Jack Cashill spent his Nov. 27 WorldNetDaily column — published the day after Thanksgiving — cheering that the election of Donald Trump will show white people are back in charge again:
Change is in the air this autumn. Donald Trump is heading back to the White House, and the Washington “Commanders” are seriously considering reviving their identity as “Redskins.”
As they are quick to tell you, our friends on the left have much to mourn this Thanksgiving, not the least of which is the very possible turning point in the history of identity politics.
For these last several decades, leftists have been looking forward to autumn. This one season gives them two opportunities – Columbus Day and Thanksgiving – for public self-flagellation.
After attacking a writer for pointing out “the exploitation and genocide of Native American people” — weirdly making a point of how the writer is “attractive, European-featured” — he whined:
This whole career track, however, is based on the premise that “Native Americans” are actually native to America. They are not.
In the many heated anthropological debates about the origins of Native Americans, the one consensus is that they came from somewhere else and not that long ago. There are no indigenous Americans, not in the U.S., not in Canada, not in Central America, not in South America.
The only people deserving the designation “native American” are the people that were born here. “Indian” is a much more honest generic term for those descended from our earliest immigrants.
Cashill then touted a dubious historian he apparently just read:
In the many heated anthropological debates about the origins of Native Americans, the one consensus is that they came from somewhere else and not that long ago. There are no indigenous Americans, not in the U.S., not in Canada, not in Central America, not in South America.
The only people deserving the designation “native American” are the people that were born here. “Indian” is a much more honest generic term for those descended from our earliest immigrants.
Typically, leftists champion immigrants. They deny members of groups like the Daughters of the Revolution or the Mayflower Society any special standing for the length of their family’s tenure in America. That said, they celebrate American Indians for having been here longer.
In his essential book “Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World,” historian John Paul-Flynn deconstructs the slapdash methodology that has allowed the left to sell America’s schoolchildren an intentionally corrupted view of their own history.
For the 10,000 or so years before the first Europeans arrived in America, the various tribes beat up on each other. As with most hunter-gatherer societies, warfare was a near constant.
When Indians built complex civilization as they did in Mexico and Peru, some of those civilizations were as brutally genocidal as Nazi Germany.
Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes could not have overthrown the vast Aztec empire with his 500-man army had not the Aztecs so ruthlessly oppressed the neighboring tribes.
Curiously, in the perverse parlor game of identity politics, the descendants of those conquistadors are not subject to the same abuse as are the descendants of the Pilgrims. They, too, get to play victim.
The Mayflower descendants don’t. They are stuck with the oppressor label. And yet as Paul-Flynn makes clear, the relationship between the Indians and the new Mayflower arrivals was impressively peaceful and worthy of commemoration.
It’s telling of Cashill’s slapdash approach that he can’t even bothered to get the authors name right — it’s Jeff Fynn-Paul, not “John Paul-Flynn.”
This is very much a revisionist take designed to make colonizers look good in retrospect. As Thomas Lecaque wrote in a critique of an earlier version of Fynn-Paul’s argument:
Fynn-Paul’s central argument is that Europeans are blameless for the death of innumerable Native Americans in the occupation of the New World, and that Americans and Canadians as a result must stop acknowledging land as being Indigenous and cease apologizing for the Euro-American settler colonial past. This is the ongoing project of “white innocence,” the denial of racism and colonial violence that becomes in itself racism and colonial violence, described so aptly by James Baldwin in his 1962 “Letter to My Nephew” as “the chorus of the innocents screaming, ‘No, this is not true. How bitter you are,’” as the oppression continues. This is the “All Lives Matter” of right-wing academia—look at these atrocities that happened elsewhere, why won’t you discuss them instead? Fynn-Paul claims, remarkably and falsely, “In fact, the European track record shows them to be almost shockingly un-genocidal, given their clear technological advantages over the rest of the world for a period of several centuries.”
Fynn-Paul writes that, “it is inevitable that a large proportion of New World inhabitants would have died within the first few decades after first contact” due to the spread of new diseases. He discusses this as an inevitable and unintentional side effect, and one that not only wiped out the Indigenous people but also means Europeans are blameless for the result. This is a well-known theory, often dubbed “virgin soil,” originally designed to argue that the population of the New World was significantly larger than previously suspected. Indeed, the latest scientific estimate is somewhere around 60 million inhabitants in the New World at that time—less than the 70-90 million inhabitants of Europe and less dense, but not a small number. This became, unfortunately, the basis for excusing Europeans from any wrongdoing in popular literature and politics.
On Fynn-Paul’s notion that native Americans were nomadic “primitive farmers” who had no land to steal, Lecaque responded:
The notion of “primitive farmers” collapses with minimal investigation—the extensive agriculture of Cahokia, for example, supported a core city bigger than London or Paris at its medieval height—and carries into the colonial period, when Native agriculture in the Ohio Valley has been shown to be more prosperous than its colonial neighbors, and when the Pilgrims, among others, were only saved by the able farming and teaching of Natives. On an even more basic level, popular history works have completely overturned the notions of “primitive farmers,” a lack of urbanization or complex civilization, or a lack of land ownership.
Lecaque also pointed out that Fynn-Paul didn’t bother to question the veracity of the pro-colonial sources he used, adding: “History is about interpretation, and those interpretations can vary greatly—but all have to be built on solid foundations. Fynn-Paul’s foundation is ideology, and the results are both offensive and laughable.”
Cashill ignored all that, of course, Instead, he concluded with more whitewashing:
The new arrivals did not steal America. For the most part they bought it in small increments. True, the U.S. government could get a bit too aggressive with their land purchases, but last I looked, the liberals on the Supreme Court championed eminent domain.
In any case, none of us alive today lost a parent or a grandparent to an Indian massacre or a U.S. Cavalry gone berserk. This thanksgiving we all have much to celebrate.
Indians get it, even if their liberal champions do not. In November, 17 counties with majority-Indian populations swung toward Trump by 10 or more percentage points.
Now let’s bring back those Redskins.
The ConWeb has long been outraged that the NFL team in Washington changed its name away from a slur of Native Americans.