The Alternative to Cultural Genocide: USA, Canada & Australia.

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[Music] [Music] in this video I answer a question from a supporter on patreon really several questions from several supporters on patreon it's a question I have never heard put to any contemporary politician net I've never seen anyone ask Bill Clinton that's I've never seen anyone ask George W Bush this Donald Trump etc and in a sense it's the most obvious and inevitable question for us to ask in 2019 really any year during my lifetime question is what nail is the opposite of cultural genocide what now is the alternative to cultural genocide looking ahead to the future given the past colonial experience of conquest North America given that as as one of these people ready to me says given that it's not really plausible now for people of European ancestry to just say sorry we shouldn't have done that we'll pack up and leave this is not an easily reversible or ex trickable situation or we can just eliminate the sure peon population of North America or Australia and I don't know if you really did poll indigenous people Canada United States Australia I don't know what percentage them even would favor that kind of solution of actually removing the European population obviously that would you know result in abandoned cities on an unimaginable scale and in a very real sense the collapse of of civilization it is in a word unimaginable what really is the alternative I'm not interested in being easy on myself here I'm interested in challenging myself and kind of pushing my own position into a corner into its limits nobody else is gonna challenge me so I got to challenge myself on these things I can imagine being an indigenous person in Taiwan when the European colonists showed up I can imagine being in the indigenous tribal Taiwanese society when Dutch Christian missionaries sure that was the Dutch it was people from the Netherlands Holland what everyone say and I can imagine absolutely embracing the Dutch as representing a more advanced civilization technologically in terms of literature I can imagine being one of the tribal people there who saw this as progress as a way out of the inexplicable horror of what witchcraft and perpetual internecine warfare were like on the island of Taiwan before the arrival of the Europeans if you don't know what Taiwanese tribal society was like you could google it you could read a Wikipedia article or something there are definitely academic articles I've read a fair bit about that I leave it up to your imagination but suffice it to say this was not a Garden of Eden this was not paradise life was nasty brutish and short and they had some unbelievably dark beliefs about human sexuality and reproduction um put it this way European Christianity would have been sexually liberating compared to what they were doing there in terms of reproduction is really really brutal and horrible for everyone especially the women okay so this is not me playing devil's advocate this is me really saying look when you understand history when you use sympathy as an analytical tool when you sympathize with both sides of the historical conflict at every stage you can see yourself in those historical situations being on the side that now in some detached sense in retrospect might be considered evil you might say to me what do you mean eyes'll what do you mean how can you possibly say that you would have been one of the people who betrayed your own nationality your own language your own culture to put it in a less stark contrast in terms the level of Technology what if you were in Japan what if you were a traditional Japanese villager maybe just struggling to become a literate in a country where the vast majority of people were illiterate and where the writing system was incredibly difficult pre-modern Japanese what if you were a Japanese villager at the time when the Dutch first showed up there again it was actually specifically the Dutch Netherlands who were the European colonists who were showing up in Japan and what are the Dutch have with them they have illustrated books that show you the map of the whole world they have Illustrated books that show you what's inside the human body they have medical instruments that can perform surgery that can cure conditions that you used to think of in terms of demons infesting people medical conditions that maybe in the past you only could try to treat with completely superstitious rituals I'm aware of some incredibly brutal and stupid buddhist rituals that existed in pre-modern japan but whatever whether buddhist animist shinto or what-have-you diseases that formerly you were powerless to comprehend and certainly you had no way of treating or curing that's who shows up the Dutch guess what else they bring with them Christianity European colonialism and so on I don't know I don't know if I had been centuries ago a member of the Cree the Ghibli the mohawk I don't know if I being the person I am intellectually curious ravenous looking for social change looking to improve my own society with my own set of humanitarian instincts that in some ways the Christian faith even caters to or exploits I don't know if I would have been the most eager adopter of an advocate for European colonialism despite the detached perspective I have today of looking back where you can say isn't it a terrible thing that in the history of Canada all of the best and brightest young men of most of the First Nations countries they were putting their time and energy into being mercenaries working for the Europeans instead of fighting against them well maybe I would have to well that was the exciting news source of part isn't it terrible that the best and brightest members of all the First Nations were exactly the ones who became Christian missionaries themselves who joined the clergy whether Protestant or Catholic whatever you want to say isn't it terrible that the Europeans were able sometimes just with money but sometimes by opening up that book by presenting a whole new world of concepts and opportunities that they were able to turn the whole strength of indigenous people against themselves ultimately leading to the total devastation of these peoples and their societies and creating the disaster that we have today normally what mainstream politicians present to us is basically genocide or genocide with a mask of cultural pluralism sensitivity multiculturalism put onto it right either just an outright celebration of European colonialism genocide or the continuation of that European colonialism and genocide plus a new Memorial Museum in Washington DC Museum of the American Indian there is a visitor there's a museum devoted to the history of indigenous peoples of Canada in Ottawa capital city of Canada there's another Museum we have in Canada the [Music] Human Rights Museum that's out in the middle of the prairies and these museums really ideologically serve the same function as Holocaust museums with in Germany or Holocaust museums within Poland the white people are never gonna give the land back right that's that's what it boils down to you get a museum you get a token you get a memorial we just saw several on this trip through Europe both Germany and France you get a great big shiny gravestone as an apology put down on the ashes of your destroyed civilization and then history rolls on so is there an alternative and really implicitly the question being asked here why is nobody talking about it and what it would would entail something else happened within just the last couple of days it'd be nice to imagine there's some people my audience who know me well enough that they could challenge me with this this kind of thing but almost at random the history of a particular native tribe within the United States came up and I googled it and read the Wikipedia article and then clicked around and found some YouTube videos from that particular tribe and their efforts at at language revival today and I was looking at an example of a tribe that today is ethnically completely indistinguishable from white people obviously that's partly through intermarriage it's partly through cultural genocide it's partly through genocide in the most literal sense cuz I did read about their history of warfare conquest relocation forced relocation etc um so the surviving people who either have a link by name or ancestry it's obviously down to a very very small percentage of their ancestry that links to this this group of indigenous and their language went extinct and although I sympathize they've attempted to revive their language using handwritten records from Jesuit priests and you know having studied Korean a Jib way listening to their very clumsy attempts to pronounce that language that to speak it I was wincing I was I felt embarrassed for everyone involved and I felt deeply embarrassed a group of people you know who were in these YouTube videos proclaiming their core sense of cultural identity and how much it meant to them to have these rituals and dances and blankets and handicrafts and even to some extent legends and mythology all of which was at best non-continuous just say there's no continuous tradition and at worst we can say it's fake fake in the sense that it's been reconstructed from accounts that were written of what that culture was like by Jesuit missionaries um I don't know maybe they have one account written by saying anthropologist but based on what I read I doubt that I think probably all of the perspectives will be from Christian outsiders who were in the process of dissolving that culture however you want to say it and just documented it in passing so obviously you're never really gonna know even what those myths and legends were what those meant to those people in the same way by the way I've seen white pagans within Europe trying to revive pre-christian religion that exist in Europe before was destroyed by the Catholic Church but the only thing they have to go on in one case I remember wasn't it the only record of local religion were from interrogations under torture of quote-unquote witches people who are still carrying on the traditional religion while being interrogated for witchcraft what it was they they confess to you could never get back to the philosophy values or what-have-you and of course this type of reconstructed pseudo culture is false in many other ways gone is any interest in the the warrior culture that's very interesting when you look at the Anthropology and the celebration of what is indigenous even from a European perspective up to a certain point in history one of the main things both Europeans are celebrating and that the first nation of the indigenous people themselves are celebrating is their warlike nature their warrior culture that after a certain point you have the reinvention of their history as if they had never been warlike at all as if they had they they had been living completely peacefully and more entirely the victims of European aggression etc so what I mean obviously both are misleading they're both ideologically driven attempts to rewrite history but nevertheless there are many elements of the indigenous culture that you know are being deleted even in the process of quote-unquote celebrating it so the question is now in 2019 what is the alternative to genocide and obviously I'm intentionally leaving this particular tribe unnamed I would not be happy to see a thoroughly phony knockoff second-rate version of indigenous culture being scaled up and imitated insincerely by white people by Hispanic people by african-american black people on a massive scale I think everyone would find that insulting and denigrating to their own intelligence I've been here before so I wasn't shocked to see like the beadwork and like they make all this what do you think it's really good some of their beatings better than mine that's for sure yeah I'm not offended at all they're like just like sisters or brothers they sit and they'll drink we'll have tea or coffee and they're just very respectful very just just wanting to learn it is so very Eurocentric in nature it's so very whitewashed and so very miss interpretive of natives and native cultures traditions and people is that there's that why you're anything obvious I'm against hobby ism because it's a form of colonialism I can't imagine that the people of North America or Australia now are going to remove Christianity from the churches that cover these continents and replace it with a phony version of an indigenous religion based on the description of that religion that was set down by Jesuit missionaries and other Christians there were plenty of Protestants did this too when they really had no interest except to destroy those native peoples and to replace their culture with with Christianity and the native people who hung on long enough to have German anthropologists show up and document their culture the best documents we have what Cree culture was like or from German anthropologists embarassingly Canadians never showed as much interest as the Germans so it goes it's it's significant that nobody's even proposing this or asking for that the real alternate history that we're reaching out for is not history in which indigenous culture remained untouched by European colonialism but an alternate history in which that a digitus culture had a chance to adapt in which it had a chance to modernize in response to Western influence without being eliminated and of course we do have an example of that in Japan right if you just walk around any Street in modern-day Japan and ask yourself how much of what I see is the result of European influence Japanese traditional culture was completely transformed materially and if the indigenous peoples of Australia and North America had had a non genocidal confrontation with European civilization they likewise would have appropriated from European civilization would have imitated the light bulb paved roads concrete fire hydrants all of these things but what would be different well the Japanese they still speak the Japanese language don't they and I mean some of you watching this video can appreciate the gravity of this and and some of you can't there's a real sense in which you will never understand the Japanese people or their culture without understanding the language the language represents not just a different way of scribbling on a piece of paper but in a profound and important sense a different way of thinking I don't believe in bloodlines you know I really I'm very skeptical about the significance of DNA put it that way I don't think that what really matters now in 2019 is the color of anyone's skin but yeah I do see it as a tremendously important challenge to bring back the languages from the brink of extinction and to really expand the role and significance of those languages today now tacked on here almost as an afterthought look in terms of the question I was given anyone can take one look at the American house of Congress and the American Senate and say where are the indigenous people anyone can take a look at the Canadian system of parliament and say where are the indigenous people how do these systems actually serve the public of the native people and it's a disaster I could make a separate video on that but long story short the political system itself needs to change it needs to change very radically and very fundamentally in Canada that was legally recognized and what was called the RCA P the world Commission on average Aboriginal peoples our political system was invented to be genocide oh it was invented to not merely fail to represent the interests of indigenous people but to actively exclude and extinguish them that's why our system works the way it does and it is not much of an exaggeration to say the same about the American system of Congress and so on for the state legislatures okay so there are very obvious very fundamental changes that happen that need to happen politically at the level of representation level of democracy even if it's simply the level of every tribe of being able to elect a representative who goes to Parliament or goes to Congress however it is you want to handle this there's a huge obvious political question there but yeah the cultural question the future of a continent that is not genocide the opposite of genocide obviously it's not just going to be political representation and I think it would be very tragic indeed if you sold the problem political representation but still everyone in Congress was just speaking English right or just speaking Spanish when you get into Latin America etc I do think there's a very real question of devoting resources not just money not just schools but sure maybe literally emptying out some of those churches and not replacing one false and oppressive religion with another false and oppressive religion but maybe looking for a very real opportunity to create and sustain indigenous language education how different would Japan be today if after opening up those books and opening up their minds to European influence they hadn't merely taken you know science geography ultimately of course electricity concrete steel warships no the rest of it what if today there was nobody left in Japan who could speak Japanese what would be the significance of Japanese culture Japanese song dance handicrafts the decorative arts if the Japanese people had lost the Japanese language from my perspective nothing from my perspective having a different way to weave a basket and having a different form of DNA or a different color of skin those things are really very meaningless to me song and dance doesn't mean a whole lot especially not when nobody alive can understand the lyrics to the song the language the language and hopefully with it the literature the history and understanding of the philosophy of the perspective the language is the real struggle for the future of hearts and minds it's going to be with the prospect of indigenous language revival that the alternative to genocide stands or Falls [Music]