Hello everyone.
Today we're gonna be talking about a Stefan Molyneux video,
"The Truth About The Native American Genocide",
which is just one in a series of videos that covers
history, pop culture, public figures, you name it.
And let's start off by watching just a short clip
from the introduction to this particular video.
[STEFAN] Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
I hope you're doing well and
I hope you're sick and tired as I am
of being lied to about everything, all the time.
Your history, uh, is lied about
in order to control your future.
I'm sick and tired of it,
and I'm going to help you break out of the matrix of Marxist delusions
that have birthed our self-destructive monoculture.
So...
[SHAUN] So, quite an intro there.
And this is what I find interesting about Stefan's "The Truth About" series.
He openly starts off with the assumption that
the established and accepted history is a lie.
The description to his video reads:
"Interactions between the early European settlers and America's native population
are often described using terms such as slaughter, genocide and holocaust -
but what is The Truth about the Native American Genocide?"
With the implication being that apparently terms like
"slaughter," "genocide," and "Holocaust"
could not possibly be the truth.
You see, for Stefan, there was the actual, true, historical event
and then that truth was perverted and warped
by liberal, leftist, white guilt, Marxist, professor types
in order to control society or whatever it is they do.
And then after that comes Stefan
who's gonna see through their lies and their ideology,
reestablish the truth and
thereby save the world or something.
Um, now just to lay all my cards on the table at the start here,
I don't agree with Stefan there,
you might be surprised to hear.
Uh, for me, it goes
there was an actual historical event
let's say, the violence against the various Native American peoples by white people invading their lands
Uh, then there were proposed justifications for that behavior
in an attempt to absolve the white folk of any guilt in the situation.
Then after that came the book-learning professor types
who, through historical research
and actually, you know,
interviewing Native American people and asking them about it,
uncovered the truth of the situation.
For white people, of course.
The Native people already knew the truth of the situation.
Then comes Stefan who is fed up,
not with being lied to,
but that the truth is now being told
because it's a truth he doesn't want to hear.
So he dismisses the modern historical consensus as a lie
and tries to get us back to this point.
When white people were good and absolved of any wrongdoing,
ever.
And wouldn't that be nice.
So which of us is correct, there?
Well, to find out we're gonna take a look at Stefan's video.
That the established history is a lie is a pretty big claim
and would require a lot of proof.
So we're gonna see what Stefan has to offer on that front.
And as always,
(except for the times when I forget to say this)
I recommend that you also watch his video
so that you can be sure I'm not misrepresenting it.
I'll put a link in the description below.
So, okay, welcome back,
air quotes.
Uh, let's start off by giving a brief overview of Stefan's video.
Firstly, in the section titled "Estimates,"
Stefan lays out his best guess for the Native population decline in numbers.
Then in the section titled "Declines?" he argues
that since there are more Native people alive today than at his lowest estimate, around 1880,
that a genocide could therefore not have occurred.
Next in the sections titled "Disease," "Empty..." and "Effects of Disease"
he makes the case that a genocide could not have occurred
because the majority of Native American deaths
were attributable to disease and starvation.
Then in the sections titled "Warfare" and "Alliances,"
he lists some Native violence against the white population
and makes the case that any white violence was justified
by the fact that they were at war with the Natives.
So a genocide could not have occurred
because the actions of any white people were, quote,
"in conformity with the laws of war that were accepted at the time."
Now, you may have noticed there
that Stefan's video is primarily concerned with whether or not
what happened to the Native Americans can technically be called genocide.
And there is much academic debate on that subject.
Most of it boiling down to what particular definition of genocide one happens to be using.
Now, personally, I think it's something of a goalpost shift.
Uh, Stefan is hiding from the actual interesting question, which is
was what happened to the Native Americans right or wrong?
By instead having the dictionary definition argument,
as if by potentially proving that what happened to the Native Americans
could not technically be called genocide
it was therefore somehow justifiable.
Now there's obviously a lot of moral ground between justifiable action and outright genocide,
of course, but Stefan's video is about the genocide question,
so that's what we're going to be attempting to answer too.
So then, was what happened to the Native Americans a genocide?
And there are 3 main points Stefan makes when answering this question.
He says, "No genocide could have occurred because
not all Native people were killed,
most deaths were due to disease or starvation,
and white violence against the Natives was justified by the rules of warfare."
And we're going to go through these one by one in more detail.
But first off, we're going to read off the legal definition of genocide from the UN,
so we know exactly what we're looking for.
[READING]
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
So, commit all that to memory, folks.
And okay, with that very lengthy introduction out of the way,
let's get to Stefan's arguments.
Firstly, the fact that not all Native people were killed.
[STEFAN] Now in 2014, those who directly self-report as Native Americans number just under 3 million people.
So, over a few hundred years, the European control of North America
has increased Native American genetic expression enormously.
Diluted, no question.
But it has increased. That is not, technically,
or even, allegorically, genocide.
In any way, shape-
Genocide is when the gene pool gets wiped out,
not when it flourishes.
[SHAUN] So, here, Stefan is making the case that
there are about 3 million self-identified Native Americans in the US today
as well as a varying amount of Natives
"contained within" other racial populations,
whatever that's supposed to mean.
And he declares that a genocide could not have happened
otherwise neither of these things would be the case.
And there's a few problems with that argument.
The first is that just because there are still Native Americans around today
doesn't necessarily mean a genocide could not have happened in the past.
The legal definition of genocide accounts for acts committed with intent to destroy a people
in whole or in part.
Not every single Native American person would have to have been killed for it to count as a genocide.
As a comparison, in the year 1900,
there were around an estimated 11 million Jewish people living in the world.
Today, there are more than 14 million.
The number of Jewish people alive has increased over the last hundred years.
Does that mean that there could not have been a genocide
committed against the Jewish people sometime in between those two dates?
Are we therefore to conclude that the Holocaust could not have happened
simply because it did not kill every single Jewish person?
Of course not, that's ridiculous.
And Stefan is talking about a history that is several centuries long.
You can't just look at the starting population number and the ending population number
and conclude entirely from that that no genocide happened between those two times.
The next problem here is that Stefan is only considering race and genetics.
The legal definition of genocide also accounts for attempts to destroy national, ethnical and religious groups.
An important thing to remember here is that Native Americans were not a single monolithic group,
there were many, many different groups of people living under the umbrella term "Native American."
An attempt to destroy any particular one of these groups could be classified as genocidal in and of itself,
without necessarily having to include wiping out everyone else of that racial group.
The Sand Creek massacre in 1864,
which we'll talk about later.
Uh, just to pick one example was undoubtedly a singular genocidal act,
even though the aim was only to kill the Native Americans present,
rather than all Native Americans everywhere.
So I'm forced to conclude that these numbers are, to quote Stefan,
"not an argument."
Since with regards to our genocide question,
it doesn't matter how many Native Americans there were before colonization,
or how many Native American people there are today.
Those numbers by themselves cannot tell us anything about whether a genocide was committed in the interim.
Anyway, let's move on and talk about disease and starvation now.
We'll tackle the most contentious issue first,
which is the alleged use of smallpox blankets to deliberately infect the Native population.
[STEFAN] So, deliberate infection from smallpox blankets.
Well, these are based entirely on two letters from British soldiers in 1763
not a government program, not a government policy,
no evidence that it was actually done.
Now, in 1763, this is long after smallpox had actually peaked.
And there is no evidence of a significant outbreak as a result of this...
vaguely theoretical bio-weapon.
[SHAUN] So first off here, where Stefan says the stories of deliberate infection are based entirely on two letters from British soldiers in 1763,
uh, that's a lie, unfortunately.
We do have a series of letters sent between General Jeffery Amherst and one of his colonels
discussing a plan to deliberately spread smallpox with infected blankets, during the siege of Fort Pitt,
in 1763.
Uh, during which, Amherst states
"you will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets,
as well as try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race."
Uh, extirpate meaning to exterminate, there.
So there's no doubt what their intent was here.
Now, Stefan claims the stories of deliberate infection stem entirely from these letters
with there being no evidence such a thing's actually done.
However, over here in... *inhales*
reality,
we also have the journal of merchant and militia commander William Trent,
who was at Fort Pitt, and he writes of a parlay with the besieging Native people.
"Out of our regard to them,"
them being the Natives, there,
"we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the Smallpox Hospital."
"I hope it will have the desired effect."
And we even have the army invoice for the blankets and handkerchief,
quote, "taken from the people in the hospital to convey the smallpox to the Indians"
Now, either everyone in Fort Pitt decided to play a bit of a practical joke on later historians,
or actually, their letters and records describe them doing a thing that they actually did.
And Stefan is elsewhere happy to accept letters at the time as being truthful.
In the section of his video titled "Empty..."
he quotes something a John Winthrop wrote without once noting that
of course, this is just one letter,
it's not necessarily truthful, et cetera,
because that letter was saying something he thinks bolsters his argument.
When the letter says something he doesn't like, though,
oh, well, they're just letters, not actual evidence.
And one wonders what 'actual evidence' Stefan is waiting for, really,
from Fort Pitt in 1763.
Video footage, perhaps.
Who knows.
Now,
the effects of the deliberate infection attempt at Fort Pitt are, of course, impossible to ascertain.
Any outbreak of smallpox after the blankets incident could have been unconnected to it.
Also impossible to ascertain is the frequency of this tactic, though.
I'd personally say that the fact multiple people all spoke about the plan without commenting on its unusualness or immorality
suggests it was a tactic that was at least known about beforehand,
even if it wasn't necessarily widely practiced.
However, with regards to our genocide question,
the efficacy of the blanket tactic doesn't actually matter.
The legal definition of genocide states,
"any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy"
"Intent."
They intentionally tried to spread disease in order to,
as General Amherst openly stated,
exterminate a race.
It doesn't matter how well it worked.
You know, they don't get let off the hook for being bad at genocide.
What matters is that they tried to do it.
Eh, let's move on and discuss the unintentional deaths by disease and its effects.
[STEFAN] If you are infected with a disease,
you don't even know it, nobody tells you about it, there's no symptoms, nobody knows... what's going on
and you go and hug some family member.
And unknowingly, unwittingly
infect that family member with your disease,
we would consider that a terrible tragedy.
We would not charge you with murder.
Come on, I mean this is not that morally complicated.
[SHAUN] "Not that morally complicated", eh?
Well, we'll see about that.
Uh, Stefan's little analogy there is pretty telling.
Throughout the sections of his video entitled "Disease", "Empty..." and "Effects of Disease"
he repeatedly stresses the completely innocent and unintentional way
in which Native Americans contracted and died from various diseases.
After all, we can hardly blame the white settlers for the diseases they passed on unintentionally,
can we?
Uh, things aren't that simple, unfortunately.
There are several factors that Stefan fails to either notice or mention, here.
He treats every death from disease or its effects as a completely blameless accident.
And to examine this, we'll again use a comparison to the genocide carried out by Nazi Germany.
Many of the deaths in German concentration camps during the second World War were due to disease.
And many of these could also be called unintentional.
In one sense, it wasn't as if the Nazis were deliberately infecting each and every individual prisoner who died of disease.
Rather, the terrible conditions under which the Nazis forced their prisoners to exist
facilitated the easy spread of disease.
Malnourishment, close confinement, overwork, stress, denial of proper healthcare,
all these things can help diseas to spread.
Now, the Nazis are of course, still at fault for those deaths,
even though it was technically the disease and not them, that did the killing.
My point here being that of course, not all disease deaths are blameless
even if the disease itself wasn't intentionally passed on.
So how applicable is this comparison to the treatment of Native Americans?
Could the actions of the white invaders have contributed to the spread of disease, even unintentionally?
And to start to answer this, let's watch two little clips of Stefan here.
First up from his section titled "Effects of Disease".
[STEFAN] And it wasn't just direct effects of the disease.
Right so, often so many of the adult Natives were incapacitated by disease.
That the others, like the pregnant women, the children who relied on their food gathering, died from starvation.
Sometimes as many died from hunger, as died from disease.
[SHAUN] So, Stefan is right there. Often, it wasn't the disease that killed directly.
It just made it harder to hunt or gather food, which then led to starvation.
And this relationship also goes the other way.
Malnourished bodies are less likely to fight off disease and infection,
and therefore, lack of food facilitates the spread of disease.
Now let's watch the second clip his segment entitled, "Alliances".
[STEFAN] Now, whites who were unable to beat the Natives on the plains
would wait til they went, uh, to ground for the winter
and then would destroy the food stores, during
the winter.
And this was, in fact, the impetus for the initial reservation system.
[SHAUN] Whites destroyed Native food stores during winter.
Now, I trust most of you will have got the point already right now
but just to make it clear,
Actions of the white European Americans, such as burning down the Natives' food stores,
helped disease to spread.
And as such, we can't designate all the deaths from disease or starvation as blameless
as many of them may not have happened if it were not for the additional actions of the white people.
Now, destruction of material resources is one such action that would encourage the spread of disease,
others would include the forced removal of Native people from their lands.
For example, many of the deaths associated with the Trail of Tears were due to disease or starvation.
The rounding up of Native people into internment camps and so on.
These actions all helped disease to spread.
And I'd again like to make something clear here that Stefan doesn't mention,
whether deliberately or not.
The period of time he's talking about,
from when the first Europeans encountered the Native American people to the present day
is several centuries long.
Not all disease deaths occurred at the initial moment of contact,
and often it was only later, once the Native people have been weakened,
impoverished, and rounded up into internment camps
that epidemic diseases had the opportunity to spread.
In fact, not all disease deaths were even due to new diseases brought by the Europeans
but rather existing conditions that the European Americans had made more dangerous.
Stefan's metaphor, in which one unintentionally gives someone else a disease which kills them,
with a hug, of all things,
is not really the most apt here.
A better metaphor would be one person imprisoning and starving another person
until thy're so weak their body can no longer fight off disease.
And should that person then die of a disease,
how responsible would we say the imprisoner is?
Now to be fair here, my metaphor there involves one person breaking the law.
And Stefan has claimed that whatever violent acts were committed against the Native Americans,
such as burning their food stores, were justified by the laws of war that were accepted at the time.
So if that were true, my metaphor would also be a bad one.
So is Stefan right there?
We're now gonna take a look at the sections of his video where he discusses
and attempts to justify the intentional violence and flipped it upon the Native Americans.
Is it true that it was always justified by warfare?
Well, let's see, and
of course, there are many different massacres and atrocities I could point to and tell you about here, where
white people slaughtered defenseless, peaceful Native people and destroyed their homes.
Um, but I'll just do one.
The one I mentioned earlier.
Let's talk about the Sand Creek massacre of 1864.
So way back in 1851,
thirteen years before the massacre,
the United States and several Native American tribes signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie.
In which the United States recognized large amounts of land as Native territory
which they held no claim over.
This included parts of modern-day Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado and Kansas,
so not exactly an insignificant amount of land, there.
However, seven years later, in 1858,
gold was discovered in Colorado,
triggering the Pike's Peak Gold Rush.
And that meant that a large amount of European American settlers started violating the treaty
and illegally moving into, and settling on, Native land.
Stefan, at one point, mentions a similar series of events in California, stating:
"The discovery of gold in California... exacerbated tensions"
Now,
what "exacerbated tensions" means is
triggered a genocide of the Native population
in what's known to history as the California Genocide.
And even by the most conservative possible definition of the word genocide,
what happened in California undoubtedly qualifies.
Militia groups waged a war of extermination against the Native people,
often with implicit,
and sometimes even with explicit support from both the state and federal governments.
In 1851, California governor John McDougal announced his intent "to make war upon the Indians
which must, of necessity, must be one of extermination to many of the tribes."
And if that's not outright genocidal intent,
I don't know what is. So,
that's your "exacerbated tensions" there.
What a wonderfully, cowardly, revisionist fig leaf that phrase is.
Tom broke into Bill's house,
murdered his family,
and stole all of his possessions.
And that really "exacerbated tensions" between the two.
Anyway,
so, back to the Pike's Peak Gold Rush in 1858.
After the discovery of gold in Colorado,
there was a flood of European American settlers illegally crossing into Native lands, and
"exacerbating tensions" all over the place.
Now, in an attempt to keep the peace,
a designation of chiefs from both the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes
signed the Treaty of Fort Wise, ceding to the United States most of the lands they currently held claim to.
This new territory was less than 1/13th the size of the land claimed by them in the Treaty of Fort Laramie a decade earlier.
So they forked over the vast majority of their lands in order to keep the peace with the States.
Among the Cheyenne chiefs who signed the treaty were
Black Kettle, White Antelope and Lean Bear.
And they're important, so remember those names.
Sorry, I realize there's a lot of dry history recitation in this section,
but I promise it's all important for fully realizing
just how incredibly fucked the Sand Creek massacre was.
So, three years later, 1864,
the year of the massacre,
Colorado troops, under the command of US Army Colonel John Chivington, began,
without any declaration of war, mind, or real reason, apparently,
attacking and destroying Cheyenne camps.
And on May 16th, 1864,
a detachment of the soldiers encountered a group of Native Americans in a buffalo hunting camp
This group included Black Kettle and Lean Bear,
two of the chiefs who had, three years ago, signed the Treaty of Fort Wise with the United States.
Lean Bear rode out to meet the soldiers,
fully confident of a peaceful encounter.
You see, Lean Bear had previously met with President Lincoln in the White House
and carried with him documents signed by Lincoln,
explaining he was a friend of the United States and was peaceful.
As he approached the soldiers, they opened fire
and murdered him.
They were acting on orders from Chivington to kill every Cheyenne they encountered.
And to quote the man himself,
[READING]
Pleasant chap, there.
Anyway, uh, tensions now *very* exacerbated,
the governor of Colorado, John Evans,
sent a letter to the various local tribes, inviting all who desired peace
to report to Fort Lyon, where they would be recognized as peaceful
and placed under the protection of the United States government.
Black Kettle then led a group of his people to Fort Lyon
where they were directed to settle at Sand Creek.
In the center of his camp, over his lodge,
Black Kettle flew an American flag with a white flag tied beneath it to signal they were peaceful
and under the protection of the United States.
The majority of the people present at the camp were women and children,
as most of the warriors were away, hunting.
So let's just recap how these people got here.
Two times they had signed treaties with the United States,
and two times people from the United States had violated those treaties,
invaded their lands, and killed their people.
The Natives had signed away most of their remaining lands attempting to keep the peace with the United States.
Lean Bear, one of their chiefs, was murdered in cold blood attempting to keep peace with the United States.
And now finally, they had surrendered themselves to the mercy of the United States,
settled where they were told to,
and were fully under the impression that they were at peace
and have been guaranteed protection and safety.
Now, uh,
content warning for this next bit.
I'm about to read some pretty nasty stuff.
If you're bothered by descriptions of violence, I'd skip ahead a little ways
So okay, on November 29th, 1864,
Colonel Chivington had the detachment of his men surround the camp at Sand Creek with guns
and ordered them to open fire.
The women and children in the camp gathered around the American flag above Black Kettle's lodge.
White Antelope, one of the chiefs I mentioned earlier,
was shot down as he approached the troops, shouting for them to stop firing.
His body was later mutilated; he was scalped and had his nose, ears and genitals cut off.
The soldiers then moved into the camp with rifles and sabers and massacred everyone he could.
Witness accounts speak of scalped children,
children with their brains knocked out,
pregnant women being cut open,
children being used as target practice by the soldiers,
mutilated corpses,
all manner of dreadful things like that.
More than 100 people were murdered at Sand Creek,
the majority women and children,
and all of them peaceful.
Black Kettle, the chief, managed to escape the camp
and somehow remained dedicated to achieving a lasting peace
right up until 1868 when he was shot in the back
and killed by US Army soldiers when he was crossing a river.
Chivington, the colonel who orchestrated the massacre
never faced criminal charges.
So what does this guy have to say about Sand Creek or indeed,
any massacre or atrocity carried out against the Native Americans, well,
absolutely nothing.
Stefan deals with the issue by just not mentioning it at all,
besides one passing reference to there being
"examples of cruelty on both sides."
There's no mention of Wounded Knee,
or Sand Creek,
or any other atrocity.
In fact, actually, in a video entitled,
"The Truth about the Native American Genocide"
Stefan never once names or quotes a Native American person.
Does that seem odd to you, because
it should.
How can a video profess to tell the truth about history while completely ignoring one side of the history?
Stefan only talks about white violence against the Natives when he thinks he can justify it.
And let's have a listen to him attempt to do that.
[STEFAN] Yeah, say what you like, these actions were almost certainly in conformity with the laws of the war
that were accepted... at the time.
The- the villages of warring Natives
who refused to surrender were
viewed as legitimate military targets and could be acted against
and this, of course encouraged, significantly later,
when Churchill bombed the Germans and so on.
So, uh... *shrugs*
Like it or not, those were part the rules of war at the time, and considerably thereafter.
[SHAUN] So, Stefan's argument is weak here, of course,
there is no argument in defense of what he's trying to defend.
He compares the destruction of Native American food stores and villages
to the Allied bombing of German cities in World War II.
Which is a bit silly for several reasons.
Firstly,
that Allied bombing of German cities is actually a rather contentious issue.
But regardless of that,
whatever your opinion of Churchill or the actions of the Allied forces,
they were, at the very least, fighting against an expansionist, genocidal fascist state
that would have invaded and conquered their countries if it had the opportunity.
The white people in America were fighting against
some Native people whose lands they wanted to steal.
And Stefan's metaphor further casts the Native Americans as the Nazis,
which, you know,
piss off!
The other way Stefan's argument is weak here is that throughout this section,
he mentions several instances of Native violence against white people.
And he's saying
this is what was normal at the time.
You can't blame anyone in particular for that,
It wasn't just white people doing the violence,
"Mum, mum, they did it too!"
You know, it's a childish argument of moral equivalence there.
I thought it was the leftist Marxist professor types who went in for all that stuff,
not you, Stefan.
Anyway,
attempting to equate the violence of the Natives with the violence of the European Americans
is wrong for a few reasons.
Mainly, obviously,
the scale.
The whites had cannons, and rifles, and organized military.
They had a much greater ability to inflict violence.
But even if we ignore that material inequality and we give all the Native people the same equipment
and assume an equal number of people killed on each side,
one side was still fighting to defend their land from invasion.
And the other side was the one doing the invading.
The Native people always come out morally superior if that's how we're measuring it.
The other odd thing about Stefan's argument here is that he, in his introduction
mentions the superiority of white Western civilization.
That is, of course, what he's trying to preserve and defend,
the idea that white Western European people are superior.
... Though I'm sure he wouldn't put it quite that bluntly.
Eh, this moral equivalence argument from later in his video
is completely at odds with that idea, however.
If you're trying to argue Western Europeans as supposedly a superior people,
then that's what you have to prove.
Moral superiority.
Not moral equivalence.
"But they did it too!"
isn't a good enough argument, Stefan.
Anyway, we're getting pretty close to wrapping up now,
but before we do, I'd like to touch on a few more aspects of the genocide debate
that Stefan doesn't mention in his video.
And they relate to the following sections under the UN's legal definition of genocide.
And I quote,
"imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Both these things can be classified as genocide.
So first up,
imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
So, in the 1960's and 70's,
the United States Indian Health Service sterilized thousands of Native American women,
often without their consent,
and sometimes without even their knowledge.
*inhales*
And well, that's all I have to say about that, really,
it so perfectly fits the exact legal definition there that I don't really need to elaborate
I don't think.
Yes, that really happened,
and no, Stefan doesn't mention it.
Next up is forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Well, I won't dwell on this,
but let's briefly talk about the Canadian Indian residential school system.
So this was a system of boarding schools that indigenous children were required to attend.
The purpose of these schools was to, quote,
"kill the Indian, to save the man."
Uh, a quote from a chap called Richard Henry Pratt, there,
who founded the first such boarding school.
And these schools were notoriously harsh and brutal places to be.
They were located far from reservations,
so that the children would have little contact with their families or culture.
And thus, separated, the children were forced to speak another language
and the practice of Native cultural activities was banned
with corporal punishment being used to enforce these rules.
These schools, the purpose of which was obviously to eradicate Native culture and to replace it with the dominant culture,
were operated into the 1980's.
And several apologies have since been issued by the Canadian government on the matter.
So, there we go.
Two examples, there, of acts that can be called genocidal
continuing into very recent times, only a few decades ago.
Stefan doesn't consider these factors,
perhaps they don't meet his definition of genocide.
But it's worthwhile asking here,
What IS Stefan's definition of genocide, as presented in this video?
He seems to think that the only acceptable definition of genocide is
the total, unanimous, and unceasing attempt of one people
to wipe out another people.
And is that a reasonable definition?
I'll leave that up to you to decide.
So,
we're back to arguing definitions of genocide again.
And I suppose much of the debate depends upon whether you believe
genocide describes the intent, or the result.
Of course, for the most part,
the United States wanted territorial expansion.
And it was willing to use genocide as both a threat and a practical weapon to achieve that goal.
Stefan, at one point, mentions Thomas Jefferson's attempt to inoculate Natives against disease,
but,
even Jefferson, in other circumstances, was willing to threaten Native people with genocide.
In 1807, he wrote:
"If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe,
we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated,
or driven beyond the Mississippi.
In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them."
So genocide was clearly on the table, then, at least as a threat.
And it's genocide as means, rather than an end,
but is that still genocide?
Well, personally, I've seen it argued that ethnic cleansing is generally a more appropriate term here,
though it's still argued that the history is peppered with, at the very least, genocidal moments.
Genocidal incidents,
even if genocide wasn't continuous and unceasing government policy throughout the whole period,
But regardless of how we classify it,
and this is going all the way back to the start of the video here,
regardless of how we classify the actions of the invading European Americans,
how they treated the Native Americans was for the most part, completely unjustified,
morally wrong,
and only defensible if you, as Stefan does, completely ignore the majority of the actual history.
I'd like to end today with a brief note about white guilt.
That being what Stefan says is behind attempts to distort the true history in which white people were always great.
Uh, Lauren Southern has also used this excuse some of the horrible stuff she believes.
'White people hate themselves and are so guilty about the sins of the past
that they're ignoring reality and deluding themselves in the present.'
And... well...
it's not true.
Now I'm not saying white guilt is impossible as a concept,
just that people like Lauren Southern and Stefan aren't applying it correctly.
Reading the history of what happened to the Native Americans,
I was often outraged,
sometimes disgusted,
but I never felt personally guilty.
Just saddened by what people can do to one another.
Acknowledging events from the past in which white people have been in the wrong isn't driven by guilt,
just honesty.
Understanding is not guilt.
Hiding from the historical record
cherry-picking from it,
whitewashing it to erase atrocities committed,
well,
that's real guilt in action right there.
Thanks for watching, everyone.
Uh, like, subscribe, leave a comment.
Basically just have a grand old time
interacting with YouTube right there.
Er, thanks especially
as always, to my supporters on Patreon,
who enable me to keep making videos like this.
We're closing in on our next goal,
which is scary,
so head over there and check it out, if you feel like it.
I'm also thinking of doing another Q&A video for 25k subscribers,
which should be coming up fairly soon.
So if you want to ask a question,
send it me over on CuriousCat, and make sure to sign your name on the bottom if you want your name read out,
and put "for your Q&A video" at the top or something.
so I know it's not just a regular question.
OK folks, thanks a lot, and I'll see you next time.
