Most existing civilizations originated in the conquest and displacement of earlier peoples

A reader writes:

I’ve discovered a fascinating page on Wikipedia. It tells us that the aborigines of Taiwan are one of the few recent and thus well-documented cases of a primitive non-Western culture (the aborigenes) being overrun and conquered by an advanced non-Western advanced culture (the Chinese).

We get fed all this guilt about the West displacing indigenous cultures. But people forget that probably half the societies in the world are the products of past conquests. [LA replies: I would say it’s more than half.] It’s just that most of these events happened so long ago—unlike, say, the white settlement of North America and disposssion of the Indians—that people have no awareness of them.

Almost all of South China was conquered from its original inhabitants by the Han Chinese who make up China’s predominant ethnic group today. All of Japan was conquered from the primitive Ainu people.

But only America (and not generally even Latin America!) gets attacked for this. I think it’s important to resist the poisonous imposition of neurotic historical guilt in the minds of Americans.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 01, 2012 11:28 AM | Send