This is a good question.
Why are land acknowledgements stupid? Everybody lives on land where somebody else lived previously. Go far back enough in history, and you’ll find that it’s all about one group displacing another, then getting displaced in turn, and so on forever. Every group is a settler colonialist. And if everybody is something, then nobody is. We don’t call anybody “a person with one head” because there are no people with two or three. There’s absolutely nothing special or unique about the American native groups because they are only “native” in a very historically narrow sense. The only thing unique about America is that it built a wonderful society after displacing the previous groups. Look at Aztecs. They came from elsewhere and started eating everybody in sight. Yet we are supposed to apologize to them for the Spaniards who, with all their faults, didn’t practice cannibalism for gastronomical reasons. Instead, they founded universities where Aztec medicine was studied and taught with the same respect as the European.
Now let’s look at war. War is a natural state of human beings. It’s terrible. I hate it. But it’s always been there. Philip Bobbitt wrote a great book The Shield of Achilles, demonstrating that every new form of statehood was brought by the need to wage war in a new way. I wouldn’t take it as far as Bobbitt but it’s incontrovertible that the nation-state arose out of the need for a new type of warfare. The idea that the US is more war-mongering than any other country is as ludicrous as the idea that Americans are unique (or uniquely cruel) in displacing other groups. For its size and dominance, the US is extraordinarily peaceful. It’s a country that will try absolutely anything before engaging in warfare. When it does wage war, it does so with the greatest economy of means and human losses than anybody else. Mind you, I’m not comparing it to the imaginary world of sweet, kind peaceniks but to the real world where we actually live.
The habit of curling our noses at America and accusing it of being the worst of the worst is moronic and ungrateful whether you are on the Left or the Right.
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