Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as an anti-American

As I said recently, if someone says I’m immoral for wanting a border, he’s my enemy. If someone says America is immoral for existing, he is, by definition, an anti-American. This is a letter to the editor published in The New York Times, June 5, 2006:

To the Editor:

Maybe I don’t have history quite right, but as I recall, most of our earliest countrymen were immigrants.

But not all. Some were born here whose ancestry is traced back for centuries, the Native American. Most of them were annihilated by those who arrived here later.

We did not come by invitation. But we came anyway. Took over. Settled in. Divided up the land as though it were ours, and pushed the few natives who remained into abandoned corners.

Reservations, we called them, reserved for those from whom the rest was stolen.

Yep, many of our earliest predecessors were illegal aliens. Not much to be proud of in that.

And not very good ground for self-righteously building walls.

(Rev.) Robert Granger

Catskill, N.Y., May 31, 2006

* * *

On the question of the whites displacing the Indians, a reader sent me this quote from Theodore Roosevelt’s Hunting Trips Of A Ranchman:

During the past century a good deal of sentimental nonsense has been talked about our taking the Indians’ land. Now, I do not mean to say for a moment that gross wrong has not been done the Indians, both by government and individuals, again and again. The government makes promise impossible to perform, and then fails to do even what it might toward their fulfilment; and where brutal and reckless frontiersmen are brought into contact with a set of treacherous, revengeful, and fiendishly cruel savages a long series of outrages by both sides is sure to follow. But as regards taking the land, at least from the western Indians, the simple truth is that the latter never had any real ownership in it at all. Where the game was plenty, there they hunted; they followed it when it moved away to new hunting-grounds, unless prevented by stronger rivals; and to most of the land on which we found them they had no stronger claim than that of having a few years previously butchered the original inhabitants. (emphasis added).

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 05, 2006 04:20 PM | Send