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1. This is fascinatingly stupid - and yet simultaneously very dangerous. I will attempt to explain in a thread.
Ancestral lands is something of an emotional thing to begin with. Because your great-great-grandfather lived in a place doesn't necessarily grant your rights to it. https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1093600535272251392
Ancestral lands is something of an emotional thing to begin with. Because your great-great-grandfather lived in a place doesn't necessarily grant your rights to it. https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1093600535272251392
2. But we can't get around the emotional attachments that form, either. So we're stuck in this weird limbo where SOME claims are popularized - like the claims of Native Americans - and some are not recognized, like the claims, say, Greeks have to Constantinople.
3. When someone suggests that X land needs to be returned by Y people, my default is always to refer to Constantinople. "So when are you going to give the Queen of Cities back to the Greeks?" Most just look at me funny. But there's an important truth buried in that.
4. What year do they want borders to go back to? Before Columbus came? Okay. So now we need to restore the Holy Roman Empire, right? And the Latinos AOC is talking about... well they are part south and central American (not NORTH American natives) and part Spanish.
5. Do we take a King Solomon solution and suggest cutting the people in half, and sending half to Spain and keeping half in south and central America? It's a ludicrous argument. What claim does an Aztec have on, say, Cherokee land, anyway?
6. On top of that, most Americans have at least a little bit of native DNA in them anyway. Apparently 1/1024th was sufficient for Fauxchahontas Warren to claim she was an Indian. So... most Americans can meet THAT standard.
7. Progs want to selectively rewind the clock. Give North America to Indians. Give Spain to the Muslims. But no Byzantine Empire - Turkey is just fine. And if a mass of Syrians want to move to Germany, that's perfectly okay even though they have zero historical claim.
8. The hard truth is, you can't rewind things like this without massive injustice today. Some families in America - my father's side of the family included - have been in North America for 400 years. Does that count for nothing?
9. Everybody lives on conquered land. The danger of someone like AOC saying what she's saying is that this is weaponized empathy. Selective sympathy. It's okay to sympathize with the conquest of A, but not B, because they don't like B.
There's no objective standard applied.
There's no objective standard applied.
10. They just pull out the sob stories and semi-staged photos, and make people feel sorry for X, while ignoring similar incidents all around the globe - because the votes and support of X are politically useful at the given moment.
