it was a step forward, still a pretty primitive state, but it was a step forward from things like the Egyptian religions and the Greek religions and the Roman religions, where you had heavily anthropomorphic gods.
So, in other words, what was human was considered to be innately bound up with what was divine.
And that caused a lot of problems because it's then much harder to separate these kinds of things from the divine.
If you've got the human sort of bound up with the divine, it's harder to separate them.
And so you want to create a god that is as abstract and inhuman, so to speak, as possible.
And then you can dump the god and still keep humanity and reality and sensualism and so on.
So all of those things end up being...
To my mind, a pretty productive step forward to end up with a more abstract religion.
But you're not going to have much luck helping people to make that step.
Unless it's sort of coming organically from within their own minds.
I mean, the development of conceptual life intergenerationally is a very complicated business, but there is, to some degree, unless there's some foundation of rationality, there is, to some degree, it is a gradual process, right?
So, the scientific community, I mean, as it's often said, you know, the people who believe in the old ways of doing things have to die out before the youth get their way, but it's usually not quite that bad, in my opinion.
You end up with some significant progress in science even within a generation because, of course, you have the scientific method.
Where you don't have the scientific method or respect for rationality, you do get societies which tend to get frozen in time, right?
So like the Chinese civilization for a couple of thousand years and most of the Native American civilizations, the Aztec civilizations, the ancient Egyptian civilizations, and some of the stuff that you see going on in the Mayan civilizations and so on.
And the pygmies, you know, the pygmies of Borneo or whatever, you get situations where because of the brutalization that fantasy is taking upon the rational self, the disconnect between any kind of interpretation of reality, so this is people who just,
you know, they fear thunder because it's loud, they never try and figure out what it is, just bouncing off emotional stimuli or perceptual stimuli with no intervening thought Well, the growth of that tends to be a pretty difficult and hard thing to do to affect that, and I would say that it would be interesting to see if you could affect that through...
The rational method, right?
So if you impacted somebody who had that kind of thinking with scientific rationality, would you be able to make some progress?
Probably I would say you'd be able to make more progress with that than you would be by saying you should believe in this religion, which is more conceptual than yours, but still, of course, based on fantasy.
I just don't think you're going to make that much progress.
This is certainly what the Jesuits and the Christians found upon their attempts to convert the Native Americans.
They just couldn't do it.
They just really had a great deal of difficulty converting these people to Christianity for the reasons that I think I've just outlined.
This could be one way of looking at it.
Now, the question then becomes, well, if you can't convert these people, what is your view of them from a moral standpoint?
Well, if you are a Christian and you are trying to convert the savages to Christ and the savages prove unconvertible, then it seems to me that, and there's some evidence for this historically, that you're going to have A situation where you can view it one of two ways.
The first way is that you say, okay, so they're not bright enough to figure out God.
God is not speaking to them yet because they're too childlike, so we need to educate them.
And we need to sort of educate them not too gently because they have to be brought to the kind of place or to the kind of situation where they can accept God or listen to God.
But they have to sort of be dragged upwards to a higher conceptual plane in order for God's words to be able to speak to them.
That God can't speak to them because they're too dumb or something like that.
And there's lots of evidence of that, of course.
Um...
Here in Canada, we had these.
I'm sure there was a case in the States as well and other places where this has happened.
You basically take these people and you attempt to forcibly assimilate them culturally, right?
You drag these children away from their parents and throw them into schools, boarding schools where, of course, they're subjected to endless, endless rape.
I mean, what occurred in these kinds of situations here in Canada was just, I mean, it was a living hell on earth.
I mean, it was just perpetual child abuse, sodomy, rape, I mean, this is pretty obvious, this kind of stuff is going to happen, but this cultural re-education is considered to be the one way of dealing with recalcitrant convertees who aren't seeing the grace and glory of God.
That's sort of one approach, and it does involve a fair amount of violence, because you have to go in and attempt to destroy the existing sort of culture, and then you have to rip the kids out, and you have to try and teach them in the ways of the Lord, and so on, and it creates a lot of resentment and problems, and just endless things that go on with this kind of proselytizing.
The second way that you're going to view these people who resist the teachings of Jesus is that you're going to end up saying, well, they could hear God, but they refuse to, and why?
Because they are sinners, and that I think is a fairly important thing to understand as well.
That if you feel you've given somebody a pretty good shake when it comes to accepting the reality and the joy and the glory and the goodness of God, but still, they rebel in their hearts.
They refuse Jesus and God and whoever, Yahweh and Beelzebub, well, maybe not Beelzebub, but they refuse God in their hearts.
Well, the only reason they're doing that is because they're willful sinners, right?
I mean, this is... This is what the teachings of children were very common at this time, that if children resist the teachings of God or have any hesitation or questions about the teachings of God, it's because they do hear God, they're just willfully resisting it, and therefore it's okay to beat the hell out of them or hit them with sticks or torture them and withhold food and water and so on, or purge them of their evil.
They can choose good, they just choose evil because they're willful and bad and so on.
So in the first situation, if you approach this from a cultural standpoint, in the first situation, you end up with the desire to re-educate these people, which means initiating violence against them, dragging them to a, quote, higher conceptual plane, and so on.
Which is a pretty bad thing all around, as you can imagine.
The people did not particularly welcome having their entire culture ripped from them and having their kids taken away and re-educated and so on.
So that didn't go so well.
In the second version, it's like, well, we've tried with these people, but obviously they're put here by the devil and they're bad people.
And so whatever we do to them is fine, right?
Because they've proven they're evil by refusing God and so on.
So that didn't obviously dispose people too well to these kinds of situations.
Now, the question of how people approached the problem of property rights and savages, so to speak, I mean, it was pretty savage what was going on on either side or on both sides of these conflicts.
But when you have a hunter-gatherer society with no respect for property rights or no concept of property rights clashing with a homesteading culture, There's a lot of savagery on both sides.
I do believe that the savagery was exacerbated by the problem of religion that we have to convert these people or they're sort of useless to us morally or evil in particular.
I think that didn't help.
But this sort of push and expansion that was occurring for people in the 19th century, 18th and 19th centuries, it's important to understand that violence breeds violence.
I mean, this is something that's so important to understand.
If you have, let's sort of take a parallel situation, right?
That you have a bunch of people in a theater and a bunch of people who are protesting outside the theater for whatever reason.
And then somebody starts shooting people in the theater.
Well, a lot of people are going to be stampeding to get out of the theater.
And they're going to come leaping out of the theater.
And they're going to, let's just say, I don't know, like it's some sort of dead end or whatever.
And they're scrambling to get out of the theater and to get away from the guy who's shooting people in the theater.
So they come pouring out and the guys won't get aside or can't get aside who have the signs, the protesters, and so they get trampled and then they get pummeled and they just get scratched and beaten and kicked and killed and people are just pouring all over them in order to get away from the violence.
Well, I think that's a morally difficult situation.
It's a morally problematic situation.
So, do you say to the people, well, you should not have...
You should have stayed in the theater where the guy was shooting people, and that's how you should have lived your life and died like a dog, right?
I mean, that's the choice you should have made.
Well, that's kind of tough... To say to someone, legitimately, I think, you want to get in.
It's also not what you would do, right?
It's sort of important as well.
You want to get away from the guy who's shooting.
And if there are protesters in the way who won't give way or who can't give way, I mean, you're not sort of going to stop and say, okay, well, I guess I'll just get shot and I'm not going to worry about, you know, maybe injuring these protesters.
You're just going to keep piling on to get away.
And so, in a very sort of rough way, I would say that this is somewhat analogous to the situation.
Well, who wanted to go and live in the frontier of the West?
Well, people who were fleeing violence in their home countries.
So if you want to look at the root causes, in my sort of humble opinion, if you want to look at the root causes of what was going on in the American frontier, well, you had this inexorable pushing and swelling of population constantly plowing out into the wilderness to get away from what?
To get away from violence.
To get away from a lack of opportunity.
So you've got some guy in Bulgaria...
Who is not going to have any kind of life in Bulgaria because he's a serf or a slave or he's taxed at 60% or he's just not got any life of any kind that's going to be worth living for him, right?
So what's he going to do?
Well, he's going to pay some guy to ship him across to the New World.
He knows nothing about it, doesn't know anything about it.
It could all be lies, but the degree of desperation that these people are facing is not that dissimilar from people trying to get out of a theater when somebody's shooting them, right?
So The fact that these people are willing to run away from their cultures, their histories, their families, their language, their everything, and jump on a ship and pay people exorbitant amounts of money, it could all be a lie.
They're going to go out and live in the wilderness.
They don't know what the hell's going on.
There are bugs. There are bears.
There are Indians. There are...
You know, every kind of horror known to man in terms of how difficult it is to settle these things.
And I know a little bit about this because I worked up north for a while after I was in high school.
So I know a little bit about how difficult it is to clear a bush and how difficult it is to live out there.
And I had a lot of modern conveniences, of course.
So, if you want to look at the deaths of the protesters, to some degree, and I mean, this is arguable, but I think it's not a bad approach to take.
If you want to look at why the protesters outside the theater end up getting killed or harmed, it's because the guy is inside the theater shooting.
Sort of the prime moral agent is the guy inside the theater shooting that's making everyone flee.
So if you want to look at who's getting the Indians killed, in a very real sense, it's the gendarmes who are in the European countries that are driving everyone out of the country because you can't live with these people holding their guns to your necks all your life.
So that's what's causing the enormous swelling population boom.
I mean, in America, which is causing people to constantly collide with in a desperate kind of manner.
Like, they can't go back.
I mean, if you've got people who are killing you in your neighborhood, you're probably not going to pull a Chuck Bronson and go out and start killing them.
What you're going to do is move, right?
But you've got no place to go if you're in America, right?
I mean, if you're on the frontier, you can't go back because you've put everything you've got into getting out there and there's no place for you to go.
So you kind of have to stay and fight it out.
But you are really fleeing a theater where people are getting gunned down, and you have to sort of push forward or find a way to make where you've got survivable, and that's going to put you in direct conflict with these hunter-gatherer societies that are pretty savage by nature, and it's going to make you savage, and there's going to be lots of atrocities on both sides.
But really, it's the result of the violence that was occurring in Europe that was causing everybody who had legs and half a brain to flee Europe and to go to the New World, where it was a complete nightmare existence, but it was still a hell of a lot better than where they were coming from.
So it's the aristocrats, it's the states, it's the gendarmes, it's the law courts and the prison wardens and the prison builders and the state apparatchiks and all of the people who are out there feasting on the body politic who were the state masters in Europe and other places which funded or gave it's the law courts and the prison wardens and the prison builders and the state apparatchiks
Those people are the ones who, in my view, have the primary moral responsibility because they're driving people out to the frontiers of America where no sane human being wants to go if there's any way not to go there.
Those are the people who are driving everybody out.
And then, so you have that from a negative standpoint.
From a positive standpoint, of course, you have the American government wants people to settle as quickly and as rapidly as possible, wants people to settle so that they can call more of the country their own, they get more people to tax, they can make more claims to a larger country because it really is a land grab.
Now, each individual person The land grab is for themselves, but when you have the American government competing with the British, with the Spanish, with the Mexicans, with the Canadians to grab as much land as possible, then what the governments are going to do,
and this is obviously pretty well documented, is they're going to offer as much free land and as much subsidy as possible to get people out to the frontiers as quickly as possible, and they're also going to make it as uncomfortable as possible for people not to go to the frontiers.
So they're going to give you free lands, they're going to give you tax holidays, they're going to whatever, right?
So again, you have governments and policies around homesteading and land ownership and free this and free that and subsidies and so on.
So you have another situation wherein violence is breeding violence.
So if you stay in this town, you're going to be subject to heavy violence, sanction, we might ship you back, we might whatever, right?
You're going to get threatened with this, that, or the other, state sanctioned.
But if you go out to the frontiers, you will get all these free things.
We'll help you. We'll subsidize you because we're interested as a state in getting a kind of land grab going.
So... Here again, why is there such a population bulge on the frontiers?
Well, you've got people in the governments in Europe and so on whipping and driving these people out of the countries and forcing them to end up going to America, and then you have the American government and the other governments within the sort of forming North American states.
Whipping and driving and pushing people out to the frontiers so that they can grab more land as quickly as possible, and they do that by applying violent sanctions to people who don't go there and stealing from the people who don't go there and rewarding the people who do go out to the frontiers, thus causing this immense population swell.
I mean, when you think about it, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Like, even now, like, two to three percent of America is occupied, and that's about it.
So why the hell was everyone on all these frontiers trying to get anywhere?
Well, because the states were whipping them and putting them there.
And then, of course, the states were out there protecting them with the armies and arming them with the militias and so on.
So the situation that results in this kind of violence, it's like when I was talking about two months ago about Serbia and Sarajevo, that it's a lot of complicated state policies that end up with this kind of level of violence occurring.
If only 2-3% of America is settled now, then what the hell is the problem with letting people have hunter-gatherer rights even now?
Well, they can't because the state owns everything, right?
I mean, that's sort of the idea. So there really was no reason whatsoever...
For this level of violence to occur, other than the fact that states were whipping people out to the frontiers, arming them and forcing them to go there and punishing them if they didn't and rewarding them with the people they'd stolen from if they did.
And so you're basically forcing people into situations where you have a massive population expansion based on government's desire to do a land grab, a massive population expansion on frontiers where normally people only go when You know, if the rest of civilization is as crowded as Los Angeles, then people will reluctantly go to the frontiers where it's just work and work and there's no doctors, there's no schools, there's just, ugh, it's horrible.
So people don't want to leave cities, right?
I mean, do you say, well, in order to escape taxation, I'm going to go live in the woods?
Well, of course not. You don't do that at all.
I mean, they didn't want to do that either.
They just were left with very little choice.
So... That kind of situation is going to put these homesteaders in violent conflict with these Native Indians and Native Americans.
That's going to cause the kind of violence that we see occurring, the kind of brute death and possible biological warfare and so on that's going on.
Now, of course, because people very rarely see the role of state violence in creating violence as a whole, because states are all about defending the population and so on, Then the fundamental lie or the fundamental falsehood that the United States citizens have not recognized within their own government is that this genocide is the result of state policies, right? I mean, I'm not just talking about the obvious ones, like where you get a bounty if you go and kill some Indians.
I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about the other state policies about driving people to the frontiers and arming them and so on.
And the lie that they won't recognize, which is one of the reasons why America remains a violent and fearful country, is that there is this central lie of the fact that the civilization is built on the bodies of millions of original inhabitants of North America.
That's not something the people have processed.
And once they do process it, then they will become much more suspicious of their own government, recognizing that it's not their guilt, of course, and there's no such thing as collective guilt or historical guilt, And so it's not their guilt that this occurred, but it is in fact the issue of government policies and programs which would help people become much more suspicious of the government.
But that's not a leap that people are willing to take, I think, just yet.
So I hope this has been helpful.
It is a very interesting and challenging topic to talk about, and I certainly look forward to feedback that you have about this issue.
There does not seem to be a deliberate policy of genocide on the part of the United States government towards the Native Americans.
However, there was sort of the Franciscan monk enclaves where they kept the younger and the...
The Native Americans seem to have been called furnaces of death because they cause so many people to die.
So it's a very complicated topic to deal with, and I hope that I've done it some justice.
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