I’m getting heartily sick of all the bullshit surrounding this whole “stolen land” concept. I was reminded of this while watching some Australian TV show (out of the corner of my eye: New Wife was doing the actual watching) where the opening credits revealed that the show’s cast and producers were aware that the show was being filmed on lands that were originally the home of some unpronounceably-named tribe of Aborigines, and wanted everyone to know how they respected that “heritage”.
Given that Australia’s aborigines are amongst the most “unsettled” populations on the planet — they are nomadic to an extent almost impossible to describe — that struck me as a little rich. Most of all, what got my goat was the tone of the statement: semi-apologetic, cringing and guilty are the words that come to mind.
We have the same bollocks much in evidence Over Here. The history of this entire world is a story of migration, settlement, wars over territory and Tribe A taking land from Tribe B — bloody hell, they’re still fighting the same wars in the Balkans — but it’s only recently that the arguments over who owns what have become a third-party issue rather than something that the involved parties settle between themselves. Or, to put it in a more scholarly fashion:
Every person alive on this planet today has ancestors who were displaced by force somewhere in their lineage. Every person alive on this planet today has ancestors who displaced other people by force somewhere in their lineage. It’s an inevitable fact of human history. American natives fought with each other over land and resources, and some tribes, like the Dakota (Sioux), were notorious for attacking their neighbors. Europe’s history is rife with such, from the Vikings to the Norman invasion of Britain. In fact, few if any of the people of Europe today are the original inhabitants of the land they reside on now; the one exception may be the Basque of the Pyrenees Mountains, but even they, at some point, came there from somewhere else. The French people we know now derive their name from the Franks, a Germanic tribe, and as for the British Isles, that motley group of islands has seen so many invasions, from Picts to Celts to Romans, Saxons, Anglians, Jutes, and Normans, that it would be difficult to keep track as they go by.
Here’s the simple response to all the handwringing and aggrievement over the “stolen land” claims: get over it, because you’re never going to get it back. End of story.
And to a lesser extent, the same is true of “cultural appropriation”: where White kids are somehow forbidden to wear their hair in those disgusting dreadlocks because Africans somehow have “ownership” of a hairstyle. What bullshit. It’s like saying that Black people can’t drink Scotch whisky because whisky is traditionally a product of the northern provinces of (lily-white) Britain, or that the Irish can’t eat chips because potatoes originally came from America.
Everyone borrows cultural artifacts and customs from everyone else. That’s been the habit of mankind for millennia, and no cries of outrage can overturn it.
When it comes to land, the stronger group has taken it from its “original” (and sometimes not-so original) weaker inhabitants. That this activity has become somewhat less egregious and bloody in recent times does not gainsay its basic premise — and where it has become more bloody, the weaker continue to learn its hard history — as the “Palestinians” are (re-)learning in their efforts to eradicate the state of Israel. (They’re unlikely ever to give up, which simply means that Israel will be forced to teach them the same lesson again and again, ad infinitum. As I’ve said many times before, the Arabs are lucky that the Jews have an inexplicable aversion to genocide, or else “from the river to the sea” could easily have changed to “from the Golan to the Suez”. Vae victis — a Latin expression — has particular currency here.)
So enough with the kowtowing (a Chinese expression) to the Perpetually Aggrieved. Fuck off, all of you, and make the best of what you’ve got. Heaven knows, most of what you can achieve comes courtesy of Western civilization.
You’re welcome.
The people that argue the most about this retardedness fall into 2 categories.
The first have never owned anything worthwhile in their entire lives, and never will.
The 2nd group consists of massive thieves that have stolen everything they possess.
Normal people are just trying to live and have little time for this silly nonsense.
Welcome to country??
Fuck off!!
I was BORN here; it’s MY fucking country as much as yours.
Don’t welcome me to my own homeland!!
I’d better not catch any of you round eyed motherfuckers using chopsticks. Because cultural appropriation, you clueless gaijin.
Which reminds me: Owing to certain slant-eyed mamma-san, I use chopsticks as often as a knife and fork & always take a pair with me when I travel. But not on TSA’s watch! TSA accepts its solemn obligation to protect you from the likes of me. The fearless sentinels at TSA (Propeller Beanies Upon Them) understand how the slant-eyed among us like nothing better than to lurk on airplanes, deviously twirling our mustaches, looking for unwary travelers to skewer, stab & impale.
With our chopsticks.
They confiscated my freaking hashi. To keep me from weaponizing them. Against you, fellow travelers. If you’ve flown in the US, you owe TSA (PBUT) your very lives. So get on your knees you drooling troglodytes, and shout ARIGATO to the heavens. DO IT NOW!
So let it be written, so let it be done.
Never understood the use of small poles to shovel bite-sized pieces of food into the mouth when there are those wonderful gaijin inventions of the knife and fork as an alternate.
Besides, if I’m allowed to appropriate an Italian dish, I love me my angel-hair pasta and a good meat sauce — spaghetti Bolognaise — and from bitter experience, those little knitting-needle things are pretty much useless in that meal scenario. The pasta gets conveyed, no problem, but then you’re left with little bits of meat on the plate that are indifferent to the gropings of wooden sticklets.
Pencils and pens are allowed, so sharpen your chopsticks and call them pencils.
With their troglodyte logic, the bureaucratic TSA goons just might buy that.
//deviously twirling our mustaches//
…while quoting from the Yukar?
.
Expressed well here, methinks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN90wZRnyM0
If you’re not Borg assimilating better methods and materials when you find them, you’re failing at being an adaptable human.
Stagnation simply isn’t something anyone owes anyone else.
Winner of the Most Obtuse Sentence Competition for the month of October.
I’M A WINNER! YAY!
Stolen land? Shut the ever fucking hell up. You’re right, everyone’s ancestors have been pushed off of their land at some point or pushed someone else off of their land. Conquest was once the only way to obtain more or better land for survival. What year do we pick to bring the borders back to? 1950? 1939? 1850? 1050? WHy that year? Such a decision is beyond ludicrous. Anyone making claims of stolen land like the Abos and the Indians and their supporters deserve to have their teeth forcibly removed.
Gawd, I am just sick to death of Liberal White Guilt! LWG has got us “land acknowledgements”, “cultural appropriation”, talk about reparations for slavery that ended one hundred and sixty years ago, diversity, equity & inclusion, white privelege, and other complete nonsense. If liberals, progressives, democratic socialists, or whatever they want to call themselves want to feel bad, but feel good about themselves at the same time, fine! Go put a sign in your front yard about feeling bad about living on stolen land, type it all caps on Bluesky. But do me a favor and include me out. You’re not going to make me into one of you insufferable buggers! Stuff your LWG in a sock and stuff the sock where the sun don’t shine. In short, fuck off!
I find dreadlocks on Caucasian people to be a very reliable indicator of persons I DON’T wish to speak to. To steal a line from a book of fashion rules I read in a checkout line; “Very few people look good in dreadlocks. None of them are White.”