Ayn Rand on Native Americans
"Now, I don't care to discuss the alleged complaints American Indians have against this country. I believe, with good reason, the most unsympathetic Hollywood portrayal of Indians and what they did to the white man. They had no right to a country merely because they were born here and then acted like savages. The white man did not conquer this country. And you're a racist if you object, because it means you believe that certain men are entitled to something because of their race. You believe that if someone is born in a magnificent country and doesn't know what to do with it, he still has a property right to it. He does not. Since the Indians did not have the concept of property or property rights--they didn't have a settled society, they had predominantly nomadic tribal "cultures"--they didn't have rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights that they had not conceived of and were not using. It's wrong to attack a country that respects (or even tries to respect) individual rights. If you do, you're an aggressor and are morally wrong. But if a "country" does not protect rights--if a group of tribesmen are the slaves of their tribal chief--why should you respect the "rights" that they don't have or respect? The same is true for a dictatorship. The citizens in it have individual rights, but the country has no rights and so anyone has the right to invade it, because rights are not recognized in that country; and no individual or country can have its cake and eat it too--that is, you can't claim one should respect the "rights" of Indians, when they had no concept of rights and no respect for rights. But let's suppose they were all beautifully innocent savages--which they certainly were not. What were they fighting for, in opposing the white man on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existnece; for their "right" to keep part of the earth untouched--to keep everybody out so they could live like animals or cavemen. Any European who brought with him an element of civilization had the right to take over this continent, and it's great that some of them did. The racist Indians today--those who condemn America--do not respect individual rights." -- "Q and A session following her Address To The Graduating Class Of The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, March 6, 1974"
"Individual rights" had no meaning for most times and most places. Even if you point to our own Declaration of Independence for specific wording, it did not much for those who were denied rights based on group affiliations.
And, as we have no other experience at all, it remains to be seen whether and how an "individualist" culture would continue perpetually and without slackening.
Read here: http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/...
It would also doom any of the hundreds of voluntary communes that dotted the social landscape in the 19th century. It would even apply today: find a commune, kick them off, take their land.
She was talking about the American aborigines who were here for 14,000 years after they came across the Bering strait, and only managed to get to a late stone-age level of development, at best.
Written history only begins about 6,000 years ago, in the west. The Americas had as much natural resources and as varied climates as the rest of the world. And yet in the rest of the world we went past the iron age and almost into the industrial age while the American aborigines were stuck in the late stone age.
I'm not condemning or criticizing those of tribal decent; but it's simply an anthropological fact that I believe is important to understand if we're going to understand civilization.
Something happened that prevented the development beyond the stone age... everywhere in the Americas. Can't blame the Spaniards; by the time they got here, *somebody* should have already developed an iron-age culture. Whatever stunted the American aboriginal peoples happened long before anyone else came to the Americas.
The cliche is that the Chinese invented everything. But the Europeans made use of it. Ancient Chinese culture developed massive bureaucracies, and the far east is noted for its disrespect for the individual and individual achievement. You can invent something clever, but it belongs to the state, or the emperor, not you. No profit-motive (this is a conclusion James Burke came to decades ago).
In the west, you get creative... you make a little money. Ambition coupled with individualism, I think, is what made the difference. So why did it never, ever happen anywhere in the Americas?
Maybe it was an excess of "harmony with nature" that the liberals get off on so much (as in movies like "Avatar"... blech).
Mirror Rands perspective to today and our plight with the illegal aliens pouring into our country - we have every right to repel them with lethal force since we do have legitimate and defined borders since we have staked legitimate and public claim to make this land private for the American people.
Maybe a way to think about this is what happens to someone who gets caught stealing. Does the perpetrator lose all of his property rights? It seems to me the right thing to do is to return the stolen property to the rightful owners and penalize the perpetrator. It doesn't give us free rein to violate the perpetrator's rights. We should be trying to set up a system of rights that applies to everyone.
(Of course it does raise a deeper issue on why it is that economically free nations do not invade other countries; and what that says about the United States.)
If invaded, I would defend my nation and die if need be.
In this age of nuclear weapons combined with the ability to deliver their enormously deadly payload anywhere in the world within minutes I have little issue with preemptive strikes on legitimate threats. What this reality says to me about the US is that we will do what is necessary to keep ourselves safe - as any nation should.
I do not know "where you stand." Do you mean that you stand with America? What does that mean? That is why I asked: if a coalition of freer nations sent forces to liberate us from our taxes and regulations, whose side would you be on? It is at once easy and hard. I have no pat answer, either. But I recognize the problem.
What I find ironic is that the "Mexicans," who are really descendants of Spaniards and Portuguese, want to claim rights to a vast swath of the SW US. They themselves are conquerors of central and southern America. If they had any integrity, they would give over their claims to those lands and migrate back to Europe. But no, they want to claim that their conquest was legitimate, but the conquest of the US over the west, including current Mexico which was relinquished back to the Mexican gov't, is illegitimate. What hogwash.
What do you expect to do, if you see a truckload of children coming? (This is the current situation.) Do you fire a rocket-propelled grenade at them? Kill a few dozen kids and their parents will get the message.
That is how it worked before World War II. "The MS St. Louis was a German ocean liner most notable for a single voyage in 1939, in which her captain, Gustav Schröder, tried to find homes for 937 German Jewish refugees after they were denied entry to Cuba, the United States and Canada, until finally accepted to various countries of Europe. Historians have estimated that, after their return to Europe, approximately a quarter of the ship's passengers died in concentration camps." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Loui....
In your version, of _We the Living_ Kira is shot not by a Russian guard before making the border, but by a Latvian, after gaining her way through the barbed wire.
We have had this discussion before and it seldom goes far. You would first have to declare the illegal crossings an invasion. You would have to regard the people as paramilitary forces - like the Russians in the eastern Ukraine - and deal with them as such. Have you ever taken a human life?
The story in Fallacies of Vision wasn't about Americans shooting Illegals - no one did in that story. FOV was about the US government not doing its job, the American people getting fed-up enough to stand up in defiance (we're approaching this now), and the US government hunting and killing its own people to defend the very illegal aliens who are not part of this nation and do not deserve representation by our government. Fed Gov not doing its constitutional duty and forcing citizens to rise up and risk their lives and livelihood to confront it and the illegal aliens.
That was the meaning of the story when it was published as an article and then placed in my book.
As for Kira, great book btw, yes she was shot cross a border illegal (and would have by either side. There is no comparison because the US border patrol does not kill illegal border crossers as a matter of policy. Would I support this type of response? At this point, 25 million illegal in, yes I would condone using lethal force as a deterrent if necessary.
"Any white person who brings the elements of civilization had the right to take over this continent, and it is great that some people did, and discovered here what they couldn’t do anywhere else in the world and what the Indians and now the racist Indians do not believe in to this day: respect for individual rights.
"I am, incidentally, in favor of Israel against the Arabs, for the very same reason. There you have the same issue in reverse. That yeah, is, Israel is not a good country politically. It’s a mixed economy, leaning strongly to socialism. Why do the Arabs resent it?
"Because it is a wedge of civilization—an industrial, uh, wedge—in a part of the country which is still primitive and nomadic. Israel is being attacked for being civilized, for being, specifically, a technological society. It’s for that very reason that they should be supported, that they are morally right because they represent the progress of man’s mind, just as the white settlers of America represented the progress of the mind, not centuries of brute stagnation and superstition. They represented the banner of the mind and they were in the right."
See Robert Campbell's "Rewrite Squad" posts here -- http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/...
It is well established that the indigenous tribes on the NA continent themselves warred with one another and the peoples on the lands moved back and forth due to conquest. The conquest of the Europeans is no different from other conquests except for the fact that the Europeans had advanced technology.
The indigenous peoples of the NA continent had an 80% reduction in population due to the effects of lack of immunity to disease. This isn't the intentional infliction of measles or small pox via blankets traded, but rather the consequence of interaction of Europeans with indigenous peoples and the fact that they didn't have generations of built up immunities to these diseases. Nothing nefarious there, just a normal consequence of nature.
Why did their cities collapse?
Where were their steel weapons and tools? Their iron weapons and tools? Their BRONZE weapons and tools?? After 14,000 years, you think they might have developed some.
Even after the collapse of Rome, western Europe didn't fall back to the stone age...
The second point she makes is that if a country doesn't respect its citizens' rights, an outsider cannot infringe on those rights b/c the citizens never had them in the first place. I agree with this, BUT the fact that a bad gov't ignores people's rights doesn't give us license to ignore their rights too.
The last point she makes is that even if the Native Americans did understand and respect rights, it still would be okay to steal their land if you were putting it better use than they did. I strongly reject that point. It's your right to do whatever you want with your stuff. There're always people who think they could put your stuff to better use if you turned it over to them. You don't have to though. I know people with WI farms going back over 150 years. Developers want to buy the farms b/c they could produce more tangible wealth. But the owners get some intangible value out of keeping the land as it was when their great great grandparents settled it. I wouldn't necessarily make the decision, but it's THEIR farm and they do have a "right to keep part of the earth untouched" if they so desire.
I'm a native American... I was born in the United States of America.