Would You Rather Be Colonized by Aztecs or Christians?

There are two kinds of people in this world: the colonizers and the colonized—at least according to the Left, which in recent years has labeled all of history’s victors the unjust beneficiaries of “settler colonialism.” This pejorative phrase has cropped up everywhere the Left dominates—the universities, the media, even the government. 

Its purpose is to delegitimize every Western country that the Left doesn’t like—America, Britain, Spain, Portugal, France, Israel, and so on. But the phrase doesn’t mean all that much when you consider that every single regime and tribal society in history was established by settlers and colonizers of one kind or another.

To put it another way: not since Adam in the Garden of Eden has any people sprouted out of the ground. (And in the case of Adam, you might recall, he had a little help.)

Borders, nations, and regimes have changed for all of history as people have multiplied, expanded, and moved around. The aim of the “decolonization” activists is to return land from the people who currently possess it to the people who previously possessed it. 

But that doesn’t solve the problem; it only pushes the problem one step back in time.

In 1980, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the American government had illegally taken the Black Hills of South Dakota—the site of Mount Rushmore—from the Lakota Sioux. 

The Court ordered the government to pay the Lakota the initial offering price of the land, plus interest. But even the liberal Court did not order the U.S. to vacate and give the land back to the Indians. 

How could it?

A quarter of a million Americans live there.

In any case, the Sioux refused the money. And it’s a lucky thing. Because the payment would raise just as many problems as it would solve.

Because the Sioux did not magically sprout out of the Black Hills. 

In fact, the Sioux possessed the Black Hills for less time than the United States has. The Sioux took the land from the Cheyenne in the late eighteenth century. If the US is going to pay the immediate previous owners of the land, shouldn’t the Sioux pay the Cheyenne? And shouldn’t the Cheyenne pay the Kiowa and the Crow, who owned the land prior to the Cheyenne?

And what about the Comanche, or the Arapaho—both of whom claimed the territory before the Kiowa and the Crow, who lost it to the Cheyenne, who lost it to the Lakota, who lost it to the US? 

And, how exactly are we supposed to “decolonize” the Black Hills? 

Even if we could identify the “right” tribe, is there even anyone around today who could seriously claim ownership ten generations later? Is there any statute of limitations here? 

Until about 75 years ago, everyone recognized the right of conquest. If you took land and could hold it long enough, it was yours. Then, liberal utopians convinced themselves that they could outlaw human nature. 

But they couldn’t.

People continued to grow, explore, and conquer. 

And why do they do it? 

The decolonization activists will tell you the answer is plunder—material gain. And for most of history, in most of the world, that has been true. The few exceptions, it should be noted, were found in the West.  

Yes, one motivation of many Western colonizers was wealth, but it was not the only one. They were frequently motivated by higher ideals as well. The proof is that most of them not only didn’t get rich but were personally impoverished for their efforts.

The Pilgrims of the Mayflower gave up lives of relative comfort to settle in America, and half of them died in the attempt. 

George Washington lost much of his net worth during the Revolutionary War. 

Thomas Jefferson died a debtor as a consequence of his many years in public service.

Even those who proudly referred to themselves as “Conquistadors,” the men leftists call thieves and plunderers, were often motivated by higher ideals—specifically, to spread faith in God and the adoption of biblical morality.

Five years before Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue, the Aztec Empire. which itself had conquered any number of tribes, sacrificed tens of thousands of victims to their patron demon over the course of just four days. 

Hernan Cortes witnessed these sorts of sacrifices when he arrived in 1521 at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. Aztec priests sliced open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their still-beating hearts as a sacrifice to the demons before kicking their dead bodies down the steps of the temple. 

Happily, Cortes conquered the Aztecs, stopped the human sacrifice, and introduced the natives to Christianity. Those who oppose human sacrifice—and I hope you include yourself in that group—must consider this an unambiguously positive development.

This is not to say that Western Colonizers didn’t commit their share of crimes—they certainly did.

It is to say that not all colonization is equal. Some forms are better than others. 

So, here’s a useful thought experiment. Who would you rather be colonized by: Christians or Aztecs?

I’m Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles Show, for Prager University.