I so wish we could get the likes of Tom Woods over to Nostr... This is totally worth of some Sats. What do you think holds people back from a decentralized censorship-resistant protocol like Nostr?
"Native Americans' Moral Deficiency
Three days ago, on Thanksgiving morning, Rep. Rashida Tlaib couldn't bring herself to wish her constituents (whom she despises) a happy Thanksgiving.
Instead, we got a Twitter/X post that said: "Let’s all remember to honor Indigenous people today by uplifting Indigenous voices and defending Indigenous rights."
In the course of my own posting over the past few days I crossed paths with someone on the platform who goes by the name Ember Spotted Elk, a member of the Lakota Sioux.
Nearly every post from her is a denunciation of the white man, and many contain the hashtag #burncivilization.
One of the more restrained posts reads:
"Dear White People:
"No one is asking you to apologize for your ancestors.
"We are asking you to dismantle the systems of oppression they built, that you maintain and benefit from."
So she is appealing to a universal standard of justice. She is saying: you are doing minority populations wrong, and we appeal to you to stop.
Whether "systems of oppression" have been built for the purpose of keeping down nonwhite populations is, to say the least, dubious, but let's leave that aside.
The Lakota Sioux themselves were unable to conceive of the very idea of a standard of justice that applied universally -- so if they wronged another tribe, they would have laughed at the idea that that tribe could appeal to a universal standard of justice against them.
Their worldview was rooted in a specific cosmology, kinship system, and reciprocal obligations rather than abstract, universal, individual entitlements that apply equally to all human beings regardless of tribe, nation, or behavior.
There is no traditional Lakota legal or spiritual prohibition against killing or torturing members of an enemy nation. A Crow, Pawnee, or Shoshone would not have possessed the same moral status as a Lakota.
"The Indians of the same region or language group did not even have a common name for themselves," explains Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison. "Each tribe called itself something like 'We, the People,' and referred to its neighbors by a word that meant 'the Barbarians,' 'Sons of She-Dog,' or something equally insulting."
Thus no pre-contact or early-contact Native North American society possessed a concept equivalent to natural rights -- that is, the idea that every human being, regardless of tribe, nation, language, or religion, possesses the same inalienable rights to life, liberty, bodily integrity, freedom of conscience, etc.
Activists have attempted to ignore or sidestep this uncomfortable truth. They have claimed that the Iroquois Confederacy is evidence of such beliefs. (They have likewise tried to claim that the U.S. Constitution was influenced by the Iroquois Confederacy, but I debunk that claim in my book 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask.) But rights were citizenship-based and did not extend to outsiders.
For that matter, William Penn's rosy accounts of the Lenape in the 1680s were idealized European projections. Traditional Lenape warfare, captive-taking, and torture (documented by 17th-century Dutch and Swedish sources) were normal.
The Pueblo peoples were peaceful toward each other within the pueblo, but witchcraft accusations could lead to execution, and raids against Navajo, Apache, or Comanche were common. Moral obligations were not universal, but ended with the pueblo or language group.
Other examples have been put forth, too, but none of them qualify, either.
Now it is all well and good that Ember Spotted Elk should wish today to appeal to a universal standard of justice, but for all her pride in and celebration of her tribe, she should be honest enough to concede that the very idea of such a standard comes from the white man she despises, not from the Lakota or any other tribe, and that she is therefore using European moral tools to render her judgment.
Now when it comes to war, we ourselves often revert to a kind of native-style prejudice in which we presume that the other side has no moral standing, that our side must be in the right, that deaths on the other side are scarcely to be mourned, etc.
That's certainly been true in my case. In my brief neoconservative period (as a high school and early college student), when I was too ill-educated even to realize I was a neocon, I never gave the human cost of war a second thought, and became impatient with anyone who did. War was like a video game I could enjoy from the comfort of my home. Devastation and human suffering were quite beside the point: the righteous U.S. government was dispensing justice to the bad guys, and that was that. What are you, a liberal?
And thus I turn once again to the great Scott Horton, whose encyclopedic knowledge of American foreign policy, which cuts like a laser beam through layers and layers of propaganda, has helped wake so many of us out of our jingoistic stupor.
It doesn't mean you don't love your country when you speak the truth about what its leaders are doing abroad. I love it too much not to say something.
As Bill Kauffman put it, there are two Americas: the televised America, known and hated by the world, and the rest of us.
"You can't have a healthy home and a worldwide empire," continued Bill. "They can't coexist. You can't care about Baghdad and your own backyard."
He went on (this is from 2008):
"McCain chooses Baghdad. We take our stand in our backyards, on our front porches, in neighborhood diners and sandlot baseball diamonds, and country churches, and rock and roll clubs, and volunteer fire departments, and all those preciously little voluntary institutions that are the lifeblood of this beautiful country."
Here and there, this older, lovelier America is reasserting itself.
Let us arm ourselves with the knowledge we need to fight against those who would deform her into an empire of lies.
Tomorrow the Black Friday weekend discount on the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom comes to an end.
This is the best guy we have teaching you what you need to know, step by step, so you can truly absorb it, about every theater of the War on Terror -- the real truth, not the comic book.
Coming soon, he'll do the same for the new cold war with Russia, that threatens to destroy the world.
There's a systematic refutation of Christian Zionism, which has done so much to spread violence around the world, as well.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. As a lover of truth, you'll be like a kid in a candy store."
~Tom Woods
#HappyThanksGiving #antiwar