Thanks for the translation of the video. It's very clear they do not understand the United States's history or the demographics of the country at all. There's no 90 percent majority of any ethnicity here. No one is being crushed by minority groups. Telling people to not terrorize gays, black and indigenous people, or any other group that has faced historical violence isn't an attack on the majority. The biggest winners of affirmative action have been white women, who are very much part of the majority ethnic group. The overwhelming majority of Confederate statues were erected during the Jim Crow era after the Civil War to intimidate the black population, not as preexisting monuments to Southern culture.
The author raises compelling questions about competing historical narratives within the United States, yet entirely absent from this discussion is the foundational illegality upon which the entire American project rests. The papal bull Inter Caetera, issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, established that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be discovered, claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers, creating what became known as the Doctrine of Discovery. This decree, which granted the Portuguese and later the Spanish papal permission to subjugate and even enslave non-Christians around the world in any territory their ships reached, represents not a mere historical curiosity but the juridical foundation for an act of continental piracy. Whether one begins American history in 1776 or 1865 becomes irrelevant when the entire enterprise originates in a European religious authority's presumed right to grant away lands belonging to peoples who had occupied them for millennia. As Robin Wall Kimmerer observes, in the settler mind land was property and capital, but to Indigenous peoples it was identity, ancestry, pharmacy, and library, sacred ground that belonged to itself and could never be bought or sold. The debate over which founding myth to privilege obscures the more fundamental question: can any society built upon such thoroughly abrogated human trust ever achieve lasting stability?
The patterns established by this original theft have replicated themselves across centuries in how European and American powers conduct both internal and external affairs. The logic that justified seizing an entire continent because its inhabitants were deemed insufficiently Christian or civilized became the template for subsequent imperial adventures, from the Philippines to the Middle East, and for internal policies that systematically dispossessed, confined, and attempted to culturally annihilate Native peoples. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz notes, Europeans appropriated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations, stealing already cultivated farmland and crops domesticated over centuries , then constructed elaborate mythologies about "wilderness" and "manifest destiny" to justify continued occupation. This same pattern of taking what others have built while claiming moral superiority echoes in contemporary American foreign policy and in the domestic dismissal of legitimate grievances from communities who remember what was stolen. When societies normalize such fundamental violations of basic human reciprocity, they embed a corrupting principle at their core that inevitably spreads through all their institutions and relationships.
Historical experience demonstrates that institutional systems can disintegrate rapidly when trust and legitimacy erode beyond critical thresholds, and there appears to be a permanent risk for even virtuous equilibria to gradually become destabilized in the long run as wealth becomes concentrated, leading to state capture by elites Tibetan Review. The American republic may represent precisely this trajectory: a society founded on an act of massive dispossession that has never been meaningfully acknowledged, let alone reconciled, now finding that the habits of domination and erasure established toward Indigenous peoples have become the operating principles for managing internal contradictions of all kinds. Whether the founding narrative centers on 1776's promise of liberty or 1865's promise of equality, both rest on land stolen through legal fictions that declared entire civilizations invisible. Reduced trust serves as both a direct catalyst in developing social cleavages and an indirect opportunity for political instability to emerge when different social groups cannot solve conflicts using non-violent means. A nation that cannot protect its own ancestors' graves, as the author notes, faces questions about its fundamental viability, but what of a nation built atop the unprotected graves of the peoples it displaced? The collapse may not be coming; it may already be underway, visible in every fracture the author describes, the inevitable harvest of seeds planted in 1493.
Is there a viable political programme which could correct this "illegality" in the United States? If not, is it an academic point of history and a matter of sentiment only? In Aotearoa/New Zealand there is the real possibility of restoration of the pre-colonial political structure known as rangatiratanga, and as tangata motu we are dedicated to achieving that restoration as a resolution to the problem of colonialism, but would such a transition be possible in the US?
Thanks for the translation of the video. It's very clear they do not understand the United States's history or the demographics of the country at all. There's no 90 percent majority of any ethnicity here. No one is being crushed by minority groups. Telling people to not terrorize gays, black and indigenous people, or any other group that has faced historical violence isn't an attack on the majority. The biggest winners of affirmative action have been white women, who are very much part of the majority ethnic group. The overwhelming majority of Confederate statues were erected during the Jim Crow era after the Civil War to intimidate the black population, not as preexisting monuments to Southern culture.
We really are such deeply similar societies that it’s super ironic how much tension lies between us. Change the dates to 1949 and 1978 and you could write an almost identical script
Not sure I agree. There is clearly a place for affirmative action to redress disadvantage due to historical injustices. The predicament of the American white majority seems (in my view) due to rising inequality in American society, and the government’s failure to foster inclusive growth. Inclusive growth doesn’t happen by itself, there must be policies to ensure growth is inclusive.
I agree, but I think the policies have been in place for about 50 years, and the Supreme Court was correct to end them in 2023. Things were evolving into structures that benefitted people who really did not need help and leaving most behind.
Now, with the enforcement of immigration laws and, as painful as it is to watch, the deportation of some illegal aliens, perhaps we will see improvement in wages at the lower end of the scale and increased ability to fund programs aimed at benefiting citizens who were left behind.
Tariffs too. I hate tariffs on intellectual grounds, but I can see potential benefits from a social perspective. Whether they will actually come to fruition will take a long time to determine.
The article "1776 vs. 1865: Why Has America’s Historical Narrative Fallen Into Chaos?" gives those of us in the western world insight into the political divide which we cannot find in our normal western sources of news and opinion.
However there is little attention paid to "the elephant in the room" of social class. I believe that "progressive" capitalists in the US consciously determined to emphasize the rights of blacks and women (among others) in order to distract from the gross and increasing inequality between socio-economic classes. And it has worked. The reaction from many white working class male Americans has been misogyny and racism, or, to be more fair, masculinism and white identity politics, rather than defending the interests of the working class, male and female, black and white.
We have seen the same phenomenon in New Zealand, even more clearly, though the outcomes will be different. When implementing economic reforms which gave foreign (mainly western) capital greater presence and power within the economy and in the process destroyed the egalitarian basis of New Zealand capitalism as it had been constructed in the mid twentieth century, the colonial regime made conspicuous efforts to to placate in advance women (as a gender group) and the indigenous Maori people who are now a demographic minority.
In our case there has been a white (European) reaction similar to that in the US (masculinist and actually racist while ostensibly anti-racist), but it has been more limited and there remains a strong connection between Maori and the majority Pakeha people (people of European ethnic origin who have more or less assimilated into Maori culture). That has left the die-hard colonialists still in power (helped by certain anti-democratic provisions in the New Zealand constitution and their control of media and instruments of government) but with the support of only a minority of the population.
So in Aotearoa (New Zealand) it is most likely that substantive political change will come through Pakeha joining with Maori against the colonialist regime which has been in place for nearly two centuries. It is hard to see a similar development being possible in the US.
Equality is important. Not false equality between genders or races but genuine equality between all persons regardless of gender or race. Then there is the cultural question: "What defines us as a people and a nation?" We are fortunate to have a clear answer to that question which happens to be compatible with the need for universal equality because in contrast to the colonialist regime, the indigenous culture is strongly egalitarian and profoundly democratic.
Therefore our way may be smoother. The American people have a more rocky road to traverse in the course of which they and (as collateral damage) the rest of the world, may suffer great tribulations.
I'll be honest, I had to use ChatGPT to summarize this article as I had no idea what the author was talking about. When I first read it, I was like, "Yes, I agree, those are the two key pivotal events in US history, but not much else made sense.
After using ChatGPT, I think I'm a little closer to understanding it is aimed at foreign audiences and perhaps that explains why it intrigued me while still being baffling at the same time.
From this American's perspective, who grew up in an area where the 1776 view might have been more predominant, and spent most of my life where the two co-existed, I wonder "WHY WOULD ANYONE CARE?"
I'm white with English ancestry, and when I was young, there were really not any minority groups around. Yet, my wife's family came over from Spain to fight in the Spanish-American War, and I have many cousins (and brothers). Their children married into various other ethnic groups; I'd say we pretty much have them all covered, although religious variation is relatively modest.
I have never felt put-out, even when there were times that, yes, I went, I wish I were African-American, as it might have cleared a few paths for me, but it never rose to the level of resentment of anyone or any group. It was just a temporary thing, and America is moving beyond it now.
What matters is who we are now. I have as much right to claim the Iron Brigade from the Civil War as anyone else even though my ancestors may have fought for the South. A black or Asian person has as much right to claim a rich white kid from the Caribbean (Hamilton) as I do.
Maybe the article is helpful in some ways, but I'm afraid it really misses the mark.
Want to add that I feel equally free to claim wisdom from any Qing emperor or Middle Eastern prince that I can. Why on earth would Chinese citizens restrict themselves? I do not get it.
Thanks for the translation of the video. It's very clear they do not understand the United States's history or the demographics of the country at all. There's no 90 percent majority of any ethnicity here. No one is being crushed by minority groups. Telling people to not terrorize gays, black and indigenous people, or any other group that has faced historical violence isn't an attack on the majority. The biggest winners of affirmative action have been white women, who are very much part of the majority ethnic group. The overwhelming majority of Confederate statues were erected during the Jim Crow era after the Civil War to intimidate the black population, not as preexisting monuments to Southern culture.
the vid pissed me off so much i went through the Billi Billi process of verifying an account so I could respond lol
LOL I appreciate your effort to educate them!
The author raises compelling questions about competing historical narratives within the United States, yet entirely absent from this discussion is the foundational illegality upon which the entire American project rests. The papal bull Inter Caetera, issued by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, established that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be discovered, claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers, creating what became known as the Doctrine of Discovery. This decree, which granted the Portuguese and later the Spanish papal permission to subjugate and even enslave non-Christians around the world in any territory their ships reached, represents not a mere historical curiosity but the juridical foundation for an act of continental piracy. Whether one begins American history in 1776 or 1865 becomes irrelevant when the entire enterprise originates in a European religious authority's presumed right to grant away lands belonging to peoples who had occupied them for millennia. As Robin Wall Kimmerer observes, in the settler mind land was property and capital, but to Indigenous peoples it was identity, ancestry, pharmacy, and library, sacred ground that belonged to itself and could never be bought or sold. The debate over which founding myth to privilege obscures the more fundamental question: can any society built upon such thoroughly abrogated human trust ever achieve lasting stability?
The patterns established by this original theft have replicated themselves across centuries in how European and American powers conduct both internal and external affairs. The logic that justified seizing an entire continent because its inhabitants were deemed insufficiently Christian or civilized became the template for subsequent imperial adventures, from the Philippines to the Middle East, and for internal policies that systematically dispossessed, confined, and attempted to culturally annihilate Native peoples. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz notes, Europeans appropriated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations, stealing already cultivated farmland and crops domesticated over centuries , then constructed elaborate mythologies about "wilderness" and "manifest destiny" to justify continued occupation. This same pattern of taking what others have built while claiming moral superiority echoes in contemporary American foreign policy and in the domestic dismissal of legitimate grievances from communities who remember what was stolen. When societies normalize such fundamental violations of basic human reciprocity, they embed a corrupting principle at their core that inevitably spreads through all their institutions and relationships.
Historical experience demonstrates that institutional systems can disintegrate rapidly when trust and legitimacy erode beyond critical thresholds, and there appears to be a permanent risk for even virtuous equilibria to gradually become destabilized in the long run as wealth becomes concentrated, leading to state capture by elites Tibetan Review. The American republic may represent precisely this trajectory: a society founded on an act of massive dispossession that has never been meaningfully acknowledged, let alone reconciled, now finding that the habits of domination and erasure established toward Indigenous peoples have become the operating principles for managing internal contradictions of all kinds. Whether the founding narrative centers on 1776's promise of liberty or 1865's promise of equality, both rest on land stolen through legal fictions that declared entire civilizations invisible. Reduced trust serves as both a direct catalyst in developing social cleavages and an indirect opportunity for political instability to emerge when different social groups cannot solve conflicts using non-violent means. A nation that cannot protect its own ancestors' graves, as the author notes, faces questions about its fundamental viability, but what of a nation built atop the unprotected graves of the peoples it displaced? The collapse may not be coming; it may already be underway, visible in every fracture the author describes, the inevitable harvest of seeds planted in 1493.
Is there a viable political programme which could correct this "illegality" in the United States? If not, is it an academic point of history and a matter of sentiment only? In Aotearoa/New Zealand there is the real possibility of restoration of the pre-colonial political structure known as rangatiratanga, and as tangata motu we are dedicated to achieving that restoration as a resolution to the problem of colonialism, but would such a transition be possible in the US?
In a word, no.
Thanks for the translation of the video. It's very clear they do not understand the United States's history or the demographics of the country at all. There's no 90 percent majority of any ethnicity here. No one is being crushed by minority groups. Telling people to not terrorize gays, black and indigenous people, or any other group that has faced historical violence isn't an attack on the majority. The biggest winners of affirmative action have been white women, who are very much part of the majority ethnic group. The overwhelming majority of Confederate statues were erected during the Jim Crow era after the Civil War to intimidate the black population, not as preexisting monuments to Southern culture.
We really are such deeply similar societies that it’s super ironic how much tension lies between us. Change the dates to 1949 and 1978 and you could write an almost identical script
Not sure I agree. There is clearly a place for affirmative action to redress disadvantage due to historical injustices. The predicament of the American white majority seems (in my view) due to rising inequality in American society, and the government’s failure to foster inclusive growth. Inclusive growth doesn’t happen by itself, there must be policies to ensure growth is inclusive.
I agree, but I think the policies have been in place for about 50 years, and the Supreme Court was correct to end them in 2023. Things were evolving into structures that benefitted people who really did not need help and leaving most behind.
Now, with the enforcement of immigration laws and, as painful as it is to watch, the deportation of some illegal aliens, perhaps we will see improvement in wages at the lower end of the scale and increased ability to fund programs aimed at benefiting citizens who were left behind.
Tariffs too. I hate tariffs on intellectual grounds, but I can see potential benefits from a social perspective. Whether they will actually come to fruition will take a long time to determine.
The article "1776 vs. 1865: Why Has America’s Historical Narrative Fallen Into Chaos?" gives those of us in the western world insight into the political divide which we cannot find in our normal western sources of news and opinion.
However there is little attention paid to "the elephant in the room" of social class. I believe that "progressive" capitalists in the US consciously determined to emphasize the rights of blacks and women (among others) in order to distract from the gross and increasing inequality between socio-economic classes. And it has worked. The reaction from many white working class male Americans has been misogyny and racism, or, to be more fair, masculinism and white identity politics, rather than defending the interests of the working class, male and female, black and white.
We have seen the same phenomenon in New Zealand, even more clearly, though the outcomes will be different. When implementing economic reforms which gave foreign (mainly western) capital greater presence and power within the economy and in the process destroyed the egalitarian basis of New Zealand capitalism as it had been constructed in the mid twentieth century, the colonial regime made conspicuous efforts to to placate in advance women (as a gender group) and the indigenous Maori people who are now a demographic minority.
In our case there has been a white (European) reaction similar to that in the US (masculinist and actually racist while ostensibly anti-racist), but it has been more limited and there remains a strong connection between Maori and the majority Pakeha people (people of European ethnic origin who have more or less assimilated into Maori culture). That has left the die-hard colonialists still in power (helped by certain anti-democratic provisions in the New Zealand constitution and their control of media and instruments of government) but with the support of only a minority of the population.
So in Aotearoa (New Zealand) it is most likely that substantive political change will come through Pakeha joining with Maori against the colonialist regime which has been in place for nearly two centuries. It is hard to see a similar development being possible in the US.
Equality is important. Not false equality between genders or races but genuine equality between all persons regardless of gender or race. Then there is the cultural question: "What defines us as a people and a nation?" We are fortunate to have a clear answer to that question which happens to be compatible with the need for universal equality because in contrast to the colonialist regime, the indigenous culture is strongly egalitarian and profoundly democratic.
Therefore our way may be smoother. The American people have a more rocky road to traverse in the course of which they and (as collateral damage) the rest of the world, may suffer great tribulations.
I'll be honest, I had to use ChatGPT to summarize this article as I had no idea what the author was talking about. When I first read it, I was like, "Yes, I agree, those are the two key pivotal events in US history, but not much else made sense.
After using ChatGPT, I think I'm a little closer to understanding it is aimed at foreign audiences and perhaps that explains why it intrigued me while still being baffling at the same time.
From this American's perspective, who grew up in an area where the 1776 view might have been more predominant, and spent most of my life where the two co-existed, I wonder "WHY WOULD ANYONE CARE?"
I'm white with English ancestry, and when I was young, there were really not any minority groups around. Yet, my wife's family came over from Spain to fight in the Spanish-American War, and I have many cousins (and brothers). Their children married into various other ethnic groups; I'd say we pretty much have them all covered, although religious variation is relatively modest.
I have never felt put-out, even when there were times that, yes, I went, I wish I were African-American, as it might have cleared a few paths for me, but it never rose to the level of resentment of anyone or any group. It was just a temporary thing, and America is moving beyond it now.
What matters is who we are now. I have as much right to claim the Iron Brigade from the Civil War as anyone else even though my ancestors may have fought for the South. A black or Asian person has as much right to claim a rich white kid from the Caribbean (Hamilton) as I do.
Maybe the article is helpful in some ways, but I'm afraid it really misses the mark.
Want to add that I feel equally free to claim wisdom from any Qing emperor or Middle Eastern prince that I can. Why on earth would Chinese citizens restrict themselves? I do not get it.