(British) Colonialism Being Evil / Turkey as Greek Land

Pith Helmet Guy (British Imperialist Officer): "Hey, there
nice Africa
would be a shame if somebody did anything to it ...
... like build hospitals, roads, cities, railroads, a written language, your entire infrastructure ...
hope you like clothes, savage.
God, it feels good being evil."

Ictinus ®️ @ictinus_x: "🇬🇷🏛️Every excavation in Turkey digs up the same merciless verdict: Greek land, occupied by invaders."
Fascinating History @Fascinate_Hist: "Head of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, unearthed at an archaeological dig in the ancient city of Aizanoi, Türkiye."

The Royal B.C. Museum was once beautiful. Wokeness drained it of all life

Tristin Hopper: The Royal B.C. Museum was once beautiful. Wokeness drained it of all life

The most valuable historical artifact on display at the Royal B.C. Museum is also the one that they’ll never acknowledge.

Once one of the finest and most innovative museums in the world, its three floors are now primarily a living testament to how quickly something beautiful can be destroyed from within.

B.C. has had some form of provincial museum dating back to the 1880s. But when its modern incarnation opened in Victoria in 1972, it was hailed as one of the most innovative museums in the world.

Local media would boast that their museum was a showcase of “firsts in international museumology.” 

There were few glass cases or informational placards. Rather, the Royal B.C. Museum became famous for its series of hyper-realistic walk-through dioramas of iconic B.C. environments.

The interior of a First Nations longhouse. The tunnels of a Vancouver Island coal mine.

And, the jewel in the RBCM crown; Old Town. A full-scale mockup of an early 20th century B.C. community, complete with wood cobblestone streets and a Chinatown donated by Chinese-Canadian community organizations in the 1990s.

Posed human figures were conspicuously absent; the idea was to give guests the illusion that they were moving through spaces occupied by living figures who had just stepped out for a moment.

But then came the various moral panics of the early 2020s: Systemic racism, “ongoing genocides,” “mass graves” at Indian residential schools. In the midst of it all, B.C. Premier John Horgan decided that the Royal B.C. Museum had to be destroyed.

First Nations had long criticized the Indigenous galleries of the museum for being out of date. There were also longstanding disputes that artifacts had been obtained under suspicious circumstances.

But Horgan’s plan was uncompromising. The entire structure must fall, and in its place be erected a $789 million temple to equity and inclusion. 

Public outcry would eventually pressure the province into halting its plans and partially reassembling the museum’s human history galleries. But the damage had been done. To visit the museum now is to see exhibits so scoured of spark and texture that they might as well have been swept by a fire.

The coal mine, sawmill, homestead and First Peoples gallery are all gone. And for everything left, there are placards everywhere to lecture visitors that they are moving through a profoundly evil space.

A mock-up of an early 20th century salmon cannery is accompanied by a sign stating that salmon, a “sacred food” for B.C. nations, has been devastated by “exploitation and climate change.”

A partial reconstruction of HMS Discovery — one of the first European ships to enter the Juan da Fuca Strait — is accompanied only by a cursory note that the vessel was used to penetrate “land and waters … stewarded since time immemorial by Indigenous peoples whose home this had been for thousands of years.”

A nearby model of Fort Victoria is paired simply with one of the museum’s many, many land acknowledgements. Of the rough-hewn structure that forms the core of the modern province of British Columbia, visitors are told only that it was built atop Lekwungen territory.

A model railway station that uses sound and light to simulate the arrival of a passenger train now largely serves as a monument to oppressed black railroad porters.

On the second floor of the Grand Hotel, the centrepiece of Old Town, is an innocuous display of what an office would have looked like at the close of the 19th century. Visitors are told that the quotidian scene before them was really a cockpit of environmental rape.

“Offices like this were established to manage the land and resources of BC,” it reads. “The colonial approach was at odds with the sustainable relationships that First Nations people have with the land and waters.”

And just in case the message wasn’t received, curators took pains to ensure that the office’s window had a view of a clearcut forest.

If the intention was simply to feature history that included fewer white men, it’s not like B.C. was lacking in options. 

B.C.’s first governor was Sir James Douglas, the son of a Bajan Creole woman. His wife, Amelia, was the daughter of a Cree chief, and spoke multiple Indigenous languages.

Just a few steps from the site of the museum is the former home of Mifflin Gibbs, one of the most influential members of Colonial B.C.’s not-insubstantial population of black pioneers. His election to the Victoria City Council in 1866 represents one of the first times that a Black man secured public office anywhere in the British Empire.

The first feature film ever made in Canada, 1914’s In the Land of the War Canoes, was shot in B.C. using exclusively Kwakwaka’wakw actors, and telling a stylized version of Kwakwaka’wakw mythology.

The Royal B.C. Museum is a short bus ride away from the grave of Nellie McClung, the figure most responsible for securing women’s voting rights. What’s more, she did it with jokes: Where suffragists in the U.K. had resorted to literal terrorism, McClung simply made fun of Canada’s male legislators until they relented.

If you’d travelled through B.C.’s various mill towns and mining settlements in 1911, you would have seen a well-dressed man with a Cantonese accent claiming to be Japanese.

That was Sun Yat-sen, and he was discreetly moving through B.C.’s many Chinatowns to fundraise for his plan to topple China’s Qing Dynasty. It worked, and he’s now widely seen as the founder of modern China.

When European explorers and fur traders first came to what is now the Canadian West Coast, they encountered highly developed Indigenous communities that easily outmatched them in terms of military and diplomatic power.

Tlingit in the far north had fought Russian colonists to a stalemate; a war still enshrined in the modern borders between Alaska and B.C.

When Spanish and British representatives met in Nootka Sound in the late 1700s to determine which of them would be adding B.C. to their sphere of influence, the talks were brokered by Maquinna, a Nuu-chah-nulth chief whose grip on the coast was so total that he boasted European slaves.

None of that was mentioned at RBCM, and it probably never will be. Because it tells the truth about a dynamic and engaging corner of the planet that doesn’t often match the “oppressor/oppressed” dynamic that the museum’s new curators would obviously prefer.

Every white figure profiled by the Royal B.C. Museum is a rapacious colonizer. Every non-white figure is cast as a one-dimensional victim: An interchangeable “person of colour” whose entire life is presented only as a distillation of the suffering they endured.

This clinical and dehumanizing approach to the past is summed up perfectly by the museum’s newest gallery, Odysseys and Migration.

It’s intended to highlight the various migration streams that have defined B.C.’s last 150 years. But it does so with beige colouring, harsh fluorescent lighting, inoffensive sans-serif fonts of paragraph after paragraph of aggressively boring text.

“Chinese Canadian community organizations and initiatives reflect the Chinese diaspora from various places, including Cuba, India, Jamaica, Malaysia, Mauritius, Peru, South Africa, Taiwan, Vietnam, and more,” reads a card entitled “Diverse Journeys.”

One of the few artifacts on display is a hammer and some broken crockery. The hammer, we are told, was used by overworked Chinese to perform the deadly labour of building the Canadian Pacific Railroad. The crockery is where he ate his “meagre” rations.

The Royal B.C. Museum used to be a place where the delight of visitors was audible. Now, it’s just sullen clumps of tourists, shuffling from one depressing placard to another. A security guard refusing to glance up from his phone sums up the current state of employee morale.

The Royal B.C. Museum is what happens when you hand the reins of a beloved institution into the hands of people who hate museums, who hate history and who seem to hate B.C. itself.

But they do love themselves; that much is made very clear in the museum’s new iteration.

Amid the vandalism and desecration that they’ve cheerfully imposed on one of Canada’s richest cultural jewels, there are constant smug reminders that they are proud of what they have done.

Anyone entering the human history galleries of the Royal B.C. Museum must pass by a sign laying out the superior virtues of its executive. “Worldwide, museums are redefining their role in our cultural landscapes. The Royal B.C. Museum is no different,” it reads.

The Old Town cinema is screening Hayashi Studio, a film about Japanese-Canadian internment narrated by and starring the white academics who shot it. At multiple points, the audience is reminded of how benevolent they are to have dug up the non-white histories so cruelly ignored by their colonialist forebears. 

In the First Peoples gallery of the Royal B.C. Museum, there used to be a partially burned traditional mask. It had been placed there to symbolize the cultural loss suffered by First Nations as a new and trendier culture subsumed them.

In B.C.’s first decades, Christian missionaries had told local peoples they could never enter heaven without first burning the “false idols” inherited from their ancestors. And so, centuries of accumulated heirlooms were destroyed.

It’s a powerful message about the folly of shattering tradition and beauty simply because something new and enticing has arrived to take its place.

But that mask, like so much else, has been happily hidden away by the new and more enlightened helmsmen of the Royal B.C. Museum.

 

On the Iranian Occupation

Shane Gill | Facebook

Iran is often flattened into slogans. A theocracy. A rogue state. A problem to be managed. Those labels are shortcuts. They allow governments and commentators to reduce a civilisation to a headline, and they allow power to hide behind simplicity when the situation is anything but simple

 

If you want to understand why so many Persians speak about their own government as if it were an occupying force, we have to understand this story didn't start in 1979. The Islamic Republic is not the origin. It is the latest layer in a much older struggle over identity, sovereignty, and legitimacy.

 

Before Islam, Persia was one of the great civilisations of the ancient world. The Sasanian Empire governed through bureaucracy, codified law, taxation systems, and infrastructure that rivalled Rome. Zoroastrianism functioned as a state religion with an elaborate moral cosmology. Kingship carried divine symbolism. Language, literature, and imperial memory were already deeply rooted. Persia did not lack identity. It possessed one of the most self-conscious identities in the ancient world.

 

In the seventh century, Arab Muslim armies expanded out of the Arabian Peninsula and defeated the Sasanian state in a series of decisive battles. Persia fell through war. Political authority shifted to rulers whose power originated elsewhere, as it did in many regions of the old world. Arabic became dominant in administration. New legal frameworks emerged. Islam entered Iran in the context of conquest.

 

Conversion, however, was not instantaneous or uniform. It unfolded over centuries, shaped by social mobility, taxation policy, elite integration, intermarriage, and genuine belief. Zoroastrians paid the jizya tax. Conversion opened bureaucratic and military pathways. Empires rarely convert populations at sword point en masse. They rearrange incentives. Over generations, belief follows power.

Conquest came first. Faith spread later. That distinction matters.

 

Persia did not disappear inside the caliphates of the Rashidun, Umayyads, and Abbasids. It adapted and reshaped. Persian administrators became indispensable to Islamic governance. Persian scholars and poets shaped philosophy, mysticism, and court culture. The Persian language survived and eventually reasserted itself in literary form. What began as military subjugation evolved into cultural fusion.

 

A critical turning point arrived in the sixteenth century under the Safavid dynasty. The Safavids imposed Twelver Shi’ism as state doctrine, differentiating Iran sharply from its predominantly Sunni neighbors. Shi’ism became intertwined with Iranian state identity, martyrdom theology merged with political sovereignty, and clerical authority gained structural weight. From that point forward, Iranian nationalism and Shi’a religious identity developed in parallel rather than in opposition.

 

Fast forward to the twentieth century. Iran was ruled by the Pahlavi monarchy. The Shah was secular, Western aligned, and committed to rapid modernization. He was also authoritarian. The SAVAK secret police crushed dissent. Political parties were tightly controlled. Economic inequality widened. Cultural Westernization moved faster than many communities could absorb.

 

Then came 1953. Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil industry. In response, the United States and the United Kingdom supported a coup that removed him and restored the Shah’s authority. That intervention embedded a durable memory of foreign interference in Iran’s political consciousness. Anti Western rhetoric did not originate in clerical sermons alone. It drew legitimacy from lived history.

 

By the late 1970s, opposition to the Shah cut across ideological lines. Clerics, Marxists, liberals, students, bazaar merchants, and workers mobilized simultaneously. The revolution was broad based. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini provided symbolic leadership from exile, but he was not the only current within the uprising. Many factions believed they were participating in a pluralistic revolution whose direction would be negotiated after victory.

 

That calculation proved fatal.

 

Revolutions are not won by abstract theory. They are won by networks. Mosques provided nationwide infrastructure. Sermons traveled further than pamphlets. Clerical authority penetrated neighborhoods where secular ideology struggled to organize. When the monarchy collapsed in 1979, the clerical establishment possessed the deepest, most disciplined structure in the country.

 

The Islamic Republic that emerged was not improvised. It was engineered. The office of Supreme Leader was placed above electoral institutions. The Guardian Council gained veto power over candidates and legislation. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) evolved into a parallel military, economic, and intelligence powerhouse. Over time it embedded itself in construction, telecommunications, energy, and regional security operations.

 

Religion ceased to function solely as belief. It became a governing architecture. Leftist parties were outlawed. Political rivals were imprisoned, executed, or exiled. Universities were purged during the Cultural Revolution. Mandatory hijab laws were enforced. Morality policing institutionalized the state’s claim over public behavior and female dress. The system consolidated itself not by accident but by design.

 

This is where the language of occupation enters contemporary Iranian discourse. The leadership is ethnically Iranian. The institutions are domestically built. Yet coercion always produces psychological distance. When authority claims divine legitimacy, suppresses dissent, filters elections, and criminalizes protest, it can feel alien even if it speaks the same language as the governed.

 

Today Iran’s crisis is not reducible to religion. It is not reducible to foreign hostility. It is not reducible to economic sanctions, though sanctions have severely strained ordinary life. It is a legitimacy crisis. That crisis expresses itself in protest waves, from the Green Movement in 2009 to the nationwide demonstrations following the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022. It expresses itself in generational divides, capital flight, brain drain, and quiet civil disobedience. It also expresses itself in geopolitical posture. Regional militias, nuclear brinkmanship, and confrontation with Israel and the United States function externally, but they also reinforce internal narratives of siege and resistance. When foreign powers threaten Iran militarily, the regime gains temporary cohesion. When domestic repression intensifies, the legitimacy deficit widens. This is the tension at the heart of modern Iran. External conflict can delay internal reckoning. It cannot erase it.

 

Many Iranians invoking pre Islamic heritage are not calling for cultural erasure of Islam. They are signaling historical depth. They are asserting that Iranian identity is older than the current political order. That memory is not anti Muslim. It is an anti monopolisation of faith by the state.

 

Iran has been imperial, conquered, Islamic, secularizing, revolutionary, sanctioned, and regionally assertive. It has endured Arab conquest, Mongol invasion, dynastic collapse, foreign intervention, and ideological upheaval. Civilizations that survive that many ruptures develop a long memory. Force can govern for decades. It can arrest, censor, and deter. What it cannot manufacture indefinitely is consent.

 

The Islamic Republic frames itself as the culmination of divine history. Many citizens increasingly frame it as a temporary chapter. Empires have misunderstood Iran before. So have ideologues. So have we. The lesson is consistent. Iran is not a slogan. It is a civilization with a memory longer than any regime that claims to own it.

 

Iran remembers.

 

What comes next will test whether power can reform itself or whether history will force the question. We've all seen what can emerge from regime change meddling. And it's never good. Whatever it is, it must be up to the Iranian people to decide. That right is theirs and theirs alone.

 

May the people of Iran have a free and peaceful future.

Fatalism, Islam, Innovation and Modernity

This also ties into the myth of the Islamic Golden Age:

"The Islamic view of the relative insignificance of everything we see with our own eyes is that this world is merely a way station. While martyrdom is the extreme reaction, it is not the only reaction to this view of the world. The question arises: Why bother, if our sights are trained not on this life but on the afterlife? I believe that Islam’s afterlife fixation tends to erode the intellectual and moral incentives that are essential for “making it” in the modern world.

As a translator for other Somalis who had arrived in Holland, I saw this phenomenon in various forms. One was simply the clash of cultures when immigrant Muslims and native-born Dutch lived in close proximity to one another. In apartment complexes, the Dutch were generally meticulous about keeping common spaces free of any litter. The immigrants, however, would throw down wrappers, empty Coca-Cola cans, and cigarette butts, or spit out the remnants of their chewed qat. The Dutch residents would grow incensed at this, just as they would grow incensed by the groups of children who would run about, wild and unsupervised, at all hours. It was easy for one family to have many children. (If a man can marry up to four wives and have multiple children with each of them, the numbers grow quickly.) The Dutch would shake their heads, and in reply the veiled mothers would simply shrug their shoulders and say that it was “God’s will.” Trash on the ground became “God’s will,” children racing around in the dark became “God’s will.” Allah has willed it to be this way; it is there because Allah has willed it. And if Allah has willed it, Allah will provide. It is an unbreakable ring of circular logic.

There is a fatalism that creeps into one’s worldview when this life is seen as transitory and the next is the only one that matters. Why pick up trash, why discipline your children, when none of those acts is stored up for any type of reward? Those are not the behaviors that mark good Muslims; they have nothing to do with praying or proselytizing.

This, too, helps explain the notorious underrepresentation of Muslims as scientific and technological innovators. To be sure, the medieval Arabic world gave us its numerals and preserved classical knowledge that might otherwise have been lost when Rome was overrun by the barbarian tribes. In the ninth century, the Muslim rulers of Córdoba in Spain built a library large enough to house 600,000 books. Córdoba then had paved streets, streetlamps, and some three hundred public baths, at a time when London was little more than a collection of mud huts, lined with straw, where all manner of waste was thrown into the street and there was not a single light on the public thoroughfares. Yet, as Albert Hourani points out, Western scientific discoveries from the Renaissance on produced “no echo” in the Islamic world. Copernicus, who in the early 1500s determined that the earth was not the center of the universe but rather revolved around the sun, did not appear in Ottoman writings until the late 1600s, and then only briefly. There was no Muslim Industrial Revolution. Today, there is no Islamic equivalent of Silicon Valley. It simply is not convincing to blame this stagnation on Western imperialism; after all, the Islamic world had empires of its own, the Mughal as well as the Ottoman and Safavid. Though it is unfashionable to say so, Islam’s fatalism is a more plausible explanation for the Muslim world’s failure to innovate.

Significantly, the very word for innovation in Islamic texts, bid’a, refers to practices that are not mentioned in the Qur’an or the sunnah. One hadith translated into English declares that every novelty is an innovation, and every innovation takes one down a misguided path toward hell. Others warn against general innovations as things spread by Jewish and Christian influences and by all those who are ruled by misguided and dangerous passions. Those who innovate should be isolated and physically punished and their ideas should be condemned by the ulema. It was precisely this mentality that killed off astronomical research in sixteenth-century Istanbul and ensured that the printing press did not reach the Ottoman Empire until more than two centuries after its spread throughout Europe.

Zakir Naik, an Indian-born and -trained doctor who has become a very popular imam, has argued that, while Muslim nations can welcome experts from the West to teach science and technology, when it comes to religion, it is Muslims who are “the experts.” Hence, no other religions can or should be preached in Muslim nations, because those religions are false. But look more closely at his point: Naik is implicitly acknowledging the success of the West in this world. All Muslim nations have to offer, he concedes, is a near-total expertise on the subject of the next world."

--- Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now / Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Lenny Henry’s Calls for Slavery Reparations are the Most Insane Yet

Lenny Henry’s Calls for Slavery Reparations are the Most Insane Yet

Alleged “comedian” Lenny Henry has come up with his best joke yet: that Britain should pay £18 trillion to black people living in Britain as reparation for slavery. He outlines this in a book, co-written with his long-term friend and media diversity campaigner Marcus Ryder, entitled The Big Payback.

Henry is best known for his association with Comic Relief and Premier Inn adverts, as opposed to his actual comedy, and his joke writing could clearly do with some work, as his demands are six times the size of the entire UK economy.

Economic ruination of the country aside, it is worth noting that most of Britain’s 2.4 million black residents are of recent African extraction, not descendants of slaves. In fact, it is possible that some of them could be descendants of the very people who enslaved those traded by Europeans in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the first place. Historians widely agree that the capture and sale of African slaves was largely carried out by Africans themselves. Europeans rarely ventured inland to seize captives directly.

Britain, by contrast, is known for its historic and unprecedented moral crusade against the practice of slavery globally, expending much blood and treasure to eradicate it. It is now a well-publicised fact that the loans drawn to pay for this venture were only paid off in 2015, meaning that most Britons have already contributed, through their taxes, to the cost of ending the slave trade.

What Henry is demanding would effectively be a vast transfer of wealth from people who never enslaved anyone to people who have never been slaves, or, in the vast majority of cases, whose ancestors were never enslaved by the British at any point in history. Henry argues that black people living in Britain today may not be the descendants of slavery but they suffer from the legacy of slavery as he believed that “modern racism is rooted in the slave trade”. One need only look at how East Asians view Sub-Saharan Africans, despite never participating in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, to dismiss this view out of hand.

Henry’s demand is not unique; it is part of a broader trend. Calls for reparations have become fashionable across the West, particularly in the United States, where activists insist that modern taxpayers must atone for sins committed centuries before they were born. The same rhetoric is now echoed in Britain, despite the fact that Britain not only abolished slavery earlier than most but also spent enormous sums and countless lives stamping it out across the world.

Curiously, none of the loudest voices calling for reparations ever mention the Arab slave trade, which predated and outlasted the transatlantic trade by centuries. Millions of Africans were captured and transported across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean, with some historians estimating the death toll to be higher than that of the Atlantic trade. Yet there are no demands for reparations from the Middle East, no campaigns for apologies from Arab states, and no bestselling books calling for compensation from oil-rich Gulf nations. The selective outrage suggests that the issue is less about justice and more about both ideology and extracting wealth. Reparations are only demanded where there is perceived Western guilt to exploit.

Even today, linguistic traces of this historic practice remain. In Arabic, the word “abd” means both “black person” and “slave”, a reminder of how deeply servitude was bound to skin colour in those societies. Yet this reality receives almost no attention from the Western commentariat or diversity activists who claim to speak for “black dignity”. It’s as if acknowledging the full, global history of slavery would complicate the narrative of uniquely Western guilt. That, apparently, is rather inconvenient.

The hypocrisy becomes even harder to ignore when one remembers that open slave markets still exist in parts of North Africa today. As recently as 2017, footage emerged showing black Africans being sold in Libya for as little as a few hundred dollars. Where were Lenny Henry and his co-author then?

According to the Global Slavery Index, there are currently an estimated 50 million people trapped in forced labour or human trafficking around the world. There are more slaves today than at any point in history. Yet those calling for reparations seem uninterested in these living victims. Theirs is not a campaign against slavery itself, but a campaign to monetise ancestral guilt. The moral energy that could be directed toward ending real slavery is instead spent on imaginary debts and performative offence.

Reparations politics has become a lucrative business. There is status, funding, and influence to be gained from perpetual victimhood. It is a kind of moral currency in a culture that rewards grievance, victimhood and, ultimately, weakness. Figures like Henry present themselves as spokesmen for the oppressed, but in reality they are extracting resources not from oppressors, but from ordinary citizens who had no part in the crimes they denounce. This is not justice; it is using the language of morality as a form of blackmail. The more society indulges it, the more we entrench a culture in which outrage is profitable, and victimhood is a form of capital.

This selectiveness can be explained by the fact that the West is currently, in a general sense, undergoing a period of moral insecurity and uncertainty. This vulnerability has been exploited. Campaigns that promote diversity initiatives, special funding schemes, and a host of other advantages for non-natives residing in majority-white countries are rife. As the psychologists Ok, Wazlawek, and Plaks (2020) observed, some individuals strategically signal both virtue and victimhood to secure financial benefits from others. In other words, moral identity and perceived suffering can be leveraged as social currency to facilitate non-reciprocal resource transfer. The same research also noted the role of collective narcissism — where groups maintain an inflated sense of their own moral worth and entitlement to compensation, demanding recognition and reward as a cynical strategy to improve their own situation.

Within this framework, the modern reparations movement fits perfectly. It is not about redress, but about extracting advantage through moral coercion. The louder one proclaims historical victimhood, the more one can demand from those cast as oppressors, regardless of the facts of ancestry or responsibility. It is a cynical game, dressed in the language of justice, sustained by a culture that mistakes guilt for goodness and compensation for compassion.

Until Western societies rediscover the confidence to reject this emotional blackmail, the practice will continue. The reward for claiming grievance will always outweigh the reward for taking responsibility for one’s own successes or failures, and moral virtue will remain a resource to be mined rather than a principle to be lived by. We have a way of life we should be proud of. Even today, in deeply troubled times, the Western world is a beacon of light in a dark world. A bastion of civility, decency, and morality. We should not feel guilt for our past but pride that we have always been at the forefront of morality, philosophy, art, literature, music, technology, and the benchmark for all aspiring developing nations.

A West that is confident in its identity, unapologetic about its heritage, and committed to the wellbeing of its people will not even entertain calls for reparations. If we wish these calls to cease, as all reasonable people should, we need to strengthen these virtues in our civilization and within ourselves.

 

 

 

"All people are equal, but some people are more equal than others"

James Lindsay, anti-Communist on X

In some sense, Communism in practice really can be summarized in a single sentence: "All people are equal, but some people are more equal than others." It shares this trait with Fascism. This sentence, derived from George Orwell (in Animal Farm) is not just a clever contradiction, though. It's dialectical. It is a statement indicative of Communism not only because its contradictions appear in practice but because the contradictions themselves are dialectically written into the program. If we want to be able to fight Communism and Fascism, it is actually crucial to learn dialectics and how to pull this mode of thought apart. It is not optional. Leaving it as optional will invariably get us caught in far more dialectical traps than we would be in otherwise, and every such thing advances the cause of the ideology we're fighting. Here's a concrete example to make it more vivid. Diversity. We have spent the last several years (arguably 55) arguing about whether "diversity" is our strength, or what kind of diversity: demographic diversity or viewpoint diversity, or whatever. At no point were we understanding the dialectic behind the program called "Diversity." This program was also used under the dialectical materialism doctrine embraced by the Soviet Union, implemented by Vladimir Lenin himself. It was called Raznoobraziya (Разнообразие), which translates literally and directly as "diversity." Lenin did not mean just any kind of diversity, though. What he explicitly said he meant by Raznoobraziya is "diversity in form with unity in content," which can also be reversed to mean "achieving unity in content through diversity in form." Sounds like Orwell: "everyone is equal but some are more equal than others." Why? Because it's a dialectical formulation of "diversity." Lenin defined what he meant by Raznoobraziya under the "dialectical law" called "the struggle and unification of opposites." Difference (diversity) and sameness (unity) were brought together into a single concept. What it meant in practice is that diversity would be superficial, people from different backgrounds, while they'd all be Marxists in line with the Party. Diversity in outer form with unity in inner content. It also meant in practice that they would leverage socialists from different backgrounds to make more people socialists by using socialism as the basis for what it meant to be whatever background in an authentic way. If this sounds like the Diversity in DEI, it's because it is exactly that Diversity. You cannot understand what it is or how to engage it without understanding its dialectical formulation or how to handle a dialectical formulation. Arguing about the value of viewpoint diversity but the weakness of demographic diversity, for example, actually plays into the Diversity program, not against it. Many did this with totally good intentions. How does it play into their hands? Because the Woke worldview holds that viewpoint diversity is intrinsically linked to demographic diversity and have a well-developed theory of how that allegedly happens (called "standpoint epistemology," which is somewhat derivative to cultural relativism). They also have a well-developed critical theory of each identity and thus a claim that the Woke view of being that identity is the only one that's "authentic" to the "lived experience" of that "social position." That is, the Woke had already laid all the groundwork to capture "viewpoint diversity" on stronger terms than their critics could possibly mean it, and even though the critics holding up "viewpoint diversity" rightly perceived the trick (everyone is Woke no matter how diverse), they weren't equipped to defeat the dialectic being used against them. If you don't think this perspective was all that powerful, I urge you to understand that the ONLY reason we have a Woke professional and legal environment at all is because this stupid trick about standpoint epistemology being the right interpretation of viewpoint diversity is one of two stupid Woke arguments that fooled the Supreme Court at least as early as 1978 (Bakke v. Board of Regents) into arguing that college admissions can and should prioritize discrimination in the name of "Diversity" because "diversity" provides an enriching educational opportunity consistent with the colleges' missions. Civil Rights law got turned inside out in favor of Woke more or less overnight. (Cf. Griggs v. Duke Power for the other stupid trick, which is the "disparate impact" doctrine case). The correct way to deal with the dialectic is to point out its bogus terms in full (because the various parts point to various truths and cannot be dealt with separately). That is, in this case, Diversity has to be exposed as a cover story that isn't about diversity at all but is specifically designed to cherry-pick a single ideological view that gets channeled through the more superficial form of diversity. The focus has to be on the trick itself, that is, treating it as causal, not as an effect. Of course, on the other hand, yet another dialectical trick awaited people regarding Diversity. Lenin's protégé, in a sense, and successor, Josef Stalin, had another take on precisely the same dialectic. Stalin's went like this, much more bluntly: "National in form and Socialist in content." This was the basis for another Soviet program he and Lenin implemented in the 1920s called Korenizatsiya (Коренизация), which roughly means "making indigenous" or "rootification," to spin a new term. The explicit dialectical formulation makes it more clear: "national in form and Socialist in content." (Its focus on "diversity" in nationalities and in "national form" led Lenin to refer to Stalin as "the national socialist.") The difference here is that within the Soviet Union, Russian was also a nationality, in some sense part of the constellation of "Diversity" but differently. Eventually, therefore, when the favoritism of minority ethnicities and nationalities wore thin for the "Great Russians," who had been up to that point consistently accused of "Great Russian chauvinism" every time they disagreed with their minority-ethnicity comrades (who were more equal than others), they were led to assert their own nationality as well. In our current anti-Woke day, that means a rising white racial consciousness, male sexual consciousness, straight sexual (other meaning) consciousness, Christian nationalist religious consciousness, etc., as an alleged antidote to the Woke reverse prioritization. Now rather than just the minorities playing the game, everyone is playing the game. And what was Stalin's use and purpose with this reaction to the excesses, abuses, and failures of Korenizatsiya, arising roughly 6-8 years after its full implementation, btw? "Russification." Everyone would be Great Russian now, and the Soviet Union would just be "Mother Russia" again. What he did was as explicitly "all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others" as could possibly have been done, likely inspiring Orwell for the famous line in Animal Farm. Stalin said that Russians, under Soviet Russification, would be "first among equals." This would have been roughly 1930, maybe 1931, and in implementation it required totally crushing the strongest ethnic minority who happened to occupy perhaps the most valuable land: the Ukrainians. Thus, in the winter of 1932-33, Stalin executes the Holodomor, the forced starvation of millions of Ukrainians under his new doctrines. No longer would Ukraine be allowed "self-determination" in its own "national form," however Socialist. That is, the dialectic was forced into synthesis. National in form and Socialist in content was presented with its negation, Russification, and forced into a synthesis literally described as "first among equals," itself a dialectical formulation. We have no choice but to understand this twisted, demented, manipulative logic if we want to combat Communism and Fascism. They operate on this logic. There is no other choice.

FDR

Thread by @Will_Tanner_1 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

In my opinion, FDR was one of the evilest men in American history, particularly since he bankrupted the British while simultaneously aiding the Soviets with no strings attached

The result was communism controlling half the world, killing tens of millions in the process🧵👇  

First, FDR had used his power well before the Second World War to destroy old America

He not only was a class traitor whose own family despised him, as @NormanDodd_knew pointed out in a recent podcast, but used the "New Deal" to demolish non-leftist power and rule across the country

Particularly, he would ensure that funds were withheld from those jurisdictions and localities that were politically opposed to him, hindering relief and recovery for those who simply wanted to live like Americans ought rather than being part of some socialist hellhole.

He then directed the funds only toward New Dealers, ensuring that those who pushed his brand of socialism and Big Government, both of which were formerly abhorrent to Americans, and solidified the power of such thought in the country

And, of course, he destroyed the legitimacy of SCOTUS by browbeating it and threatening it with court packing to get it to go along with his unconstitutional, un-American agenda

As a result of FDR's firehose of money to socialists, Old America, a land of ordered liberty, small government, and little regulation, died

What replaced it was the bureaucratic state of today: a massive governmental apparatus, welfare and social aid programs, high taxes to pay for it, a predilection for relying on the national government rather than community members, and federal agencies that reach into every aspect of formerly private life 

As might be expected of such a man, FDR didn't just push socialism on the country

He also filled his administration, from the Cabinet-level positions to minor bureaucrats, with Communist Party members

For example, Harry Hopkins was a Soviet agent; he was close with FDR and headed much of the New Deal, then handled American WWII relations with Britain and the USSR, with which he was quite friendly

Then, as Whitaker Chambers, himself a former Soviet agent, exposed in "Witness" and Congressional hearings, much of the low-level bureaucracy was full of Soviet agents

That included men like Alger Hiss, who "aided" FDR at Yalta and was behind closed doors with FDR as he handed Europe to Stalin, letting communism advance like a murderous wave across half of Europe 

Then there's World War II

FDR has a reputation for saving our Anglo brothers across the ocean, which isn't true

Instead, he bankrupted the Empire, drawing every last ounce of gold out of Britain and taking over its bases. The Brits even had to confiscate wedding rings to pay for the outdated equipment, from rust bucket old destroyers to near-useless airplanes, that FDR sent them

He also prodded the Germans into war with us by sending US destroyers to, under the flag of neutrality, sink German U-boats or radio their locations to the British, much as Wilson had done during WWI 

Meanwhile, as @realDianaWest exposed well in "American Betrayal," and Sean McMeekin notes in "Stalin's War," FDR did everything possible, well beyond necessity, to aid the Soviets

In addition to the weapons and equipment, from trucks and tanks to planes and trains, we sent in massive numbers, FDR provided them with all the bases of American success. Industrial secrets, intellectual property, factory processes and equipment, and so on, were sent to the Soviets en masse, along with vast amounts of raw materials. The Soviets were, as Diana West exposes, allowed to steal whatever secrets they wanted, whatever the cost to American business and industry, as a matter of FDR policy

None of that was done for the British. They got to bleed themselves dry financially while the Soviets were freely given whatever they asked for

The aid to the Soviets continued even as the war's end was a foregone conclusion, and much of it ended up in the hands of post-war communist guerillas, while the industrial aid led to Soviet economic might that long threatened Europe and challenged America

Meanwhile, as the Soviets were given all they wanted, they also tormented our men and even imprisoned Americans in their slave labor camps

Sailors who braved U-boats to deliver supplies were berated and demeaned, and airmen who landed in the USSR were often thrown in gulags. At the end of the war, potentially 15,000 Americans remained imprisoned in the USSR, never to be released. Neither FDR nor Truman did anything of note to help them; even non-military, economic aid wasn't conditioned on their release

So, like the German units and Eastern Europeans that FDR handed to the communists, thousands of Americans rotted and died in Soviet slave labor camps thanks to FDR

Then there's the matter of war policy. "Unconditional surrender" needlessly prolonged the war and led to the Soviets r*ping and killing their way across Eastern Europe, r*ping millions, if not tens of millions, of women and killing millions of civilians

FDR's Morgenthau pressed to deindustrialize Germany after the war, something that would have meant endless suffering and yet more Soviet power over Europe, as there would be no German bulwark. FDR entertained the idea

Meanwhile, Ideas like invading through the Balkans to block off Soviet forces from invading Europe were scorned, and instead we trodded across France and Germany as the Soviets gobbled up territory

Throughout the war offers from the Germans to kill Hitler and replace him in exchange for peace and an alliance against the Red Menace were shunned; instead, FDR wanted the Soviets to march across Europe and commit endless atrocities as they did so 

FDR was all on board with such behavior

A particularly gut-wrenching story shows that: during the Tehran conference, Stalin said the Allies should execute 100,000 German officers after the war to break the back of Prussia.

Roosevelt joked that, "maybe 49,000 would be enough." His son and aides laughed

Only Churchill was outraged and stormed out, and it was only at that point that Stalin pretended he was joking.

Then after the war, Americans and Brits often handed German units to the Soviets, who proceeded to work them to death in slave labor camps, well exceeding the 100k Stalin initially suggested

FDR, though dead for most of that, would have been all on board with that, as Truman was 

So, if a man is to be judged by his accomplishments, what did FDR achieve?

The r*pe and murder of half of Europe

The turning of the Soviets into a global hegemon, armed and industrialized by America

The bankruptcy and demolition of the British Empire

The destruction of Old America and replacement of it with a bureaucratic welfare state administered largely by Soviet agents of the Alger Hiss and Harry Hopkins mold

In short, pretty much all of it was evil, worst case scenario for the formerly free world 

FDR is regarded as a savior of sorts

If you're a communist or Soviet sympathizer, I suppose that's true

But if you support Western civilization, if you view the modern bureaucratic welfare state with horror and despise what the Soviets did to Europe and the post-colonial world, often with the aid of communist run-America, then FDR was one of the most evil men America has produced

And following WW2, of course, was the Cold War “against” our former “ally”…

But what was that period really about? 

Is carbonara American?

"Carbonara is the most American pasta dish. We can pretty much say that is an American invention.

I mean, you can pick my Italian accent. I'm very much Italian. I'm not going crazy. I'm just saying the truth. Let me break it down for you.

So, we got to go back in Italy, in the 1940s during World War II. Cuz before 1940, nobody ever heard or wrote about this dish. The most widely accepted theory is that carbonara was born by the combination of US military rations and pasta. Those ration usually included powdered eggs and dried bacon.

The US soldier used to ask Italian cooks around the country to prepare some pasta with their rations. And that's how carbonara was unofficially born.

Talking official, the very first written recipe was in Chicago in 1952. The very first Italian recipe was just two years later in 1954 on La Cucina Italiana. Gruyere and curdled eggs. Yes, you heard me right. Groviera e uova rapprese.

But it gets even worse. In 1986, Gualtiero Marchesi, the greatest Italian chef ever, wrote his official recipe about carbonara, saying it, that it cannot be made with scrambled eggs. Carbonara needs to be a creamy sauce. That's why according to Gualtiero, cream is not just required, it's essential for the best result.

So how? We arrived to nowadays where Italians think that there is just one holy carbonara recipe which cannot be changed. Absolutely no cream, absolutely yes, guanciale, no bacon.

Well, I don't know. I don't know how we arrived to that. I know that I was born and raised in Italy for 24 years of my life. I used to believe that the carbonara was that and cannot be changed. It was holy. But you know, now opening my mind, studying a little bit more, I found out that it's not true.

A lot of things actually about what Italians believe about their cuisine, it's, are not correct. Now, I'm not saying that Italian cuisine is bullshit and it's not good. The nowadays recipe of carbonara is amazing. It's probably the best one. I don't know if just because I'm used to it, but it's incredible."

Related:

If carbonara is supposed to never have cream, explain the addition of cream in Gualtiero Marchesi's carbonara recipe? : r/ItalianFood

"There is no widely accepted story about the origin of carbonara but there's a widely accepted recipe and that one does not contain cream or garlic."

"Ironically, the oldest published Italian recipe for Carbonara... had garlic in it. No cream, but it did have a creamy sauce made with eggs.

There is no one 'correct' way to make Carbonara, unlike what modern Italian purists like to say. These are some of the oldest published recipes for it in Italy:

The first ever Italian recipe came out in 1954, which... used pancetta, along with spaghetti, eggs, Gruyère and garlic, printed in the magazine La Cucina Italiana. A year later it was published in the cookery book 'La Signora in Cucina', again with pancetta, and this time with Parmesan instead of Gruyère.

In 1960 we finally get to see guanciale, which most modern Italian food purists say is unchangeable, in 'La Grande Cucina', in a recipe that also includes CREAM.

My point with this is, unlike what Italian food purists claim, there is no singular 'correct' or 'traditional' recipe."

If carbonara is supposed to never have cream, explain the addition of cream in Gualtiero Marchesi's carbonara recipe? : r/ItalianFood

"In the 1970s and 80s, cream was a common ingredient in carbonara. As an example, the most famous Italian chef of that time, Gualtiero Marchesi, used cream in his recipe, but plenty of other people were...

cream was a common ingredient.

see eg https://www.repubblica.it/il-gusto/2022/04/06/news/carbonara_la_ricetta_tom_cruise_gwyneth_paltrow_jamie_oliver-344223973/

where they describe a celebrity "Masterchef" of the 1960s, where a Roman actor, Renato Rascel, uses pancetta and cream rather than guanciale (and wins the silver medal) - gold going to a risotto dish.

Ugo Tognazzi (another actor, and famous gourmet)) instead shows off his amazing carbonara recipe served in New York in 1964:,,

mezzo chilo di pasta, per la precisione spaghettini. E poi, 6 uova (3 intere, 3 solo tuorli), pecorino (ma appena 30 grammi) e parmigiano (100 g). Poi un etto e mezzo di bacon (proprio così, bacon), un etto di prosciutto crudo, grasso e magro, 50 g di burro, un bicchiere di panna, e poi peperoncino, cognac o brandy. In quanto alla preparazione: sbattere uova, formaggi, panna, sale e pepe in una terrina, mentre in padella si soffrigge il bacon al quale poi viene aggiunto il prosciutto. Gli spaghettini, al dente, vanno conditi con il burro e poi con la salsa, il soffritto e, tocco finale, con il Cognac."

"then why do you think the resistance to not having cream in carbonara today come from"

"ts a general pushback to 80s italian cuisine, which had cream in everything.

the idea is that its cheating to get the creaminess from cream rather than egg, and it dilutes the flavour

similarly, modern italian risotto aims to achieve 'creaminess' with a minimum of butter, by emulsifying(?) the risotto with a shaking motion"

If carbonara is supposed to never have cream, explain the addition of cream in Gualtiero Marchesi's carbonara recipe? : r/ItalianFood

"It's a crystallization that happened in response to the internet, where italians discovered that another group of people claiming to be italian started to make " traditional " recipes"

Canada wasn't 'stolen' from Indigenous people

Opinion: Canada wasn't 'stolen' from Indigenous people
It was built on land that was received from the Indigenous in exchange for benefits that continue today. False notions mustn't balkanize us

If Canadians care to understand why our country is increasingly fractured, one key driver is the notion that non-Indigenous Canadians — “settlers” as they are called — should be grateful to live anywhere in the Americas.

The “settler” label is mostly directed at those of British and European ancestry. But it can apply to anyone whose families arrived from anywhere — Africa, Asia, the Levant, the Pacific — who were not part of the prior waves of migration to the Americas.

According to the most recent scientific knowledge, human settlement in the Americas began about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. These pioneers of settlement must have arrived from Asia by boat and hopscotched along the Pacific coast because the interior land was glaciated. They migrated as far south as modern-day Chile, but it is unknown how far inland they penetrated and whether they survived to merge with later migratory settlers.

Another wave of migration started around 13,000 years ago when an ice-free corridor opened through Alberta between the two great glaciers covering North America. This made it possible for people from the now submerged land of Beringia to move south through Alaska, Yukon and Alberta across North America.

Later, but at an unknown date, came the movement of the Dene-speaking peoples now living mostly in Alaska and Canada’s North (though the Tsuut’ina got to southern Alberta and the Navajo to the southwestern United States). Their languages still show traces of their relatively recent Siberian origins.

The Inuit migrated from Siberia across the Arctic to Greenland around AD 1000. Another group inhabited the Arctic starting around 2500 BC, but their relationship to the Inuit is uncertain.

In short, the Americas were settled in waves from Asia. Everyone alive today is descended from settlers. The latest “Indigenous” settlers arrived barely ahead of the first European settlers, the Vikings, who settled in Greenland and Newfoundland, and of Christopher Columbus, who started Spanish settlement in the Caribbean.

Singling out Europeans as “settlers” drives land acknowledgments, as well as demands for compensation and reconciliation. It plays on guilt about the actions of actors long since dead, while the concurrent demands for land, decision-making power and financial settlements occur on an open-ended basis. Internationally, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) also assumes the Indigenous vs. settler-colonial divide is valid.

Why does this matter? Because peaceful, relatively prosperous nation-states are not guaranteed to last. In fact, they’re the exception, not the rule. To make actual progress in unifying Canada as opposed to watching it break down and fragment into hundreds of inconsequential principalities (a separate Quebec, a separate Alberta, and multiple First Nations with state-like powers, of which there would be up to 200 in British Columbia alone), it is overdue to dissect these assumptions, and the related belief that Canadians have done little to make up for some of the wrongs done in history.

Language clarifications

Let’s begin with language.

The notion that some groups in the Americas have been here since “time immemorial” and thus are indigenous in the truest sense of that term is evolutionarily and historically false. The evolutionary origin of every human being lies in Africa, where Homo sapiens evolved as a distinct species about 315,000 years ago. Also, as Encyclopedia Britannica notes, “we were preceded for millions of years by other hominins, such as Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, and other species of Homo.”

The fact that all of us jointly link back to origins in Africa should be enough to stop using the “time immemorial” phrase, as well as any artificial distinction between those considered “Indigenous,” whose ancestors arrived in separate waves of migration separated by thousands of years, and those considered “settlers,” whose ancestors arrived during the last 500 years.

That some people’s ancestors beat others by 19,500 years or less to what we now call Canada does not create a permanent obligation on the part of later arrivals, or their progeny, to those whose families arrived first, just as Indigenous people today are not responsible for the actions of their own ancestors against other tribes over thousands of years. In the grand scheme of evolutionary time, all our ancestors’ lives were but a relative blip.

The ‘stolen land’ assertion

A stronger argument might be that later settlers owe the families of earlier settlers for stealing their land, which is a popular claim. However, that assertion ignores the multitude of treaties signed across Canada as well as the very approach by the colonial British and Sir John A. Macdonald that treaties were preferable to brazen conquest, as happened with other empires throughout history, including those now labelled Indigenous.

Further, that not every inch of Canada is covered by treaty still does not negate how the Canadian nation-state provided funds even to those First Nations not covered by treaty — in British Columbia, for example. Or how the 1982 constitutional amendments recognized Aboriginal and treaty rights, which are being constantly expanded by Canadian courts.

Moreover, the first Europeans and later British did not come to the Americas and “steal” a $2.5 trillion economy (Canada’s GDP in 2025). Rather, the earlier inhabitants were followed by French fur traders, Scottish explorers, Western farmers, Toronto financiers, Atlantic and Pacific fishermen, British and Asian workers, entrepreneurs in the 19th and 20th centuries and many other arrivals. All of them built Canada up. They did so with their own sweat, time and investment. That’s why farms feed Canadian families, mines provide steel for automobiles, natural gas and hydroelectricity heat homes, and skyscrapers can be built on First Nations reserves — because all “settlers” together made modern-day Canada possible.

Reconciliation considerations: Money flows and tax exemptions

Whenever reconciliation conversations begin, they inevitably assume “stolen” land as per above and ignore the significant past and present cash transfers as well as generous tax exemptions — many of which are not constitutionally required but exist as a result of the Indian Act, and thus could have been eliminated at any point in our collective history but were not.

Let’s follow the money. In 2013, one of us (Milke) authored the first comprehensive Fraser Institute report on the money spent in just the postwar world until 2012, at the federal and provincial levels, on Indigenous Canadians, including those once called “treaty Indians” but also others.

The results? In 2013 dollars (i.e., adjusted for inflation), in what was then known as the Department of Indian Affairs, spending on Canada’s Aboriginal peoples rose to almost $7.9 billion by 2011-12 from $79 million annually in 1946-47. That was an increase from $922 per Indigenous person per year to $9,056 — a rise of 882 per cent. By comparison, total federal program spending per person on all Canadians in the same years rose by 387 per cent. Of course, Indigenous Canadians are also eligible for and receive other government spending because they are Canadians.

Another one of us (Flanagan), updated that report and published several of his own for the Fraser Institute, which echoed the findings of the 2013 report on Aboriginal spending: ever-higher budgetary spending, plus eye-popping recent settlements of lawsuits. The largest of these was a $40 billion settlement in 2022 for children taken from reserves into foster care.

Spending on Indigenous programs and services in the 2024-25 budget was $32 billion, nearly triple what it was 10 years ago, even as outcomes have not measurably improved. Multiple multi-billion-dollar financial settlements also continue to be awarded every year, on top of the program and services funding itemized in the budget.

In addition to the child welfare settlement noted above, ponder a $10 billion settlement in 2023 related to the Robinson Huron Treaty (including individual payments of at least $110,000 per person), and an $8.5 billion agreement in 2025 to reform First Nations child and family services in Ontario, among others.

Much of the above spending on Indigenous peoples goes beyond traditional treaty and constitutional requirements. There is also much more to come. In the federal departments of Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, beyond “routine” spending on Indigenous Canadians, several transfer programs explicitly provide funds to Indigenous Canadians and/or to support further claims upon the public purse.

That’s the spending side. Now the tax exemptions. In 2024, Flanagan published a report for the Aristotle Foundation on tax exemptions given to First Nations under Section 87 of the Indian Act. That’s the longstanding tax exemption for real and personal property owned by “Indians,” including employment income, on reserves. One incomplete estimate from 2015 quantified the value of those exemptions at roughly $1.3 billion a year.

At some point — we suggest now — all this should count towards the “paid” column in the reconciliation ledger.

The mistaken morality play

Financial matters aside, what drives one-sided reconciliation talk in Canada is not only the mistaken claim that those now labelled “Indigenous” have existed in the Americas from “time immemorial,” a creationist myth, but that pre-contact, First Nations were unlike all other human beings in history — peaceful with each other, and at one with the environment.

This image is ludicrously far from historical fact. Amerindians were environmentalists only because their small numbers limited the environmental damage they caused. And warfare was endemic among them. At the time of the American Revolution, the Iroquois were waging war to create an empire in Ontario and the American Midwest. The Ojibwe and Cree, originally woodland peoples, blasted their way onto the prairies after they got guns from the Hudson’s Bay Company. As late as 1870, the Cree and Blackfoot, both weakened by smallpox, fought a lethal battle near the site of modern Lethbridge, which is still remembered in tribal lore.

As the Romans said, Vae victis (“woe to the conquered.”) If the losers in intra-Indigenous wars did not die in battle, they were often tortured to death or enslaved. Slavery was practiced on a particularly large scale on the Pacific coast, where slaves could be put to work cutting wood. Indigenous slavery persisted in British Columbia even after that province joined Confederation and still has echoes today. And in other parts of the Americas, pre-contact, human sacrifice was practiced. It was of course colonialists — the British in Canada as only one example — who ended such practices.

How Indigenous identity politics imitate … Europe

Chopping up Canada into ever-more tribal enclaves is historically reminiscent of the continent often vilified in modern-day discourse: Europe. Both before the Roman Empire and after its collapse into the medieval age and until at least 1945 in various forms, the innate tribalism of Europe has long been costly in blood and treasure.

Mid-20th century historian Will Durant described the after-effects of the collapse of that empire and how Europe retreated into today what we could call “balkanization”: “half-isolated economic units in the countryside,” “state revenues declined as commerce contracted and industry fell,” and “impoverished governments could no longer provide protection for life, property, and trade.”

Of course, most people in human history have endured what the philosopher Thomas Hobbes described as nasty, brutish and short lives precisely because human beings have, for much of our history, found reasons to divide from each other. They did so most often for less-than-ideal reasons and with even less ideal results. But unlike those under most empires (at one end of possible political organization) or tribes (at the other), what mostly began as a British colonial experiment and is now modern-day Canada increasingly gave rights and prosperity to a diverse set of peoples — all of us “settlers.”

Of those who wish to turn Canada into a thousand mini-fiefdoms, we ask the same question Pierre Trudeau asked during a speech to a Montreal crowd during the 1980 referendum on separation. After describing Canada’s virtues and also the interdependent world we live in, Trudeau challenged the separatist-isolationists this way: “These people in Quebec and in Canada want to split it up? They want to take it away from their children? They want to break it down? No! — that’s our answer!” to which the crowd roared their approval.

What about one Canada for all?

The mostly peaceful northern country of Canada was not an accident but a conscious creation, mostly of the British, after their win on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 (with Indigenous allies, it should be noted). That led to the eventual victory of the British in 1763 and Canada’s eventual creation as a nation-state in 1867. Its success over centuries, pre- and post-Confederation, but especially in the postwar world, is also due to 19th-century British presumptions which fully flowered in the last century. That included expanded freedoms for all, including in 1960 when Indigenous Canadians were rightfully restored the right to vote.

Canada’s accomplishments include individual rights, including equality before the law and in policy (with the noted exception of reverse discrimination and DEI); legal protection of property rights (albeit not constitutionalized), a mostly open, free economy; the rule of law and independent courts; and democratic rule, among other achievements rare in human history.

There are thus two questions every Canadian today should ask.

First, was the arrival of later settlers, be they French or British in the 16th and 17th centuries and beyond, and later arrivals from Africa and Asia, mostly a positive development? We would argue that the answer is “yes” for all the above-noted reasons: Increasing freedoms for all over time, more prosperity, and peace on the northern half of the North American continent.

Second, the most fundamentally important question we can ask of each other in 2025 is not “When did your ancestors arrive here?” but “What kind of Canada do we want in the future?” Little good and much harm will come from destroying our inheritance, including private property, or ramping up identity politics which comes at the expense of equality of the individual, or continuing down the path of balkanization.

The better future for Canada is one where all are treated as equal in law and policy as much as practically possible. It is one where property rights are secure and the economy thrives, and where the “fusion” of peoples from all over the world continues what the first settlers began 20,000 years ago: A near-miraculous project where Canada is renewed to be a free, flourishing country where all are welcome.