Amerika

In the contemporary political climate we face the burden not only to discuss, but to ethically justify, the historical raids and conquests of our European ancestors. Currently people have so little knowledge of our own European heritage that this ignorance often manifests as moral outrage. Thus — as anyone who has attended a liberal high school or college already knows — all of our European history is considered to be a succession of unethical genocides and land thefts.

Public conservatives minimize the issue by claiming it is ‘water under the bridge’ since it is distant history now, or try and universalize the matter to all places and times, since all peoples throughout the world have done the same. However, liberals and those in their education systems want an ethical justification. They want to know exactly how their heritage was created and whether or not it was ethically created. Only when they feel that their society is legitimate and ethical will they feel comfortable in taking up the torch of Western Civilization.

Modern society has difficulty discussing raids and conquest because it finds it hard to justify preemptive strikes. In our criminal justice system, offensive action taken in self-defense often counts as an assault if it happens before the first punch is thrown. The law often penalizes those who shoot a burglar who enters a home if the shot happens before he has already committed some life-changing assault on an innocent victim.

Like all civilizations, ours is built on a surplus of goods. Because of this, our ethical system is radically different than a tribal society built on limited resources. Thus, what today is considered unethical theft and invasion was once considered ethical raid and conquest. To take resources when a surplus exists is obviously unethical. To invade land when there is enough land for everyone is obviously wrong.

On the other hand, in a tribal world of limited and scarce resources, to invade a more fertile and plentiful land than one’s own is survival, and to take resources because your people do not have any is also just survival. As I wrote in my previous article, the will to survive and live is in fact an intrinsically ethical will. This will to survive is God;s will, also. It is the natural desire of creation to preserve the highest goods: the strongest, most beautiful, most resourceful individuals of any species. This is how evolution happens.

Thus, this context of scarce and finite resources is the needed ethical context for most historical raids and conquests. The raids on France and England by the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish vikings are a case in point, along with tribal warfare amongst indigenous people everywhere, the fighting amongst Kingdoms in the Middle Ages, and the various expansions and migrations of peoples over Europe and to the Americas. But what about the more modern case of colonization? This is the constant axe which liberals always grind.

Often colonization was motivated by the same factors which tribal warfare, raid, and conquest are motivated by. Finite resources, exploding population growth, overcrowding, persecution and abject poverty, were all motivating forces for immigrants to move from Europe and England to the Americas. These wholly ethical motivating forces ultimately made colonization a generally ethical phenomenon.

Without glossing over the negativities and struggles between the colonists and natives, we should be clear that no colonization movement was ever reducible to privilege, greed, pride, or arrogance. And considering that we cannot put words in the mouths of indigenous peoples, we should be clear that no indigenous group considered itself the ‘owner’ of its land. Theft is in and of itself a Western concept which is dependent upon the notion of property. Thus, it is contradictory for a liberal to claim that the colonization of the Americas was a theft if the same liberal claims that property is a detestable imported bourgeois European concept foreign to the Natives.

Moreover, the same liberals argue that mass migration of Mexicans and Central Americans to the United States is a necessary colonization. These people, it is said, are fleeing poverty and danger, and thus, they have no other choice but to flood our gates. So, in the same way, if any liberal supports illegal immigration, they are supporting colonization in principle, and they are admitting that colonization is ethical in principle when such colonization is a necessity for survival.

From this we can deduce that liberals consider raids, conquest, and colonization to be ethical in principle; they approve only those however which, in the classic egalitarian way, move resources from the strong to the weak and not the other way around. When resources are scarce, these activities become morally obligatory. The Will to survive is an intrinsically moral will. I guarantee that a fair analysis of American and European history, based on this principle, would not have the moral outrage which it gives to many today.

Even more, as has been written on this site before, colonialism happened after history made it clear that Europe would not be left alone by outsiders and had to conquer the wider world to keep itself safe. The third-world Mongols, Huns, and Muslims invaded Europe before the middle ages much as Barbary pirates savaged its shores, forcing Europeans to develop a worldwide military network in order to suppress future threats.

And for us Empaths, know that empathy does not change the moral imperative to raid, conquer, and colonize, when circumstance requires it. To cower in fear and empathy when survival is at stake is to die. And it is immoral to die when one has necessary value to offer the world. Nature values the strong over the weak, while humans value the weak over the strong, but the former produces better humans while the latter downgrades us ever steadily toward the primitivism of our simian ancestors.

Tags: colonialism, conquest, vikings