The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Stolen Land’ and Fake Numbers: How SJWs Invented a ‘Genocide’ Myth

Posted on | January 5, 2021 | 2 Comments

In 1998, University of Wisconsin historian David Henige published Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate, in which he examined how, during the late 20th century, academics began arguing that the indigenous population of the Western hemisphere before the arrival of Europeans was much larger than previously estimated. This origins of this argument can be located rather precisely, with the 1966 publication of an article by Henry F. Dobyns in the journal Current Anthropology. Dobyns cited evidence that the native population had been devastated by pandemic diseases — particularly smallpox but also influenza, diphtheria and other contagions — brought to the Americas by European explorers and colonists. Dobyns then extrapolated from this an astonishing claim:

If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with? Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe. . . .
What Dobyns realized was that such diseases could have swept from the coastlines initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who had never seen a white person. The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas may therefore have encountered places that were already depopulated. Indeed, Dobyns argued, they must have done so. . . .
So many epidemics occurred in the Americas, Dobyns argued, that the old data used by [early 20th-century ethnographer James] Mooney and his successors represented population nadirs. From the few cases in which before-and-after totals are known with relative certainty, Dobyns estimated that in the first 130 years [i.e., from 1492 to the early 1600s] of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died — the worst demographic calamity in recorded history.

Is this true? Were there more than 100 million people in the Western hemisphere before Columbus arrived? Did 95% of them die of disease?

Let me offer three answers to these questions:

  1. We don’t know;
    but
  2. Probably not;
    and
  3. It doesn’t really matter.

The point made by Henige in Numbers From Nowhere is that the population estimate by Dobyns was an extrapolation lacking solid factual basis, and that this gigantic number launched a debate that quickly became political, rather than scholarly. Those whom Henige called “High Counters” (insisting on a large pre-Columbian population) were engaged in a sort of anti-American propaganda, the effect of which was to accuse European colonists of perpetrating a holocaust of such enormous proportions as to make Auschwitz seem trivial by comparison.

The reason why I say this debate doesn’t really matter is that it has almost nothing to do with the history of the United States. There is a vast difference between what Dobyns originally asserted and what is now claimed by those who denounce Americans as possessors of “stolen land.”

Whatever the entire population of the Western hemisphere may have been in 1492, the bulk of this indigenous population was in Central and South America, not in what is now the United States. However many natives died of contagious disease in the century following Columbus’s expeditions, these diseases were not spread by our British ancestors, who at that time were busy killing each other and various European enemies, including the very same Spaniards who were devastating the Americas.

The point Dobyns made about the effect of pandemic disease is important to understanding why, when the English finally began settling along the east coast of North America in the early 1600s, they encountered a relatively sparse native population that had already been shrunk by pandemics. The entirety of what is today the continental United States, with a population of more than 300 million, was perhaps home to around 1 million natives when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Very few of those natives were living in the vicinity of the first English settlements here; most were living in territory claimed by the Spanish. What is made to disappear in the whole “stolen land” rhetoric of the social-justice crowd is the fact that when the first British settlers arrived at Jamestown and Plymouth, England was engaged in a colonial rivalry against Spain (to say nothing of the French, the Dutch and the Portuguese, all of whom were pursuing their own American colonial empires).

By the time our own ancestors began to establish what became the United States, the Spaniards had been conquering and colonizing the Western hemisphere for more than a century. The oldest permanent settlement in the U.S. is not Jamestown, Virginia, or Plymouth, Massachusetts, but St. Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565 by the Spanish conquistador Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. St. Augustine was founded by Menéndez, a commander of the Spanish treasure fleet, as an outpost against the French, who had sent an expedition to Florida led by Jean Ribault. Shortly after the founding of St. Augustine, Menéndez’s Spanish troops killed Ribault and about 350 of his men in two separate massacres.

What Menéndez did to Ribault’s Frenchmen was trivial in comparison to the unrelenting violence Spanish conquistadors inflicted on the native peoples of their American empire. Everybody knows about what Cortez did in Mexico and what Pizarro did in Peru, but have you ever studied what Hernando de Soto did in the present-day Southeast U.S.? De Soto brought along on his expedition a number of ferocious “war dogs,” giant mastiffs who were trained to disembowel their human prey. The natives along the path of De Soto’s expedition were certainly intimidated by their first encounters with men who had firearms and horses, but they were absolutely terrified by the Spanish war dogs.

Say what you will about the English settlers of the United States, they were not worse than the Spaniards who conquered Latin America.

Yet somehow, inflammatory rhetoric about “genocide” against natives has become a standard part of the anti-American discourse, accusing us of occupying “stolen land,” an effort to delegitimize our national sovereignty, so that we have no right to enforce our borders. Why isn’t this argument made against the countries conquered by Spain?

The SJWs can’t answer that question, and so they seek to silence their critics with accusations of “racism,” as if the descendants of Pilgrims owe an apology to descendants of Spanish conquistadors.

Anyone who thinks the natives of North America suffered a worse fate than other conquered peoples in other places at other times is simply ignorant of history, including the history of England. The original population of the British isles was first conquered by the Belgae, then by the Romans, who made it part of their empire for about 300 years. In the twilight of Roman power, the province of Britannia was invaded by seafaring Anglo-Saxon marauders, from the vicinity of modern-day Hamburg, Germany. The Anglo-Saxon conquest marked the beginning of the Dark Ages of England, two centuries where the light of civilization in the island was practically extinguished. Scarcely had this Anglo-Saxon realm become somewhat of a Christian civilization than England began to be raided by the heathen Vikings from Scandinavia. Once the Viking era had past, and the descendants of those piratical savages incorporated into the population of Britain, England was conquered by the Normans.

By the time William of Normandy crossed the Channel in 1066, his was the fifth conquest of England in the span of about 1,000 years. Every successive wave of conquest was attended by its share of massacres, atrocities and oppression, but this history of our English ancestors is apparently unknown to young Americans, who are taught to despise themselves as perpetrators of heinous violations of “human rights.”

The SJW belief in “America the Evil” — the idea of the United States as the worst country in world history — is really just a toxic residue of Soviet-era anti-American propaganda. Anyone who wishes to push back against this leftist narrative can begin with Thomas Sowell’s 1998 book Conquests and Cultures: An International History. Let me quote the first paragraph of Sowell’s chapter on Britain:

For about one-fifth of its recorded history, Britain was a conquered country, a province of the Roman Empire — and one of the more backward provinces at that. Men from other provinces ruled over Britain, but Britons did not rule other provinces. One measure of the backwardness of pre-Roman Britain was the ease with which it was conquered by greatly outnumbered Roman soldiers and held in subjugation, despite a massive and desperate uprising in 61 A.D. The Romans were simply far better equipped and far better organized. In many other ways as well, the Romans represented a much more advanced civilization than existed in Britain at that point in history. Indeed, after the Romans withdrew from Britain four centuries later, the Britons began to retrogress, and in many respects it was centuries after that before Britain regained the economic, social, or cultural levels it had reached as a province of the Roman Empire.

How many natives of Britain died as a result of the Roman conquest? The answer: We don’t know, and it doesn’t matter, because nobody is trying to make this a theme of political propaganda. The SJW myth of America as a uniquely evil nation founded on genocide and oppression requires us to ignore the history of the rest of the world, including the history of countries from which illegal aliens are now arriving here.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!




 

Category: History, Immigration, Racism

‘The Road Leads Back to You’

Posted on | January 5, 2021 | Comments Off on ‘The Road Leads Back to You’

One cold evening in 1930, two Midwesterners sat in a third-floor apartment on 52nd Street in New York and dreamed of a warmer climate. Stuart Gorrell and Hoagy Carmichael had become friends while attending Indiana University together. As they looked out the window in frigid New York, “not liking what we saw,” Gorrell later recalled, he and Carmichael “turned our thoughts to the pleasant Southland”:

Georgia, Georgia,
The whole day through,
Just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind.

At the time Carmichael and Gorrell wrote “Georgia on My Mind” in New York, a 15-year-old girl in Albany, Georgia, had just given birth to a baby boy. Aretha Williams named her son Ray Charles Robinson. He developed glaucoma in childhood and went blind at age 7. Ray Charles learned to play piano and by the time he was a teenager, was earning $4 a night playing in a theater in Jacksonville, Florida. Before he was 20, he was making hit records, and in 1960, he recorded “Georgia on My Mind.” It was his distinctive rendering of the song which, in 1979, was declared the official state song of Georgia. It seems “the pleasant Southland” has been on a lot of minds recently:

Democrats will turn America into a one-party country if they win the Senate runoff elections, President Donald Trump said Monday in Dalton, Georgia.
“They’ll make Washington, DC, and other liberal places the 51st, 52nd, 53rd states of the union, guaranteeing the radical left a permanent majority of the U.S. Senate and the House, and the electoral college,” he said at a rally for Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
“It will make it really a one-party country and the party will be the wrong party,” the president continued:

They will pack the Supreme Court with crazed extremists, and I’m not happy with the Supreme Court. They are not stepping up to the plate … They’re not stepping up. How about that? We don’t have … look at the Supreme Court. President of the United States, I want to file suit … and they said, “Sir, you can’t. You really can’t do that.” Why? So, they have legal reasons. Complex legal reasons. It’s wrong. If you’re the president of the United States and you get defrauded out of an election, you should be able to file a suit. But we can’t do that. They say, “Sir, you don’t have standing.”

President Trump said he was winning by a lot and then, “all of a sudden, I was losing by a little tiny bit, just a little.”

We shall soon learn if Democrats can steal another election (or two) in Georgia. They have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Senate runoff campaign to elect Jon Osoff and Raphael Warnock. My native state has been barraged by wall-to-wall campaign ads and everybody down home has been bombarded by get-out-the-vote messages, so it is impossible for anyone in Georgia not to realize how high the stakes are. A few headlines via Instapundit:

Raphael Doesn’t Just Flirt With Marxism,
He Embraces It
— Lisa Carr, Victory Girls

The Media Is Lying About Trump’s Call
with Georgia Secretary of State
— Matt Margolis, PJ Media

Campaign Director: Warnock ‘Absolutely’ Backs
Defunding Police, ‘Most of Them Are Bad’
— Tyler O’Neil, PJ Media

Police Reports Detail Warnock’s
Obstruction in 2002 Child-Abuse Probe
That Led to His Arrest
— Brittany Bernstein, Yahoo News

Harvey Weinstein Attorney David Boies
Donated Thousands To Help
Warnock, Ossoff In GA Senate Races
— Dylan Housman, Daily Caller

The liberal media, of course, are ignoring any news that may reflect negatively on the Democrats, while hyping up a lot of nonsense about Trump’s phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State, but the news probably won’t have much impact on the Senate elections simply because of that multimillion-dollar advertising blitz in the state.

Modern election campaigns are ordeals to be endured, a punishment inflicted on the citizenry, and I pity the Georgians who can’t turn on their TVs without being reminded of this ugly political mess.

Other arms reach out to me.
Other eyes smile tenderly.
Still, in peaceful dreams, I see
The road leads back to you.

Not many peaceful dreams in Georgia lately — more of a nightmare. But one way or another this dreadful election will soon be over, and then perhaps “the pleasant Southland” will be pleasant once more.

 




 

Category: Election, Georgia, Senate

How Bad Is Philly? Worse Than Chicago

Posted on | January 4, 2021 | 1 Comment

Yesterday I took notice of the awful crime situation in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago, where homicides increased 55% last year.

However, as bad as Chicago is — and frankly, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to live in that Democrat-controlled hellhole — Philadelphia is actually worse. Under Democrat Mayor Jim Kenney, violent crime in Philadelphia, which was already worse than Chicago, increased more than 40% in 2020. More people were murdered in Philly last year “than in all of 2013 and 2014 combined”:

The only time more people were slain in the city was in 1990, when police reported 500 homicides as violence surged alongside an intensifying crack-cocaine epidemic.

The media would have you believe that crimes other than homicide have not increased, but Dana Pico is not buying that claim:

Murder is a crime of evidence; dead bodies are very difficult of which to dispose or hide, and they get found. But rape, assaults which don’t result in hospitalization, robberies, etc, are crimes of reporting; if the victims don’t report them, then as far as the police, as far as the statistics are concerned, they didn’t happen.
And with Larry Krasner’s refusal to prosecute seriously the ‘little’ crimes, with the black community hating the police, and with conviction rates so low, it is more probable that other crimes are simply being reported less frequently than it is that fewer crimes are being committed. When your city is stuck with a District Attorney like Mr Krasner, who doesn’t believe in prosecuting criminals, or sentencing them harshly when they are prosecuted and convicted, what reason is there to report that you were robbed?

When you vote for Democrats, you vote for crime. But don’t worry. If you get murdered in Philadelphia, you can continue voting for Democrats after you’re dead. They’re “inclusive” like that.




 

Category: Crime, Democrats, Pennsylvania

Rule 5 Sunday: Mindy Robinson

Posted on | January 4, 2021 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Well, shows you what I know. Not two days after posting last week’s Rule 5 post, what do I see on the Book of Feces but an ad for John Schneider’s new movie Stand On It, which looks and sounds like a remake of Smokey & The Bandit by the guy who arguably owes his career on The Dukes Of Hazzard to that movie. Oddly, the music is available on Amazon, but the movie itself has to be ordered from Schneider’s studio or streamed on Vimeo. Anyhow, the role of runaway bride originally filled by last week’s Rule 5 girl Sally Field is being played by reality-TV and B-movie actress Mindy Robinson, who also took a shot this year at running for Congress here in Nevada’s third district. The red hair looks good on her.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

On the campaign trail?

Ninety Miles From Tyranny: Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1218, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

Animal Magnetism: Holiday Totty V and a Saturday Blondepocalypse.

EBL: Falstaff, La Boheme, Tosca, Rigoletto, Droste Effect, Hoppin’ John, Dawn Wells RIP, Ernani, Basia Bulat, Carol Lynley, Il Trovatore, Havana New Years Eve, Teacher Union Hypocrisy, Rose Bowl, Tehran, Un Ballo In Maschera, Cobra Kai Season 3, L’Elisir d’Amore, and MAGA Kayleigh.

A View From The Beach: Post-Christmas Clearance, Fish Pic Friday – Amy Kennelly, Tip a Glass to a Better Year, Tattoo Thursday, RIP: Mary Ann, Your Wednesday Wetness, Tuesday Tanlines, Hilarious!, Your Monday Morning Stimulus, A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Break, and Palm Sunday.

Proof Positive’s Vintage Babes are ringing in a new & improved year!

Thanks to everyone for all the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: Shotgun Blues

Posted on | January 3, 2021 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Shotgun Blues

— compiled by Wombat-socho

So crackpot Kor/Am journalist bombers outdrew Sally Field? Who’d’a thunk it?

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Left-Wing Journalist Among 4 Arrested in Arkansas for Firebombing Police Cars
Bacon Time
Dark Brightness
The Pirate’s Cove
The Political Hat
A View from The Beach
357 Magnum
EBL

Rule 5 Sunday: Sally Field
Harsh Brutus
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

Mysterious Explosion in Nashville
EBL

‘Person of Interest’
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Eastbound & Down
A View From The Beach
EBL

‘Something for Everyone to Hate’
Bacon Time
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 12.28.20
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

Nashville: ‘Lone Wolf’ Suicide Bomber
357 Magnum
EBL

Wealthy Celebrities Flock to Georgia to Help Elect Two Left-Wing Democrats
EBL

In The Mailbox: 12.30.20 (Morning Edition)
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

Crazy People Are Dangerous
357 Magnum
EBL

In The Mailbox: 12.30.20 (Evening Edition)
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

Transgender Terrorism: Seattle Antifa Weirdo Charged in Firebombing
EBL

In The Mailbox: 12.31.20
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum
Proof Positive
EBL

In The Mailbox: 01.01.21
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Top linkers for the week ending January 1:

  1. EBL (14)
  2.  357 Magnum (9)
  3.  A View From The Beach (8)
  4.  Proof Positive (6)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

Stupid City, Stupid Mayor: Homicide Increases 55% in Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago

Posted on | January 3, 2021 | 7 Comments

Remember, dead people are still eligible to vote in Chicago:

A 41-year-old man was shot and killed early Friday morning in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, marking the city’s first homicide of 2021 and following a year of spiking crime rates there and around the nation.
According to Chicago police data, the city recorded 769 homicides in 2020, a 55% increase over 2019.
The increase, reversing a three-year trend, is among the highest in city history, The Chicago Tribune reported Thursday.
Fatal shootings rose by 53%, with December shootings totaling 50, compared with just 19 a year earlier.
According to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office, 78% of the gun violence victims were Black.

So that’s about 600 black people shot dead in Chicago last year, a Democrat-run city in a Democrat-controlled state with some of the strictest gun-control laws in the country. If Black Lives Matter actually cared about saving the lives of black people, they’d be rioting about this, but the truth is the Black Lives Matter is just a propaganda operation with only one goal, to help Democrats win elections.

It would be wrong to say to describe this as a “tragedy,” because it’s so predictable. When you elect Democrats, people get killed as a result. If you’re too stupid to understand this, that’s not my fault.




 

Category: Chicago, Crime

The Other Podcast: Lizard People!

Posted on | January 2, 2021 | Comments Off on The Other Podcast: Lizard People!

Tonight at 7 p.m. ET on The Other Podcast, we will delve into the bizarre conspiracy theory behind the Nashville bombing:

A man who knew Christmas bomber Anthony Warner got a disturbing surprise in his mailbox on New Year’s Day when he received a package from the bomber.
The non-descript package was postmarked December 23rd, two days before investigators say Warner killed himself in the bombing. . . .
The package, which contained at least nine typed pages and two Samsung thumb drives, was immediately turned over to the FBI. . . .
“The knowledge I have gained is immeasurable. I now understand everything, and I mean everything from who/what we really are, to what the known universe really is.” . . .
The letter urged the friend to watch some internet videos he included on two Samsung thumb drives.
On another page Warner wrote about 9-11 conspiracy theories, ending with the statement “The moon landing and 9-11 have so many anomalies they are hard to count.”
Warner later wrote that “September 2011 was supposed to be the end game for the planet,” because that is when he believed that aliens and UFO’s began launching attacks on earth.
He wrote that the media was covering up those attacks.
But Warner’s writings grow even more bizarre when he wrote about reptilians and lizard people that he believed control the earth and had tweaked human DNA.
“They put a switch into the human brain so they could walk among us and appear human,” Warner wrote.

Apparently, the person who spread this “lizard people” conspiracy is a former BBC broadcaster named David Icke, who borrowed much of his theory from an Azerbaijani immigrant named Zecharia Sitchin.

Well, anyway, we’ll have lots to talk about tonight and, if you miss it live, you can find all our podcasts in the Podbean archives here.




 

Category: Talk Radio

‘Mi Casa en Beacon Hill’

Posted on | January 2, 2021 | Comments Off on ‘Mi Casa en Beacon Hill’

It was discovered that Alec Baldwin’s wife, who pretended to be a Spaniard named “Hilaria,” is in fact a New England WASP of colonial stock who was known as Hillary Hayward-Thomas to her private-school classmates at the Cambridge School of Weston, growing up in a five-bedroom home in the prestigious Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston.

The most interesting aspect of this fraud is how Alec Baldwin himself has acted as an accomplice in his fake-Spanish wife’s hoax. Ace of Spades pointed out that there are video clips of Baldwin making media appearances in which he mocked his wife’s “Spanish” accent:

Obvious question: How could Baldwin not know the truth?

Obvious answer: It’s impossible. We must assume that Baldwin has met his wife’s parents, Dr. Kathryn Hayward and attorney David Thomas Jr. Since her parents are entirely American — they retired to the Mediterranean resort of Mallorca, but living on a Spanish island doesn’t make you a Spaniard — Baldwin must know his wife’s accent is phony.

Just FYI: My oldest daughter’s husband is Argentine, and she spent a full year in a Spanish-language immersion program in Argentina. She is fluent in Spanish, and they use both languages in their home, but my daughter doesn’t speak English with an accent. Do you see the point?

No matter how fluent in Spanish one might become, a native speaker of English doesn’t lose the ability to speak English, yet “Hilaria” Baldwin pretends she doesn’t know the English word for “cucumber.”

So what’s this about? We know that “Hilaria” owned a chain of yoga studios in New York. Is it possible that there is some sort of government program in New York that grants favorable treatment to minority-owned businesses, and that she was taking advantage of that? Because otherwise I cannot think of any other reason why this Yankee WASP would pretend to be Hispanic, except perhaps that she might be mentally ill.

Well, she did marry Alec Baldwin . . .




 

Category: Celebrities
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