[refurb]

What makes a distinction between “land theft” and just conquest?

I mean, if I think about North America, when one native tribe attacked and defeated another tribe and took their land, was that land theft? When the British, French or Spanish did the same, was that “land theft”?

[rbg246]

Your argument is a rhetorical diversion away from my comment regarding the crime's of the British empire.

When someone commits a murder do you say. Well what about all the other murderers?

What hypothetical American indigenous tribes may or may not have done is not the subject of this thread.

[pedrosorio]

I don’t see an argument, just a question. Is land theft a neologism for conquest or does it mean something else? If so, what is the difference?

[rbg246]

Please you tell me, do you think conquest is different to land theft?

To me they are the same thing

[pedrosorio]

The concept of conquest is clear to me. One country/civilization/tribe occupying land previously owned by another through violent means.

The concept of conquest does not imply "crime" as it occurs at the intersection of two societies with different laws, and in most cases neither would consider a conquest benefiting them to be a criminal/negative activity.

I have never read a definition of "land theft". If it is supposed to mean the same as "conquest", it goes about it in a confusing way, by including the word "theft" which is a crime, whereas as we saw, "conquest" cannot be a crime in the traditional sense. It's also unclear to me why use "theft" rather than "robbery" which seems more appropriate given the violent nature of conquest.

I guess the point of using "land theft" instead of "conquest" is to imply that in an ideal world there would have been a supranational law enforced on all human groups that forbids violent displacement of one group of humans by another (i.e. conquest), which I guess most people would agree would be a good thing.

So, assuming conquest and land theft are synonymous, with the latter being used to express disapproval, and going back to your first comment: "To say that it was anything but utterly disgusting is an understatement". I suppose this is true, but the reply from refurb seems appropriate: humans have engaged in warfare long before we have written record. Our cousins, the chimpanzees do abominable things to each other in war, and so did our ancestors, of every race and every culture, including the native people that were the victims of the British empire.

"What hypothetical American indigenous tribes may or may not have done is not the subject of this thread" is a silly reply, as far as I can tell. American indigenous tribes engaged in warfare and conquest [1] like every other human group in history.

The British Empire did not, as far as we can tell, come up with new and particularly hideous ways to inflict harm upon other humans, that we had not considered in the hundreds of thousands of years we've been harming each other.

They have the distinction of being the first ones to do it globally. The true harm of the British empire is the delta between the harm they caused to humans in the places they occupied and the harms other humans (the ones conquered, others in the region) would have caused in the same area over the same period of time. Unfortunately, I don't have a way to estimate what that delta is. But I am sure the answer is not "all the harm the British empire caused minus 0 because everyone they conquered was a peaceful post-warfare civilization, disturbed only by the British savages".

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/service...

[rbg246]

Ok, firstly I am unsure how any of the above refutes my statements about the British Empire.

You have decided to get into the semantics of conquest vs land theft. My reading of your reply is that conquest is an excusable activity?

My understanding of your argument rests on that everyone does it (conquest) so what the British Empire did was only unique in its scale.

I think your question and argument takes on more a personal morality question and I will present you with the way I think about it.

A couple of questions, if you have different answers to me then we just have different personal belief systems and we can leave it at that.

Do you excuse murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery in your current life as just being something people and chimpanzees do?

If the answer is no (I am sure it is) then why do you say conquest is excusable? Which by my definition is just larger groups of people engaging in the above mentioned crimes?

I do not want to be celebrating an organisation which is responsible for those crimes.

Finally, indigenous people's violence (and remembering there are 1000s of nations across the world which is kind of ridiculous to be saying them all at once) does not culturally define them in the same way mass violence defined the British Empire.

Violence, oppression and misery was the modus operandi of the British Empire.

[pedrosorio]

> My reading of your reply is that conquest is an excusable activity?

No, I believe you have misread my response. I said: "in an ideal world there would have been a supranational law enforced on all human groups that forbids violent displacement of one group of humans by another (i.e. conquest), which I guess most people would agree would be a good thing."

> Do you excuse murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery in your current life as just being something people and chimpanzees do?

No. Your prediction is correct.

> I do not want to be celebrating an organisation which is responsible for those crimes.

That's reasonable.

> Finally, indigenous people's violence (and remembering there are 1000s of nations across the world which is kind of ridiculous to be saying them all at once) does not culturally define them

I agree.

> Violence, oppression and misery was the modus operandi of the British Empire.

Agreed. It was the modus operandi of the British and every empire before them, and most organized groups of people with power before them. Which is the reason why "violence, oppression and misery" does not define the British empire culturally, as it does not define any of the indigenous peoples' culture.

The main difference in the modus operandi of the British empire is they replaced other groups exerting this violence globally because they were the only ones with the technological advantage that allowed them to do so at the time. Does not excuse the acts, but does not make the British empire any different than most organized groups of humans that have ever lived either (as far as willingness to perpetrate violence and oppression goes).

[refurb]

Well, it’s trying to find a set of standards that are equally applied to everyone no?

If I kill someone and call it “self-defense” and someone else kills someone under the same circumstances and I call it “murder” that doesn’t make sense does it?

[rbg246]

But this thread is not about other people, I haven't said that it was ok if Spanish or some indigenous people's were carrying out violence or just the British carried out violence.

I have made a statement that the British Empire is absolutely / objectively bad - what's the comparison aiming to do?

[refurb]

I'm trying to connect the dots in a logical way. How else does one arrive at a logical conclusion?

You seem to draw a distinction between the British conquests (which you refer to as "land theft") and the native conquests (which you do not label as "land theft") and I'm trying to figure out why.

You seem to be fall for the myth of the "noble savage"[1]. The myth is basically that before the white man arrived, the natives lived in some "natural, uncorrupted" form of life that was inherently superior. This is a myth.

At least with some native American Indians, conquests involved things like rape, slavery and the murder of non-combatants. And warfare not because of some dire need for resources, but rather just for conquests sake.

So I would argue that what the British did is not exactly unique (except for the breadth of it) and thus doesn't deserve a label of "land theft" unless you're willing to apply that with any type of conquest and in that sense, it's a pointless distinction.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage