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The 2024 Democratic National Convention opened with the claim that “our country was built on Indigenous homelands” from tribes that had been there “since time immemorial.” The American Lung Association’s DEI office tells members to begin by stating that “the land on which we stand” used to belong to Indian tribes who are now suffering from the “on-going violence and repression” of “tobacco-related health, indoor and outdoor air inequities.”
“The ACLU of Northern California exists on the occupied territory of over 100 tribes,” the Communist founded activist group thundered. New York declares that “the land politically designated as New York City to be the homeland of the Lenape who were violently displaced as a result of European settler colonialism” also known as the United States of America.
Yale University’s land acknowledgement concludes with, “we honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land.”
Land acknowledgements, which began as a Marxist movement in Australia, have spread to America and become universally accepted by woke institutions, especially universities, as part of the larger conception of America, Australia and Canada as illegitimate “settler states” which displaced the “indigenous population” and require a program of leftist “decolonization”.
Behind the radical politics is ‘Blut und Boden’: an idea that came from an entirely different branch of the international socialist movement. The Nazi ideology of ‘Blood and Soil’ or ‘Blut und Boden’ posited that the German people had an innate racial link to the land. That’s the same nationalistic romantic idea behind land acknowledgements.
The magical “enduring relationship” that the Nazis believed existed between the ‘Aryan race’ and German land (along with the land they intended to seize from the Poles and other ‘slavs’) has been transplanted to America, Australia and Canada under the guise of social justice.
Land acknowledgements frequently gush over the “soil” and “blood” in ways that closely resemble Nazi ‘blood and soil’ doctrine.
“When we talk about land, land is part of who we are. It’s a mixture of our blood, our past, our current, and our future,” the Native Governance Center claims in a line widely incorporated into land acknowledgements. The National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center muses on “blood and land memory.” Behind the poetry is ‘Blut und Boden’ or the idea that some people belong on land because they are connected with it and others are foreign invaders who do not belong.
The Nazis followed through on the logic of “Blood and Soil” by expelling and killing millions of people with plans to exterminate millions more including ‘slavic’ peoples. Decolonization follows a similar formula justifying the dispossession of millions of peoples as “European settlers”. And while land acknowledgements may seem like silly performative wokeness, those who promote them have justified the brutal massacres of the European population in Africa and elsewhere.
Both ‘Blood and Soil’ and land acknowledgements ultimately find their way back to the utopian communes created by European radicals in America. In my book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left, I described the rise of these ‘Communists’ who sought to abolish private property and marriage. The Nazi obsession with utopian peasantry emerged from a ‘communist’ commune based on the work of Robert Owen, the Father of British Socialism, and Charles Fourier, the French socialist who coined the term “feminism”.
The serial failures of these communes across over 150 years led leftists to build a mythology in which only the American Indian tribes could have lived in a perfect state with nature because of some magical link with the land. They never considered the possibility that ideological agriculture has always failed, whether it was the Soviet collective farms or the Nazi racialized farms, and that farming requires hard work not a great deal of theorizing about human society.
“Blood and Soil” farming failed miserably leading the Nazis to accelerate their plans for the conquest of Eastern Europe in search of slave labor and fresh land. Soviet agriculture led to famines, the embrace of eccentric theories, desperate attempts under Khrushchev to copy American agriculture and the USSR finally going deep into debt to buy American wheat.
Land acknowledgements are conveniently detached from real performance. Like the DNC’s 2024 land acknowledgement, they often get the tribes and their locations wrong. Their claim that the Indians had a mystic link with the land and were its ‘stewards’ is more empty romanticism. Like 19th century Europeans believing that the Arab and his horse had a special connection, land acknowledgements are the kind of ‘orientalism’ that woke academics decry elsewhere.
Nomadic tribesmen who move about have far less connection to the land than farmers and homeowners. They are also far less likely to romanticize the land and its flora and fauna than university professors who collect turquoise earrings and dubious stories of family Cherokee ancestry. The land to nomads is a utilitarian resource to be exploited, not stewarded, and there is always more land on the horizon, more fish, more passenger pigeons, and more buffalo.
Land acknowledgements, like the rest of blood and soil ideology, have nothing to do with reality. But there’s no more interest in exploring the actual history of American Indian tribes than Nazi theoreticians wanted to discuss the actual history of German peasantry. The purpose of ideology is to seize power and impose social change with a false paradigm.
Land does not belong to races, but to those cultures that build civilizations atop it. Land does not make people, people make land. They cultivate it, develop it and make it accessible. A century or two goes by and some other people drive them out and do the same thing. Or not. A great civilization or culture becomes forever associated with the land, not because of ‘blood and soil’ nonsense, but because its culture reached beyond the land to change the world.
The ancient Egyptians may be long vanished, but we associate the land with them, not with the current Arab invaders and occupiers. So too Rome, Athens and Jerusalem. The power of these names does not lie in the blood or the soil, but in the mind and heart. The vast frontiers of the West were romanticized, not by the Indians, but by the cowboys, farmers, and poets. The culture of the West was distilled by dime novels and nickelodeons into the cowboy mythos.
Land acknowledgements revive ‘Blood and Soil’ ideology to uproot the United States. Like ‘Blut und Boden’, decolonization represents a genocidal worldview that is doomed to fail.
Blood And Soil …
Describe the evidence of a crop of hemorrhoids.
It’s more like blood and toil for some of us…
So do the Demo-Rats really buy into THIS IS STOLEN LAND load of Tommy-Rot from Ben & Jerry?!
I don’t really know what the difference between Nazi nonsense about bloody dirt and “land acknowledgements” is besides which people are meant to be ethnically and racially “cleansed” but I do know we’re all dumber now that we’ve been forced by woketards to find out about it.
And the last time I checked, it was Amerindians who introduced tobacco to whitey, not the other way around, so they would have only themselves to blame for “on-going violence and repression” of “tobacco-related health, indoor and outdoor air inequities,” if those fantasies actually existed. How do tobacco and air quality commit violence and repression against an invasive species from Asia or anybody else? Also last time I checked, Amerindians only smoke if they want to, just like everybody else, and those who live in their own homes control their own air quality, just like everybody else who does. No smoker has air equity with non smokers and tobacco smoke can’t pollute outdoor air.
The stupidity of woketards seems to be limitless, even though there’s supposed to be a limit to IQ deficiency.
It’s all about the feelz, no brain is required to be woke.
It was the Spaniards thst introduced horses. The Indians were basically primitive nomads who built nothing. It would still be thst way today if not for Europeans.
Not to mention the wheel. For nomads, that’s a real miss.
Good point about Magical Thinking.
Applies to a lot of Green policies, for example.
Why do Marxists feel the need to destroy everything they see? It’s because they’re Marxists.
Crybaby idiots Ben & Jerry weeped & wailed about stolen Indian lands, then were forced to regret it.
The two fools set themselves up, as their Burlington, Vermont headquarters sit right on top of land once held by the Abenaki tribe.
The tribe is demanding that land from the Ben & Jerry Co. be returned, or an eight figure check be written. Needless to say, the leftist hypocrites are refusing.
It’s gratifying to see leftist crybabies step in their own bullshit.
Flaming Ben & flaming Jerry spend all their time crying about America’s greatness.
Now they have a lawsuit to cry about.
Bill Clinton does a commercial for Ben and Jerry’s:
“Give me a B J !”
Ben and Jerry are definitely hypocrites but they sold their company years ago. The Ben and Jerry’s Company is owned and run by hypocritical cry bullies though, so a bit of schadenfreude at their expense is justified.
I believe I share save your column links. Bang on. Sir.
thank you for sharing them
BTW, I sent your article titled “Meet the Racist who Brought Kamala’s Parents Together” to 36 friends and relatives. And after I sent out your article titled “Obama’s Communist Nepo Baby Judge Who Loves Evil”, my phone exploded with messages from people who know that we either elect Trump or the country will be permanently and completely “fundamentally transformed”.
These Land Acknowledgments are a great way for people to feel morally superior without actually having to do anything.
Yes, they don’t even have to riot our protest. They can just put an obnoxious “inclusion” sign in their window or something.
You’re not wrong.
This week in New South Wales a Judge had a just found guilty repeat offender do a “welcome to country” in the courtroom at the start of his sentencing hearing.
Then told him he was welcome to do it anytime.
This after just been done for 2 aggravated burglaries of old ladies and sexually assaulting one of them. At 19 he has a record as long as both arms and both legs.
But, hey, got to get that virtue signalling in.
You Aussies are ruled by even woker woketards than we Tanks are. Sorry. Seriously.
Up here in Canada we play a game at least as woke as the Aussies. Many governments, school boards, hospitals, churches…etc all do “Acknowledgments ” every time they do anything public. These mea culpa’s are posted on walls and websites, in emails and on stationery. What they purposely ignore is that many of the current first nations tribes occupying their “forever homeland” are actually there as the result of invading and attacking and enslaving the previous first nations tribes, who did the same to their predecessors. It’s a fake farce all about manipulation and money.
I wrote about this a few days ago in response to DG’s “All of American’s Problems are Leftist Problems” , that there needs to be a “Daniel Greenfield Reader Vol 1” where some of his most insightful articles can be preserved, rather than become just so many leaves falling on the forest floor.
I doubt Daniel will read this — I don’t even understand how he can have time to sleep let alone spend time in the comments section, so if some of you who have his ear could pass the idea to him that would be great. I don’t know but maybe he is already marking his best work for such a purpose.
If it would be of help I could chip in a couple of thousand dollars and no I am not a wealthy man. I could write the check today. –or maybe in a few days, as I write this I just started passing a kidney stone and as horrendous as the pain is now, I fear it is about to get several octaves higher
Kidney stone? They have a method to break those up with ultra sound waves, you should look into it if you haven’t already. Whizzing one of those things out is agonizing. My step father did it the old fashioned way when I was a kid and he was screaming.
I heard drinking a lot of liquid helped prevent kidney stones. I drink water and a lot of orange juice.
Randy, thank you so much. I do look at the comments section and try to reply. A reader is a nice idea and might be a project for the future.
I’ve had kidney stones. My sympathies. Don’t go with ordinary painkillers. See a relevant doctor and get non-steroidal anti-inflammatories. They can only do so much.
Lithotripsy is the procedure you want asap. It’s quick and painless. Don’t delay. My stones were so large they couldn’t be passed. Spent weeks in agony before I received this treatment. If your doctor isn’t a nephrologist see one, Get x-ray or ultra sound. Insist on the lithotripsy.
Great essay.
The land acknowledgement nonsense has invaded even universities in extremely red states. DEI is a debilitating disease, like arthritis, that steals a person’s capabilities slowly.
few universities are red even if they’re in red states
Years back, at the University of Washington, I attended my daughter-in-Law’s graduation in the business school. Presiding faculty, the featured speaker, and anyone else who took the stage to speak, all babbled on with a “land acknowledgment”, as the head of the department sat nodding like a bobblehead.
But more about the “featured speaker”. Was he the highest academic achiever? Not a chance. He was the most economically, socially, and apparently emotionally challenged student they could graduate. He was a Somalian on a full ride scholarship. He rambled on for 30 minutes about his hardships and how America needed to do MORE FOR ITS MINORITIES. (Department head still bobbling like an idiot.)
His audience were parents and family members from across the country who had just plunked down serious money for their children to attend the Foster School of Business. Their children were ordered not by last name, or by academic ranking, but by some form of hardship, or disadvantage score. The first 2 auditorium wide rows were black and latinos. White people were relegated to the rear.
Welcome to the University, suckers.
The U Dub. Former U of Pappy Boyington. It used to have a statue of him there but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been replaced with a statue of a Somali warlord or rainbow tranny. Beautiful campus though, even Red Square, which was already commie red by the late sixties during the Vietnam War protests. That was still the good old days, though, because the cops would chase the stinky hippies around and club them like harp seals.
The same Politically Correct Morally Superior people who talk about the Native Americans’ eternal and undying connection to the American continent deny the Jews’ eternal and undying connection to the Land of Israel.
Good point. And Amerindians are an invasive species from Asia anyway. They have no more claim to American land than anybody else. At least the Jews have lived in the land of Israel for three thousand years, which no other ethnic group has – not even close.
I’ve been thinking a lot about their Shamanistic religions. They believe in omens, a common belief in India also.
Wow, great article. (if they insist on thinking in terms of supremacist Western imperialism then they should also consider how Western progressive instutitions and governments are currently not respecting the traditions and cultures of African and Asian countries who resist ideas such as that lgbt issues are a human rights crisis etc.)
A great lesson of history is that if you are unable to defend your land and country, someone else will definitely come along and take it any way they can.
How many Democrats and living on the this land where Native Americans once lived how many Democrat Lead Cities are built on it as well
Just an0ther attack on white America’s conscience, designed to break our spirit and our self respect, in the hopes of a bloodless surrender to “our betters”.
De Tocqueville remains the best source of a refutation on this issue The American Indians owned nothing
Just wait, mankind, until the Lord returns and takes back everything. It’s His.
“The earth is the LORD’S, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” Psalm 24:1.
“Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” Psalm 2:8
The only people guaranteed their own land at that time, is Israel.
The migrants that crossed over to North America had no written language so we cannot know for sure when they arrived or if there were any inhabitants already here. If they did not purchase lands, then they own nothing. Its all a farce.
I think it was the descendants of Shem, more or less, who migrated to North America (continental U.S.). Perhaps some descendant’s of Ham. I’m thinking they were the first people’s here, occurring after Babel.
The late Bible teacher, Bob Barlow, thought the races were made then, at Babel, besides the confounding of the language and the probable land division. The name of his book is, “The Origin of the Races.” I thought he made a good scriptural case for the races beginning at Babel. The book might be in the name of “Sun Ming.” Bob had been a missionary to China, and that was his name in Chinese.
How conveniently the Indian tribes here became victims regardless of the tribal savagery they inflicted upon each other; claiming territory and raping the women, pillaging the booty of the tribes they attacked, and taking both women and children as slaves.
Apparently, they are excluded from such rampages against others and the acquisition of land obtained just like others have and continue to do!