Rules for Strategic Arguments (Pilot)

HOW TO WIN THE OPEN BORDERS ARGUMENT EVEN AGAINST EMOTIONAL PEOPLE

Image result for trail of tears open source
The Trail of Tears was a horrible crime perpetrated by the US government
under Pres. Andrew Jackson, but it's also the worst example to use in order
to justify open borders. In fact it's the best reason to treat that idea as the
idiotic pipe dream that it is. (Pinterest)

Last week I had a long and heated exchange with an impassioned young Navajo lady concerning open borders. She was making a superficially plausible argument that like US-born Native Americans people from Mexico are descendants of the First Nations, and that the REAL "illegal aliens" were white Americans that came here uninvited and stole their land.
Let me make one thing clear: I support returning more sovereignty to the Indian reservations. The current arrangement deprives them of real actionable political clout. I've also supported campaigns against Indian mascots (although not court cases) as well as the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Have I completely supported all of their causes? No. But I'm not required to say yes to everything.
Basically, her argument contained several logical BBQ pits:
Atahualpa Inca XIV.png
Inca Emperor Atahualpa was a casualty of Spanish
treachery. Yet his society was hardly the harmonious
Xanadu that critical race theorists would have you believe
(Wikimedia Commons)

  1. There were no borders and no laws preventing Euros from coming to the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, Hernán Cortes, the Spanish conquistador that conquered the Aztecs was welcomed by them due to their own mythology prophesying the arrival of a pale god known as Quetzalcoatl. We learned this in 4th grade. The Inca Empire was conquered in a roundabout way by a force of perhaps 120 Spaniards that hoodwinked a hostage Emperor Atahualpa into fighting his rival Huáscar and killing him brutally. Then the Spaniards eventually murdered Atahualpa in a barbaric and treacherous fashion too.
  2. Although ethnically the American Indians were different and therefore not "tribes", they did not form nation states in the sense that we know. In fact, this was true of many Euro countries. Germany and Italy were not united until the 1860s, and that was done through conquests and royal marriages.
  3. Many of these Indian origin advocates as I call them subscribe to the ludicrous belief that it was the Europeans that introduced war to the New World and that the Indians lived here in harmony. This sweeps aside the obvious fact that many Indians did not die just from European violence, but also from disease such as smallpox for which they had no immunity brought over from Europe. Likewise Europeans were more vulnerable to Malaria, a disease that they typically contracted in Africa.One related theory posits that the American military distributed smallpox infected blankets to American Indians in order to eradicate them. This is under dispute as it's been distributed by discredited academic Ward Churchill, so I invite more evidence from those that believe it.
  4. Related to point 3, American Indians did fight conflicts with each other, this is exactly the type of thing that the early colonists exploited in order to conquer the New World. Ever heard of the "Beaver Wars" between the Iroquois and a slew of other Indian nations like the Erie and Huron? The fact is that there has been war over lands or other resources on every continent regardless of whatever race lives there; have you never heard of the Mongol Empire and Genghis Khan? I'm not saying it justifies murdering the Indians and taking their land, but let's stop promoting a Utopian illusion of pre-Columbian America.
  5. Illegal immigration from Mexico is not exclusively limited to Mexican or even Latin American citizens. PewResearch now reports that illegal immigration from Africa is at an all time high. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that one type is better or worse than the other, but it brings lie to the belief that this is just allowing related
  6. Just like the general American population, there is no Latino race. This is why on applications and forms there is typically a separate question asking whether the applicant is "Hispanic or Latino of any race". This is well-known as there was a fairly complicated racial hierarchy casta in colonial Spanish America ranging from the peninsulares (Spain-born settlers), colonos (Spaniards and other Euros born in the Americas), mestizos (Spanish-Indian descendants), mulatos (Spanish-African descendants), indios (full-blooded Indians), and zambo (African and Indian, a possible origin of the slur "sambo"). There are also full-blooded black Latinos known in Spanish as. . . wait for it . . . negros.

Image result for 8 ball8 ball time! But let me cut through this for those of you short on time. The basic premise of their position is that Europeans are the real illegal immigrants that destroyed American Indian societies by exploiting the lack of borders. Therefore. . . what are they trying to convince Americans to do?

  • That we should allow the USA to have open borders in order that the same thing happens here?
  • To not even screen people for infectious diseases. By the way, smallpox is making a comeback and remember the Ebola and Zika scares?
  • That allowing another hostile and doctrinaire religious system to infiltrate the USA would be a good thing for anyone?
The "original Americans argument" is actually the best one AGAINST open borders. The American Indians were in most cases pre-nation state societies. All of the other myths of a harmonious pre-colonial society are based on the mistaken desire to see everything non-European or non-white as being virtuous rather than looking at the true circumstances of what happened. These are the same type of academics and their followers that believe that pre-colonial Africa was harmonious while ignoring the presence of empires and kingdoms like Buganda, Ghana and Zulu. These empires came about as a result of subjugation of neighbouring peoples that were black Africans like them.

Please write back to ask about this Rules for Strategic Arguments, or to propose a topic idea of your own for me to formulate.


Video commentary:


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Did the "Dancing Israeli" theorists actually read the FBI file?

Image
A few months ago a friend of mine, like myself Jewish, suggested to me that there would be forthcoming indictments of Israeli agents for involvement in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He was convinced that documents slated for declassification would shine a light on an operation by Israel's Mossad that had either prior knowledge or involvement in the plot.  I would be remiss if I did not admit that for years controversial historical events, what are popularly panned as "conspiracy theories", are a topic that has fascinated me. But I've always had a blind spot for the 9/11 theories mostly because there were so many of them, and it is difficult to distinguish serious questions from spaced out hyperbolic speculation. And sure, I'll also admit that the idea that there could have been a nefarious plot to topple the Twin Towers and pull the USA into wars in the Middle East made me uncomfortable. After all, my own family hails f
Read more

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Anti-Semitism Canard

Image
House Intelligence Committee counsel Daniel Goldman with committee chair Adam Schiff during the impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump's communications with Ukraine. ( Ha'aretz ) The so-called Jewish "leadership" has scuttled American Jews' future Recently my aunt, who is almost 70 years old, told us that the current climate is the most anti-Semitic that she's seen in the USA having lived here her entire life. But I had to struggle to keep myself from saying how surprised I was that it wasn't worse. And I'm not the only one as a friend, like myself also Jewish, has observed the House impeachment hearings and said to me "this is bad for the Jews" for weeks on end. He says this because a glaringly prominent selection of people, from the heads of the committees (Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler), to their majority counsels (Norm Eisen and Daniel Goldman), to the witnesses (Gordon Sondland, Alexander Vindman), to the experts (Pamela Karlan
Read more

A year later Ryan Dawson is Addicted to Lies, Part 1

Image
 As I'm writing this it is the week after the 19th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the event that defined my generation just as Vietnam defined the generation of baby boomers. It is a bitter day for many reasons. On the one hand there is the largely held sentiment that the almost three thousand victims of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. Another reason compounding it is the lack of transparency by the US government and various other governments regarding the events leading up to the tragic attacks. And yet on top of that is the fact that opportunistic hoaxers have taken it upon themselves to take advantage of that lack of transparency and use the available information to concoct lies and canards in order to fit their worldview. In 2019 I debated one such person, Ryan Dawson of ANC Report. Typically I have the urge to find something redeeming in one of my opponents, but with respect to him the longer the exposure to his material the easier it is to see th
Read more