07/26/2024
Truth is extremely subjective. In a book title, “Truth” is extremely arrogant. "NOT STOLEN: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World is just such a book. When “Truth” is used in a polemic disguised as history, it is not only arrogant; it is a fraud and an insult to the intelligence of the reader.
In a famous line from the motion picture "A Few Good Men," Jack Nicholson's character, a U.S. Marine colonel, is challenged for the truth by the defence attorney, played by Tom Cruise. Frustrated and angry, Nicolson confronts Cruise: “You can't handle the truth!” Likewise, after reading NOT STOLEN, I am convinced the author cannot “handle the truth.”
Claiming to tell the “truth” about the colonization of the lands and peoples of the Western Hemisphere (New World), particularly the United States, while accusing his critics of “historical cultism,” the author drifts from the discipline of history into a political diatribe. Addressing his readers directly, like an old school marm checking for dirty fingernails, this author states that his purpose in writing this book is to ‘take aim at my colleague’s radical Leftward lurch in recent years.’ He tells readers: “Fadish labels such as ‘genocide’ and ‘stolen land’ are not only historically inaccurate—they do far more harm than good, including the very people they are meant to protect.”
Calling himself a “centrist,” then admitting he is “anything but neutral,” the author informs his readers that he has “intentionally portrayed European adventurism in a more positive light than the majority of modern analyses.” Firmly positions himself in the revisionist camp, his truth is a “neutral” harangue against the materialist work and analysis done by such laudable settler historians as Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, as well as all the Indigenous and settler historians who have investigated the Doctrine of Discovery, ‘New World’ colonialism and its corollaries, Christianity, capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and genocide.
While never providing a substantive definition of genocide, our protagonist admits that Europeans in the New World perpetrated any number of atrocities on the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: “Population decline, forced conversions, provoking wars, countless treaty violations, the Trail of Tears, the California Indian massacres, the extinction of the buffalo, racial prejudice and discrimination, confinement on reservations, and continued marginalization of many Native groups.”
Although admitting there is much to lament, he emphatically states, “there are virtually no grounds—at any time in the five-hundred-year history of European settlement in the New World—for declaring European policies or actions against the Amerindians to be genocidal …this (genocide) is—at best a metaphor; at worst, an inexcusable exaggeration that diminishes the victims of actual genocide. Nor is there historical justification for arguing that the United States or any Western Hemisphere country is fundamentally illegitimate on the grounds that it was ‘stolen’ from Indigenous peoples.”
Once again, he is out of step with “truth.” Coming out of the horrors of the Second World War, the United Nations Convention on Genocide defined genocide as “the intentional destruction of a national, ethnical, or racial group (including killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm), imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.” He is also out of step with the 2007 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and even Pope Francis, who in 2022 reluctantly described Canada's residential school system and its forced assimilation of Indigenous children as “genocide.”
While the author warns against the dangers of an alternate understanding of colonialism, he whitewashes the history of racism and cultural chauvinism as anachronisms: “Americans and other Europeans were often wrong—but they were surprisingly humane and got some things right.”
Asserting that his book reclaims historical objectivity that has been lost in the age of social media, he tells readers that, “the United States remains the major political, economic, cultural, and military bastion of democracy in the modern world.… and genocide historians and the ‘stolen ground chorus …enable modern-day genocide and human rights abuses on a far larger scale, by baselessly removing one of the most important weapons in the democratic arsenal against tyranny: the truth that, despite their faults, America and its democracy will continue to warrant a prominent place on the moral high ground of history.”
