Based on a slew
of mineral rights and land claim victories during the past
50 years, the former occupiers of entire continents (the
Americas, Australia), First Nations people, are sitting
pretty. Even though they were unable to defend territories
once under their possession, they have rather brilliantly
rewritten the rules of the game so that territory once theirs
(once were warriors), has been returned to them, which implies
that it is theirs forever, since, as they cogently argue,
they were the original occupiers.
Nota bene:
Any astrologer worth his wage knows not to leave himself
short of the ‘reversal of fortune’ card.
The great enablers
are the virtue signalling political establishment and its
minions looking to win votes and score points with the big
G. in the sky. Having been sold hoodwinked-line-and-sinker
on a twisted notion of moral rectitude, the land and rights
forfeiters have pleaded nolo contendere (no contest)
to the charge that it was illegal and immoral to have waged
war and dispossessed First Nations of their land.
Among the big
losers in this epochal reset is Christopher Columbus, who
for half a millennium was universally revered as an intrepid
explorer and discoverer of the Americas. In the nation’s
classrooms he’s now portrayed as a brute, his statues
have been toppled and defaced, forcing the conclusion that
decommissioning valuable art works is a small price to pay
when it comes to doing the right thing: signing appease
treaties with the new winners on the block – the erstwhile
defeated.
This flummoxing
reversal in fortune must ‘rank’ (a word also
employed as an adjective) as one of the great political
coups in the history of mankind. The losers of entire continents
have somehow managed to instill in their conquerors sufficient
guilt and shame such that the latter are now voluntarily
returning long-held lands and rights to the original occupiers.
Which begs the question: what is the point of winning if
you have to forgo the victory? What does evolutionary fitness
mean if the fit are denied the compensations and ranking
attendant to fitness?
In athletic
competitions, the very best are universally applauded and
rewarded for being the best. The runner, the sprinter who
finishes dead last is for all intents and purposes dead
at the finish line – that is forgotten. However heartbreaking
is his disappointment, no one would think of declaring him
winner as a feel good gesture.
For most of
man’s history, superior strength, intelligence and
especially weaponry determined a group’s fitness.
Females, wanting what was best for future offspring, instinctively
offered their eggs to the alpha male. Back then, there was
no
confusing the winners from the losers,
and everyone stood to gain by that distinction.
Be as it may
that in the present age the twin plagues of relativism and
the political correctness are blurring the whited-out line
between the fit and unfit, it would be a mistake to view
this development as an outcome of modern thought. The philosopher
Nietzsche points out that this perversion of the natural
order dates back to Christianity, and in particular the
11th century with the raising of the effete, sterile priestly
class to pre-eminence. In this new configuration, the Omegas
became the venerated while the Alphas, the manly men, the
propagators of the race, were recast as degenerate savages.
“This systematized disfiguring and castration of life
is counted holy, inviolable . . . . the worst mutilation
of man that can be imagined presented as ‘the good
man.” acidulates Nietzsche in The Will to Power.
More of the
same is happening on our watch. Now that First Nations --
empowerment's favourite poster people -- are auto-invited
to the world’s most prestigious political and economic
forums, a development that de facto transmutes abject defeat
into a trifling footnote of history, it's only a matter
of time before the battle cry to "level the playing"
field turns into a tyranny.
Yes. Victimization
works. In 2021, the federal government gifted more than
3.5 billion dollars to Canada’s aboriginals. The presumed
winners, hamstrung by political correctness and therefore
guilty as charged, in the spirit of absolution are voluntarily
ceding powers and privileges to a people whom they assumed
they had decimated. “There are strange things done
under the midnight sun,” writes Robert Service, a
British-Canadian poet who opted for the tough love and law
of the Yukon. Meanwhile, the once undisputed victorious
are being reprogrammed to honour the losers of entire continents
and to self-flagellate on their way to the many contrition
centers that are popping up like mushrooms after a hot rain.
If the winner
lacks the will (the intelligence) to esteem his victories,
to elect those exceptional attributes and qualities that
enabled him prevail over all the others, isn’t he
announcing under no uncertain terms that he is no longer
fit for the winner’s circle? Would we rather the elite
perform our vital medical surgeries, or, in the spirit of
fairness, should all cultures and ethnicities have equal
access to the scalpel? Who should we want in the cockpits
of our planes at 35,000 feet?
If we are to
disentangle this confusion of values, it is essential that
we subscribe to and abide by the easily discernible objective
criteria that determine to whom belongs an occupied land.
Since it is in everybody’s interest to know if we
are indeed the monsters First Nations make us out to be,
if Columbus,
alleged gencocider, is guilty as charged,
we will want to clarify a pecking order of rights in respect
to made-made laws that legitimize land ownership vis á
vis natural law.
Let us hypothesize
a successful lunar landing by Team-A and the subsequent
establishment of a permanent moon colony. Since they are
the first to arrive and settle there, no one would dispute
that the portion of the moon they occupy isn’t theirs.
Earthlings can insist that the moon be divvied up among
the nations of the world, but as a practical matter it belongs
to Team-A because they are there and the earthlings are
not.
Half a century
later, Team-B lands on another area of the moon and establishes
a colony. When Team-A learns of Team-B’s arrival,
they issue a warning that as first occupiers the moon belongs
to them and orders the new team on the block to return to
earth, but as a practical consideration the land occupied
by Team–B belongs to them because they are there and
Team-A isn’t, while the rest of the moon remains up
for grabs.
Let us now hypothesize
on earth a major increase in demand for the element of lithium
to power electric vehicles and to keep in check a philosophical
malaise that has rendered ¾ of earth’s adult
population manic-depressive.
As it so happens,
there are significant deposits of lithium on Team-A’s
territory, but they lack the technical know-how to mine
the element, a deficit the civilizationally more advanced
Team-B is able to supply. So in consideration of the demand
on earth and its superior technology, Team-B invades Team-A
and easily dispossesses them of their territory. Team–A
can cry to Jupiter’s moon that as first occupier the
land is theirs, and that would include all art and artifacts,
but until they can repossess what they lost it belongs to
Team-B. In other words, the spoils of war go to the victor.
That is how it has always been – until recently.
Among the first
beneficiaries of the war are the earthlings, now assured
of their daily lithium fix. It would constitute pure folly
if earthlings, who depend on lithium, were to allow themselves
to be convinced that the land currently held by Team-B should
be returned to Team-A because the latter were the first
occupiers.
Notwithstanding
the brilliant minds and wordsmiths that formulate our constitutions
and Bill of Rights which appeal to our better angels, we
cannot rewrite who we are, which is measured not by the
words we speak but our actions and the gene sequences that
underwrite them.
Implicit in
every nation’s founding principle is the dictum: “We
have the right to be here because we are here and you are
not.”
In the Americas
and Australia, First Nations were unable to defend their
continents. An advanced military culture prevailed over
a more primitive one, and that outcome, in its decisiveness,
perfectly illustrates the method and objective of evolutionary
biology. To reverse the winner-loser result through decree
or a patently false narrative is to elevate mediocrity,
a sure formula for setting any species on its way to extinction.
Which isn’t
to say that there may not come a day when man will be able
to rewrite his genotype so that reason will be allowed a
seat at the table when negotiating territorial disputes.
But until that happens, we look to the territorial imperative’s
most consummate exemplar, Russia’s Vladimir Putin,
whose understanding of it is indistinguishable from the
manner in which it operates through him. Or in flag-speak,
until someone take it way, Crimea belongs to Russia.
But Putin, however
wicked, immoral and ungodly (that is instinctual) is not
sui generis. He is simply the imperative’s
current tool of choice, and when he is no longer with us,
there will be someone else, and again someone else, until
we finally figure out how to decommission our hard-wired
obsession with territory, if indeed we decide that such
a decision will better serve the species.
However lethal
and demeaning to the race is the primordial urge to amass,
occupy and defend territory, it could very well be that
this blind force is elemental to life everywhere in the
universe, that the brute we see reflected in the mirror
is in fact an ascendant creature, and the blood count left
in the wake of life forms fighting for top ranking is what
best guarantees the advancement of civilizations and the
evolution of species.
From caves to
castles to computers, man’s progress remains unchecked.
What we hope for today is more often than not a sure thing
for tomorrow, so long as we recognize that our fondest hopes
for the future are best served through contest and conflict,
an unforgiving, ruthless binary (we win, you lose) that
nonetheless vouchsafes the best shall prevail.
