[Salon] Land rights

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

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Land rights

(never) again...

Talleyrand Dec 5

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Samuel Eliot Morison has written:

The only extenuation of American policy toward the natives of North America is that it continued an old-world process of one race or people pushing a weaker one out of an area that it wanted. Almost every European today is a descendant of Asiatic intruders into Europe; almost every North African the descendant of Arab intruders. “The country is a land for cattle,” said the children of Reuben to Moses when they saw the land of Gilead, “and thy servants have cattle; wherefore, said they, if we have found grace in thy sight, let this land be given unto thy servants for a possession.” In the United States, as elsewhere in the nineteenth century, this process of conquest and expansion took the form of a relatively highly developed civilization pushing out a backward people who could not or would not be absorbed, and who were too few in number and weak in technique long to resist. But some of the Indians put up a very good fight.

That process amongst civilised nations was said to have ended in the second half of the twentieth century. Those who said so were wrong. As wrong as those who now say that Israelis will never again be able to show their faces again in polite international society or that Americans will pay a heavy price for their collaboration. These things won’t happen, either. What will happen is that the civilising process of the second half of the twentieth century in a portion of the Northern Hemisphere will recede further into the past. It is for the ages. The next time a powerful state expels or kills a weaker population in order to take its land and its cattle, fewer protests will be heard amidst the asserted right of self-defence. Fewer will pay homage to the idealistic formula, land for peace. Fewer will stake their careers on public piety and even fewer will care. The world’s Samantha Powers will remove themselves to obscure comfortable eyries, sometimes giving an interview in which they repeat that there are always grievances on all sides and that, in truth, not much more could have been done. And there will be many more next times… which is as obvious, basic, and trite as what is now taking place before the world’s eyes.