I have (and I am quite sure that the same holds true for the vast majority of you) sat through more than my share of sanctimonious sermons about how North America’s virtuous and “at one with nature” Indians were horribly oppressed and, indeed, the victims of “genocide” on the part of Evil White Men™. Indian leaders (I eschew the various politically correct synonyms that have since been developed) seem to believe, or at least a majority of them do, that they are entitled to play the role of perpetual victims because of events that happened hundreds of years ago. Of course, even that line of argument (the “it-was-two-hundred-years-ago-so-shut-the-hell-up” argument) works from the basic presumption that what happened to the North American Indians and their “culture” was wrong. I don’t concede that point.

This is important because the Indian myth is at the cornerstone of the anti-American myth. “If the United States was built upon the genocide of a peaceful people,” so the theory goes, “then everything it has ever done is morally tainted.” Nonsense. The vast majority of North American Indians who died did so as a result of diseases to which they lacked natural immunity. Those of us who hail from other parts of the world can hardly be held morally culpable for that, anymore than we can hold the Indians responsible for any of our number who died from their diseases. Many of the other who died did so in wars which were made necessary by armed resistance on the part of various Indian bands. In any case, most of those killed died long before the conquest of the West.

Of course, there is more to it than just this. Not only can we not be held at fault for most of what happened, but most of those actions that we did take were morally right. This is such a contrarian statement that it must sound absurd: but think about it for a second.

Where would the world be today if we’d simply done what some would seemingly have had us do and we’d left the Americas to its indigenous inhabitants? By most accounts, the Americas would look pretty much exactly as they did in 1491. When Columbus arrived the Indians had been stuck in their traditional patterns for, in all probability, thousands of years and showed no sign of breaking with those patterns any time soon. Absent the conquest of the Americas by Europeans a huge percentage of human resources would remain untapped and a huge reservoir of human potential would have gone to waste.

Yes, Indian cultures were “destroyed” by the arrival of Europeans. To this I say: so what? Of what practical use were they to humanity? Would they have provided a greater benefit to the world than the creation of the United States and the other nations of the Americas? No sane person thinks so. The history of humanity is the history of the destruction of weaker cultures and civilizations by stronger ones. This is not something to be mourned or regretted, for it is this very process of creative destruction which drives us forward though time.

When the first Europeans arrived in the Americas, they were not inhabited by any civilized men. They were dotted with a few scattered tribes of primitives and savages. If the price of the future glory of North America was the destruction of those wandering hordes, Deus lo volt. After all, at one point, the entire world was inhabited by tribes and bands and, eventually, virtually all of these examples of an inferior form of human organization met their fate. It’s just that most of the truly primitive tribes in the Old World were destroyed before the advent of written history and, therefore, we don’t know enough about them for more than a handful of lunatics to mourn their loss.

Given the limited supply of usable land on the Earth, any land which is inhabited by no more than a scattering of savages must be considered Terra Nullius- no man’s land. It is the right and, indeed, the duty of superior civilizations to seize that land and to bring the blessings of modern life to it.

This is an important point to consider because we are on the verge of an age of great space exploration. The cult of Indian victimhood, if it is allowed to endure, is very likely to deter our descendents from simply displacing by force alien primitives they might encounter on some far away and Earth-like world. It is only though the re-interpretation of our history (or, more accurately, the re-re-interpretation of our history) that we can make it clear to those who come after us that they have a sacred duty to conquer and civilize the lands of primitives. It would be the height of folly to abandon useful land for the sake of a few scattered tribes.

It’s time to stop feeling guilty about our history. After all, none of us would even be here had history turned out differently. The Indians simply met their destiny and, in the end, their decedents get to live in a civilization which is a hundred times greater than anything that they, on their own, ever could have provided.

Oh, I know I will be attacked as “unfeeling” and “uncaring” for this, but I truly don’t care. Countless cultures and civilizations have been destroyed over time and I see nothing which does not suggest that all this was to our great benefit. The only reason we care more about the Indians then, say, the lost glories of Abyssinia or Carthage is that the North American Indians have better press. Hell, Carthage and Abyssinia are bad examples in that they were actual civilizations. We mostly don’t know the names of the European equivalents of the Haida or Sioux since they were pretty much all dealt with, one way or another, long before anyone was keeping real records. The level of sophistication displayed by the North American Indian is comparable only to that of African tribes, and who cares about them?

Of course, for all our whining about the Indians we aren’t actually about to do anything serious about it. Given this, it’s downright silly of us to spend time flagellating ourselves over something that happened hundreds of years ago.

My advice to both the Indian activists and those few sad North Americans feeling bad over what happened: get over it. We’re all much better off for what happened.