There are more than the usual reasons to publish JutGory’s overview of the absurdity riddling Ben & Jerry’s fatuous July 4th Tweet exhorting the U.S. to “return” “stolen indigenous land” to the Native American tribes. The most unusual one is that WordPress has temporarily (I hope!) lost its damn mind, and has replaced all commenter names on the recent posts with the Borg-like “[1].” As a result, readers are unable to tell who wrote Jut’s comment, for which we should all be grateful.

The main one is that the oft-heard demand that the United States should return the nation to “the Indians” is historically, legally, ethically and realistically batty and ignorant, and drives me nuts every time I hear or read it. Jut concisely explains why it’s nuts historically and legally. He does not go into the aspect of the matter than is usually ignored by shallow thinkers like whoever wrote the Ben & Jerry tweet, which is that if the U.S. hadn’t been in possession of its current mainland North American territory in the 1940s, Nazi Germany would have overrun it and probably the world, and reduced the happy, innocent hunter-gatherers there to either slaves or ashes. Tragic as the current status of the tribes is today, it is a lot better than that. Similarly Hawaii, where there is no question that the residents were robbed of their islands, would have been conquered by the Japanese. If Secretary Seward had not bought Alaska from the Russians, all of us, including the Native Americans, might have been blasted into the Stone Age (where, admittedly, the tribes would have been more confortable than the Europeans) by the Soviets.

I am not exactly saying that Native Americans should be grateful they were over-run, but rather that, as JutGory correctly points out, you can’t turn back the clock.

Here is [1]’s…sorry, JutGory’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Flagrant Virtue-Signaling Of The Century: Ben & Jerry’s”:

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Just another example of Twitter’s inability to facilitate an exploration of subtle thoughts.

Does the US exist on “stolen land”?

Sort of.

Apparently, Manhattan was purchased from indigenous people, just not the ones who “owned” the land. That would make the US a good faith purchaser for value.

But, really, that was a fraud perpetrated on the Dutch, or maybe the English. But, we got it from England fair and square in the Treaty of Paris. All of the original states were stolen from England.

We bought the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon. That was another big portion of the US.

And, the Mexican-American War, contrived as it may have been, was settled legally.

Then, there was Texas.

A huge portion of the US was obtained legally from other thieves.

That is not to say that it is that simple (the whole point of this comment is that it is not). The Indian Relocation Act violated a treaty made with the indigenous people. Jackson violated it. The Supreme Court said so. Jackson defied the Supreme Court, setting precedent for the Democratic Party.

Other treaties were violated.

There is no denying that the indigenous people obtained the short end of the stick in many way. But, any thoughtful person would acknowledge that this is as much a consequence of a tragic culture clash than anything else.

The European explorers came from a sort of rigid territorial culture that was tightly populated in Europe. They encountered numerous migratory cultures that did not view “ownership” of the land in a similar way. In a clash between those cultures, the cultures that were explicitly territorial (Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.) had an advantage over the indigenous people, as technology gave them greater power to impose their beliefs on the others (i.e. they were better at establishing territorial borders.

Then, there were immune systems. Europe had survived the plague.. Given European social structures, the plague was able to devastate the continent. You might call it a danger of an openly commercial society. That danger was soon visited upon a migratory group of peoples that had probably never experienced such destructive diseases. They were simply and sadly unprepared. In Europe, a population might have been destroyed, but borders and infrastructure might have remained. The Indians were far less prepared for that than the Europeans were when the plague hit them.

(If I were a stone-cold evolutionist, I would point out that European infusion in North America had the same evolutionary impact here that the plague had in Europe. The massive death rate here was less a matter of genocide than it was a matter of survival of the fittest. But, that is not really compassionate or wise when you comprehend the devastation to the Human Culture; with every culture destroyed, the Human Race loses something and it will likely never know what it has lost, or how it may be recovered.)

Add to that, the US tried to do the right thing. They “reserved” land for indigenous peoples (I think the law classifies them as “conquered peoples”) to give them autonomy under the Federal Government and outside the control of the States. It’s a nice idea, but still flawed. You cannot take a migratory people and give them freedom within a boundary that you set aside for them. You get an A for effort, but, at some point, you have to understand that the two cultures have potentially irreconcilable cultures. At some point, even if might does not make right, might will set the path forward. (I don’t know if this sets up an ethics zungzwang-a-ma-jigger, but I am not sure how you can say which party is right and which party is wrong when two parties who can’t live together are forced to do so.). Ultimately, the more technologically advanced culture, with greater immune systems, and a clearer vision of land ownership won out.

Unlike the Canadians and the Mexicans, who both share the notion of national borders with us (the US), many of the indigenous peoples do not or did not (for what it is worth, they should blame Spain and the Mexicans for wiping out the Central American empires (whose social structures were probably closer to Europeans than the North American Indians) have the same concepts and lost out as a result.

It is unfortunate; it really is. But, I am not sure the solution rests in trying to rewind the clock (I am pretty sure it is not), and I am positive that a wholesale return of the US to indigenous peoples is dumb (we would hardly be acting ethically in abandoning the indigenous people to the whims of the bloodthirsty Canadians). In any case, I am not sure that much of this warrants an apology (except for treaty violations, which really warrant some kind of legal resolution).

I would bet that if Twitter allowed for 3000 character Tweets, Ben and/or Jerry might have produced a response like the one above faster than a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters would have.

But, I would need to know the odds before placing that bet.