The Noble Savage and The Pig Ignorant

 "Nothing that results in human progress is achieved with unanimous consent. Those that are enlightened before the others are condemned to pursue that light in spite of the others..." -- Christopher Columbus

A few bones to pick with the revisionist historians.

They are legion. They are remarkably close-minded. They are more interested in scoring cheap debating points and advancing a particularly skewed view of history than they are in objective truth. I have encountered this attitude so many times over the years when discussing the subject of history, and I find it so maddening, that I am surprised I haven't throttled a score, at least, of truly reprehensible liars.

The Overlord once had dreams of teaching history. There was even A Plan: I would attend college, major in the subject, eventually get a PhD, and then teach. History is, and always has been, my first love.

Fate, however, had other plans: it introduced me to computers and I then discovered I could make a much-better living working with them, and having to support my mother and younger siblings at the tender age of 20.

But I've never stopped studying and consuming all manner of things historical. When you do this, you often get involved in discussions with like-minded people, many of whom are quite brilliant and informative, and then there are those who are dumber than pigshit and who seem to lurk and proliferate in the darkest corners of the Internet.

Their "study" of the subject is usually begun with a poor public school education, or rather, indoctrination, and only gets worse from there. You'll know these people by the following traits:

1. They appear to have no historical sense in terms of what one is supposed to study history FOR. Rather than seeing history as the unfolding story of Man on this planet, they tend to regard the subject as little more than a dry collection of events and personalities who are assumed to be either "good" or "bad", and this is as far as their limited intellect takes them. History is somehow a morality play.

2. They "study" the subject without regards to context. History does not take place in a vacuum, and to truly understand events one needs to have some idea of the backdrop against which they have taken place. You need to know something of the culture, state of human knowledge, philosophy, anthropology, geography, and more, within which the events took place and which shaped the actions and motivations of the people involved.

3. They tend to shade everything -- even indisputable facts -- through filters, mostly political and emotional. There is no objectivity: everything must be viewed through these lenses, even to the point where an alternate point of view can be safely and reflexively dismissed simply because it does not conform to present ideology or because that alternate viewpoint makes the moron uncomfortable in some way. They will re-write history, often on the fly, according to what their orthodoxy or their feelings tell them SHOULD have happened, or by what they need to believe happened.

4. When you make an argument they can't answer, the tendency is for them to declare your point invalid, claim they hold the moral and intellectual high ground, and then call you names. You've sinned, you see, because you've made them look stupid and this is the absolute worst thing ever. It has damaged their fragile self-esteem.

5. Such people are monotonously repetitive in their arguments and usually only have a single argument to make. These are parrots, very often not even having a basic understanding the very arguments they are making, as they make them. These idiots will continue to make that singular argument until you give up the conversation out of sheer frustration, despite countering their singular point or fact with fifty of your own. They then declare victory, run away, and Mommy makes them cocoa to soothe their anxiety and fear of a new idea after their terrible ordeal of a verbal and logical pummeling.

There has been a running, online commentary on a single subject for the past few weeks: Christopher Columbus.

This coincides with the recent arrival of several new books I've read (they will be referenced as we go along), as well as mentions of older books in my library

The whos and the wheres of the online debate are unimportant. Suffice it to say, that when it comes to the subject -- in toto -- of European colonization and settlement of the New World, the assignation of  evil only goes one way. So too the causes and effects. And this one way street of blame, recrimination and accusation always reveals the blind spot in the pro-"indigenous" point of view.

That is to say, the people who support it are morons.

Let's skip to some key features of this perennial argument. In no particular order:

Europeans brought diseases to The New World which killed millions.

Why, yes, they did. To deny such is to engage in a futile effort against evidence. However, if you were to pay careful attention to the bleating of the sheep, you very quickly notice that while they have ample evidence of European (i.e. "White") smallpox destroying the American Indian, they tend to ignore the phenomenon of diseases carried by "the other" having similar effects on whites.

So that when you read Jared Diamond's magnum opus tour du crap "Germs, Guns and Steel", you discover that every time Diamond makes a reference to diseases he a) only attributes them to Europeans and b) always prefaces the word "disease" with the adjective "nasty", the implication being that only Europeans casually (and unknowingly) killed with imported diseases, and that European (i.e. "White") diseases are the only wretched and deadly ones.

Of course, if you adhere to this view you have to conveniently forget that while American Indians died in massive numbers from influenza and smallpox, that they returned the favor by introducing Europeans to syphilis and tobacco, this last the source of how many tens or hundreds of millions of cancers?

You also have to ignore historical -- and well-documented -- examples of the flow of disease in the anti-White direction, such as the East Asian pandemics that were a constant threat to Europe, and which have included bubonic plague and the modern mini-catastrophes of SARS, MERS and now, COVID-19. You would have to deliberately refuse to admit that unfettered immigration into the West has brought with it a resurgence of formerly-eradicated diseases -- measles, mumps, polio, just to start the list.

In fact, diseases like plague, SARS and MERS are all native to the Middle East and East Asia -- in other words, everywhere the descendants of Ghengis Khan went (certainly a humanistic altruist, indeed! The inventor of biological warfare) -- and continue to go in modern times, thanks to Western inventions like airplanes.

The only reason they  haven't killed everyone on the planet with their own "nasty" pathogens is because Western Medicine consistently cures whatever bug they manage to puke up.

To make short work of Diamond's book, all the rage among a certain, historically-ignorant set, it takes him approximately 500 pages to essentially say:

 "I've once again proven what every historian of note has said vis-a-vis-Western Dominance for the last 300 years, but please, do not call me a racist for it." 

In fact, all of this debate is an exercise in people calling others racist and behaving in racist fashion as a supposed exercise in anti-racism.

The man (Diamond) contradicted himself at least three times in his own foreward, for fuck's sake.

I will still recommend reading it for the laughter and to get some sense of what the "anti-White", "anti-Columbus", "anti-Imperialist" view has devolved into. Which is to say, essentially a backseat squabble over who "started it".

This is why biologists should not attempt to write history: they have but a hammer in their toolbox and they treat everything, therefore, like a nail. Anyone who begins 500 pages of dumbfuck by stating that New Guinea headhunters are superior to all others, by definition, is a stupid bastard. You get the impression that he only makes such statements because it's a combination of fashion and bragging (i.e. I've lived for years in New Guinea and you haven't, as if that's somehow special or a mark of distinction?).

Why Is It That the Descendants Of Immigrants from Europe are "Invaders", "Occupiers" and "Imperialists", but those whose ancestors emigrated from Asia are "Indigenous"?

If you ever wish, figuratively, to see an idiot's head explode, ask them this question. They literally cannot answer it without a flamenco dance around truth, logic, or facts, and in the process, make themselves look sillier than they already are.

The simple answer is "because the former are White and the latter are not White", but you'll never get this simplistic explanation from any of the anti-European naysayers. The reason why, is likewise, simplistic: their goal is NOT to discuss truths, it's to throw shade. I have to describe something of the mindset (if you can call it that) these people enter into the discussion with:

They have to believe, as an article of faith, that all White Men (specifically White Men) are racists. There is no argument you can make to counter this religious assumption. The point here is to occupy the moral high ground, and having believed they have done so, then pronounce their further arguments that stem from it as unassailable, so don't bother.

In order to maintain this illusion, we have to play with the definitions of words. The main ones being "indigenous", "racist" and whatever euphemism you choose to use for "invader".

By their definition of "indigenous" anyone who is a descendant of migrating Asians born in the New World is "indigenous". The fact that Asians had to walk here from Siberia (or so the theory, which is badly in need of revision, for reasons I will state a bit later) means nothing. The fact of "indigenous" is NOT "nativeness" to the landscape, but rather racial, and then it is further tinged with a large dollop of unhinged sentimentality, which I will address shortly.

By a strict definition, my birth in New York City through descendants of Italian immigrants makes me every bit "indigenous" as a Cherokee or an Aztec is under the squishy, politically-driven, emotionally-weak one. if "Indigenous" is strictly related to "place of birth" then everyone who was born here is BY DEFINITION "indigenous".

The point simply devolves into a kerfuffle over "who was here first", and even here, we get into problematic territory for the anti-White interlocutor, for much archeological and anthropological evidence of he last 40 or so years is beginning to call into question as to whether the Indian found an uninhabited, pristine wilderness when they supposedly crossed the Bering Sea on foot to colonize two continents from the Arctic Circle to Terra Del Fuego.

Recent evidence indicates more than a single culture existing in the Americas prior to or during the time of Asian emigration, and some of them existing as much as 60-80,000 years before Tonto made landfall in Alaska. Books on peoples like the Albans and Denisovans, the new science of DNA, scientific papers proving the existence of a pre-Clovis culture in the Americans, abound, and in many ways, are forcing "scientists" to re-evaluate their thinking about human history.

I put "scientists" in quotations for a reason: the greatest resistance to either a re-examination of evidence or outright admission that the "Out of Asia" and "Out of Africa" are either seriously-flawed or incorrect theories threatens the rice bowls and prestige of thousands within the scientific community. They've been teaching the same stuff for nearly a century now, many having come to prominence on "discoveries" that are now in danger of being questioned. The theories are designed to fit the evidence: new evidence undermines the theory. The entire dogmas of human evolution, emigration, and colonization of the ancient world are now being called into question.

For example, a well-documented incident in San Diego, California: during the construction of a roadway off-ramp, workers uncovered the remains of a mammoth (actually, several). The scene is indicative of the post-hunt. Bones are broken apart by tools. In one circumstance, a mammoth tusk is found to have been placed upright in a hole in the ground, broken open with some form of hammer, and the marrow scooped out...with a tool.

Carbon dating puts this scene somewhere in the neighborhood of being 100,000 years old. That's 60,000 years before Sitting Bull's great-great-to-the-thirtieth-power grandfather supposedly walked through miraculously and conveniently ice-free passages during an Ice Age.

The naysayers dismiss this sort of thing out of hand: the fact that a mammoth tusk is found upright proves nothing. It could easily have been deposited in an upright position by earthquakes and mudslides and whatnot, but that doesn't explain THE HOLE. Nor does it explain the deliberate dismantling and despoiling of the tusk. There is also no indication that such handiwork was the labor of an Asian, let alone anything describable as a "proto-Indian". We don't, as yet, know who did it, but this event falls outside the realm of the best "guesstimates" (because this is what it' all is, really) of when the ancestors of Pocahontas arrived on these shores.

Recommended titles on these subjects: "Unlocking the Past" (Martin Jones), "Who We Are and How We Got Here" (David Reich), "America Before" (Graham Hancock).

Columbus Never "Discovered" Anything

While strictly true, i.e. other people were here when Columbus arrived, people who make this argument omit a very important point because, once again, we have to get caught up in a word, in this case "discovered" which is derided as Eurocentric, and therefore, racist.

Because this is always about race, you know.

It is true that Columbus never discovered a brand new territory, but that is not what makes the Columbian Voyages legendary or important.

A book I've read many times over the years, "The Discoverers" (Danial Boorstin) makes the point that what makes Columbus' feat so remarkable is that it resulted in feedback. He returned to tell the tale, and then returned several times over, and then millions followed him.

Unlike, say, the voyages of Zheng He, the not-too-well-know Chinese navigator and explorer, the results of Columbus' voyages are obvious. He may have been mistaken about his destination in the beginning, but it was an error that was soon recognized and corrected by those who followed him.

And it is more of an achievement when you stop to consider that the feedback revolutionized the way Europeans saw the world, their place in it, and the possibilities that were now open to them. The return from "the Indies" erased the mental, philosophical, scientific, industrial, artistic, and mercantile boundaries of a Europe that was languishing in a "Dark Age". It rejuvenated an entire continent.

Zheng He may have undertaken voyages of greater scope, but his were not voyages of discovery: instead, he was being sent to KNOWN places not to find anything new, not to open trade and communication between lands and people, but rather to brag about the ascendency of Chinese civilization. The Chinese were long used to thinking of themselves (they still do) as a divine race, the very center of culture and civilization in a barbaric world, so unselfishly beneficent that they equipped a voyage of some 400 vessels to visit the known lands of the Indian Ocean and Southeast Africa in order to give away the riches of China and to impress the peoples there with Chinese "superiority". 

China needed nothing from the rest of the world and wanted nothing from it, and as a measure of this superiority, gave away silks, gold, jewels, just about everything to the ignorant savages that inhabited the rest of their Known World as a show of "beneficence" (more-recent history has China borrowing and adapting everything foreign for a century now, from democracy, to fascism, to communism, and now, capitalism, with a hefty theft of intellectual property, never once admitting they've fucked anything up, merely repeating a litany of supposed victimhood., which all stems, ultimately, from their own arrogance)

In the end, Zheng He's voyages came to nothing, the records were destroyed, a strict code of silence was placed over the endeavor, the Chinese were forbidden to sail outside of their territorial waters. Why? Because it turned out that the outside world DID have something China wanted.

It turned out to be a giraffe.

I'm not kidding.

Zheng He found himself on the Africa coast, hearing legends of a mythical beast called the "Kirin"(giraffe) by the natives. In one of the most-absurd coincidences in history, that word had a special meaning for the Chinese: the "Kirin" was, in Chinese mythology, a beneficent spirit, a sign of good fortune, long life, and everything up to and including free blowjobs forever, and so some were captured and brought back to the Emperor. The Emperor strutted about, convinced that this was a symbol that he and his dynasty were to last forever, that he was the greatest ruler EVAH!, and only good things could happen forever and a day.

And then the giraffes died.

Because it turned out the Chinese didn't have anything they wanted to eat. This was now seen as a sign of ill-fortune. And because China is a shame society (like much of Asia) rather than admit a mistake, or tell themselves a truth about their innate fucktard, they'd rather cover it up and pretend it never happened. For centuries, no one knew of the fantastic voyages (and they truly were!) of Zheng he, who in terms of distance and places visited surpassed Columbus by the proverbial country mile.

But nothing came of Zheng He's adventure. there was no Chinese emigrating to other parts of the globe, no flood of naturalists and scientists intent on making discoveries, no adventurers seeking fame and fortune, no revolution in thought.

Not so with Chrissy C.

So while Columbus can be said to have not discovered something someone else didn't know about before, the previous discoverers, so far as anyone can tell, did not transmit their data and accomplishments back to the Home Base. All the Indians who were going to walk across the Bering Strait (yeah, right!) had already done so, never to return.

Taken in context with the documented discoveries of the Portuguese in their attempts to reach the Orient (yeah, I used that "Eurocentric" word -- deal!) by sailing around Africa, it was Europeans who were expanding their world and worldview, while the rest of the world stayed mostly static. Even the accomplishments of history's greatest seafarers -- the Polynesians -- is a complete mystery, owing to their lack of a written language and habit of hopping from island to island after instigating ecological disaster.

Likewise, we find few, if any, records of such voyages of discovery on quite the same scale from great civilizations like Egypt, China, Phoenicia, all accomplished sailors. It has been postulated, and it's probably correct, that since their voyages were to destinations known for the purposes of trade and war and within the borders (mostly) of an inland sea probably narrowed their horizons and prevented the true voyage of discovery from taking place among them.

Recommended reading on the subject: "The Discoverers", "The Seekers", "The Creators" (Daniel Boorstin), "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" (Samuel Eliot Morison), "Prince Henry the Navigator" (Peter Edward Russell)

The Noble Savage

Of all the laughable, pernicious and childish myths surrounding this story is the idea of "The Noble Savage", living in harmony with Nature, a saintly being of great generosity, the pacifistic pastoralist to be emulated, admired, and celebrated.

What horseshit.

The very idea of the "Noble Savage" was invented by a White Man, living in Switzerland, who never met a savage, noble or not (Jean Jacques Rousseau), the veritable prototype of Adam, unblemished by sin, untouched by the human frailties of greed, jealousy, anger, and the heartbreak of psoriasis.

The archeological and anthropological record tells a different story. These are the people who supposedly hunted the great American megafauna to extinction.

These are the people who have, even by their own lore and memory, a long history of internecine warfare, slavery, mass slaughter to prevent reprisals. The Aztecs slaughtered millions upon their altars; the word "Sioux" is Mandan Indian for "Snake" (so you can see what the other Indians thought of them); the words "Commanche" and "Apache" instilled terror in their time. The Iroquois were prolific wife-stealers and slave-takers;  the early Viking settlers of the eastern North American seaboard told tales of the terrible "Skraeling", terribly pitiful wretches prone to violence (when a Viking describes someone as (paraphrased) "easily provoked to violence" we just might be talking psychopaths, here).

My own hometown of Staten Island was the scene of repeated Indian massacres of Whites (see: The Pig War, The Peach Tree War and the Whiskey War), incidents which all seem to have begun with the Indians not understanding the meaning of "private property" and feeling free to steal whatever they could not obtain by more honest and upright means.

Indians have historically slaughtered one another -- and everyone else -- as easily as Joe Biden soils his adult diapers.

Cortez could never have overcome the Aztecs with his pitifully few Conquistadores if they hadn't had a history of subjugating and abusing the tribes that lived around them. If Tlaxcalans, Otami and others, hadn't allied themselves with him in order to exact revenge upon their  cruel -- and imperialistic! --slaver, bloodthirsty Aztec overlords Cortez would have been just one more beating heart ripped from a chest in homage to the Sun god atop a pyramid of skulls.

Somehow this is NOT a Holocaust -- deliberately capturing victims for ritual sacrifice, at a rate of thousands a day, at times -- but an Indian catching a cold from a sneezing Barcelonan and spreading it to others, without intent, is?

Go figure.

In fact, it was the Spanish that first promulgated the concept of Human Rights (Bartolome de las Casas, see "The Valladolid Debate") in the Americas and the beneficiaries were INDIANS. No such concept existed in the Indian mind or culture previously.

The Indigenous Peoples Built Sophisticated Societies Destroyed By Europeans Because They Were "In the Way"

This one is easy to dispel. 

Yes, there were pyramids in Mexico. yes, the Inca did build cities at incredible heights. The Pueblo peoples of the American southwest -- Hohokum, Kayenta, Anasazi -- all built magnificent cities carved into natural rock or made of Adobe.

But, so what? Others did the same, and much earlier.

There is no pyramid in North America that approaches in age and engineering skill those in Egypt or Mesopotamia. In fact, the Olmec, Mayan, Aztec cultures were late-comers to the pyramid-building and irrigation-system-building game. 

Great cities were the norm in Asia Minor, North Africa, Greece, China while the American Indian was still trying to discover which leaf he could safely wipe his ass with.

Domesticated crops were old hat in the Old World before the Indians discovered how to grow corn, squash or potatoes.

We're often told they did all of this without even having knowledge of the wheel, but this, too, is bullshit. It's a boast that is intended to make the accomplishment seem greater than it is. Remains of toys and tools all over the Americas -- but mostly in Central America -- have wheels. The reason WHY the wheel wasn't used as extensively as it was elsewhere in the world is because the Indians slaughtered all the suitable animals to be yoked to a wagon. They had killed off the horse in North America: the Bison was too dangerous and difficult to domesticate; mules and donkeys were unknown, as was the ox. All that was left to them were dogs and llamas.

Great for pulling sleds or bearing small loads, but not for major transport.

Great building projects, like the Cahokia Mounds in the American Midwest, are impressive accomplishments, but the Celts had made dirt mounds and underground burial chambers in Europe millennia before, so too around the shores of the Black Sea, in India, in Southeast Asia. Making a gigantic mound of dirt into the shape of snake on top of a stone structure -- regardless of scale -- is no mean feat of human engineering or mathematics when this kind of thing is seen everywhere to have been a common human endeavor.

The truth is that most of the "great" American Indian "massive construction projects" and "technological leaps" were made, even independently, thousands of years after they were made elsewhere.

This is not indicative of any inherent stupidity or genetic failing in the American Indian: it is more indicative of cultures that have stagnated, for after the erection of these "great" monuments nothing similar follows. They seem to have reached a certain level of sophistication -- and comfort -- and then devolve. Their drive and curiosity seemingly depleted.

In the end, the American Indian came up against a culture which had developed the abilities to travel across open oceans with fairly precise navigation, could produce tools and weapons of iron and steel far superior to anything found in the New World, organize, transport, finance and supply expeditions at great distances and to continuously follow up those expeditions with more and bigger ones.

A more dynamic, and therefore superior, culture.

And all of that is before we even get to gunpowder and firearms, knowledge of husbandry and agriculture, superior scientific sensibilities, and adaptability in terms of learning from other cultures and recognizing and correcting their own mistakes, subsuming both into a more-sophisticated and elaborate overall system of collected knowledge, suitably catalogued, modified and expanded by new discovery.

The "sophisticated" "indigenous" people found themselves up against a superior culture, and simply could not deal with it on equal terms. This doesn't make them bad people; it makes them just one more example of history's continuing pattern -- cultures that can adapt and achieve do, those that can't die.

And thanks to the White Man -- the so-called Genocidal Maniac -- there's still enough of the descendants of Montezuma and Powhattan to fucking whine, complain, bitch, moan  and piss all over an Italian hero every year, and no shortage of dumbasses who will take their side in an effort to appear sophisticated and intelligent, but who merely come off as shallowly pedantic, insufferably smug, and galactically ignorant.

Apparently, we White Guys weren't very good at this Indigenous genocide thing, after all.

Additional recommended reading on these , and related, subjects:

"Empire of the Summer Moon" (S.C. Gwynne)
"The Comanches, A History 1706-1875 " (Thomas W. Cavanaugh)
"Christopher Columbus, A Man Among the Gentiles" (Clark B. Hinkley)
"The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne" (Louise Levathes)
"The Great Voyages of Zheng He" (Song Nan Zhang)
"Lost History of the Aztec And Maya" (Charles Phillips and Dr. David M. Jones)
"Carnage and Culture" (Victor Davis Hanson)