COMING TO NORTH AMERICA
Re: Assault from within. Conrad Black, Sept. 2
In defending Canada’s legitimacy as a nation, Conrad Black errs in describing First Nations cultures at the time of European settlement as “at least 5,000 years behind that of Europe by any reasonable measurement,” but fails to say what that measurement is. The notion that one civilization’s achievements can be compared as superior to another is to apply Darwinian theories of evolution meant for biological species onto human societies. Cultural evolution was discarded in the early 20th century by Franz Boas who asserted the principal of cultural relativism. Black also errs in comparing the arrival of violent Huns, Vandals, and Saracens into Europe with the “gentler and more tolerant” Europeans who settled America. This statement would come as a surprise to the Beothuk and the Aztecs. Moreover, Europeans refrained from all-out assault on natives until about 1830 be- cause they were dependent on them to sustain the fur trade. Alexandra Phillips, Vancouver Conrad Black implies white Europeans have been benevolent to Indigenous people and provided opportunity for African slaves to play out their “good harvester” essences, and then sees Whites now as victims of unjust non-White racism.
He says the land wasn’t really occupied before European arrival. Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Liberty and Property cites Hugo Grotius who, by way of dismissing native rights, argued land was not being used if not being improved, meaning for profit, from the old French.
Many of us are compromised (I’m a third generation farmer) but the actual contradictions can’t simply be dissolved with Grotius’s specious reasoning or by smug twisted history.