One of the many, many justifications that has been used by defenders of U.S. Manifest Destiny is that, since certain Indigenous groups conquered and displaced other Indigenous groups, these groups have no legitimate claim to the land that they had taken from the previous inhabitants. In their view, somehow, this is supposed to make permissible the subsequent U.S. conquest and appropriation of Indigenous lands. "Well, the Indians were fighting and conquering each other long before the Europeans got here," the argument goes. It's often left at that, as if it were obvious that that fact justifies what the U.S. devoted a huge amount of its energy towards in the course of the 19th century.
Suppose that the Axis had defeated the Allies in World War II, including the United States. The Germans and the Japanese, triumphant, decide to deport the entire population of the United States onto reserves in the Canadian arctic or in Soviet Siberia, leaving U.S. land open for German and Japanese colonists to settle. Would the fact that wars had taken place in North America prior to World War II, including the U.S. Civil War, somehow make the Axis justified in deporting so many millions of people off their land and appropriating it for their own peoples' use? "Well, they had been fighting each other before we got here." I hope this line of reasoning sounds as ludicrous to you as it does to me. Yet apologists for Manifest Destiny continue to trot it out as if it made perfect sense; in fact, this line of reasoning has been so little challenged that Indigenous groups feel the need to downplay their own cultural differences and the various (scientifically-supported) multi-wave models of their migration into the Americas, just to deny the apologists the ammunition that these facts would bafflingly provide them.
The Hungarian people arrived in central Europe from the plains west of the Urals during the 9th century AD, displacing prior Slavic populations in the region that eventually became Hungary. Does this mean that any nation so willing and able could, with complete justification, invade Hungary, expel all the Hungarians to far-flung reserves, and chalk it up to "the Hungarians themselves took the land from its previous owners"? Ludicrous, right? So why has this ridiculous idea been accepted as a legitimate argument in the discourse on the U.S. treatment of Indigenous peoples?
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4 comments:
Aaron, I absolutely agree with you that we were and are unjustified in taking away indigenous land and marginalizing their communities. The argument of manifest destiny: "Well, the Indians were fighting and conquering each other long before the Europeans got here", is tenuous at best.
I think that you could make the argument a little bit stronger if you also denounce this worldview on moral, philosophical, or spiritual grounds (deductive); In addition to the (inductive) method you employ of using theoretical instances to highlight the inconsistency of manifest destiny logic.
I'll do that too, absolutely. However, I think that people in general are more struck when they think of other people's problems in terms of their own (hypothetical) experience, rather than listening to appeals to a morality which might not be shared by everyone. The "how would you like it if..." argument seems to get through to people in a way more abstract arguments don't, because it forces them to adopt the point of view of the victim, and leaves less room for excuse-making.
Yeah, I generally agree with that. I didn't mean to imply that your argument was incomplete. I think making arguments personal can definitely be usefull. Causing somebody to put themselves in another's shoes can be usefull.
But I think, depending on the person and situation, one might often need both. I think that it is possible to reason with people on moral or philosophical grounds. I think often people haven't thought very deeply about their biases, and if you challenge the foundation of them, they crumble fairly quickly.
For example, if somebody truly believes that a specific race is inferior, it doesn't matter if you put you pose a "how would you like it if" question. According to them it is not comparable, they cannot put themselves in the shoes of that race because different rules apply. The only way to change their mind is to challenge the root of their bias. To prove to them that even according to many of their own professed believes (such as religious ones), the bias is not justifyable when held up to scrutiny.
I like this argument
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