stolen land, shmolen shmand

Submitted by Kepha (United States), Jul 21, 2022 at 13:28

If we were to demand that all "colonists" right historic wrongs by "giving back" conquered territory, most of the world would have to pay.

If we look at the current world, who is sitting on the same land their ethnic/cultural forebears occupied at the time of the agricultural revolution? We have these:

• The Han Chinese, but only in the North China Plain and the Loess Plateau.
• The Dravidian peoples of India
• The Mon-Khmer peoples of Southeast Asia
• The Khoisan peoples of southern Africa
• The Copts
• The Aramaic-speaking peoples of the Fertile Crescent (including Jews)
• The Amazigh
• The Basques

Looking at the Americas, we'd have to demand that the Navajo and Apache move back to interior Alaska and the Yukon, where the Na-Dine peoples originated. The Nahuatl-speaking peoples of Mesoamerica would have to move back to the Desert Southwest, and leave central Mexico to the Otomis, Popaloca, and other "Chichimeca".

What would it cost to have all who identify with an Arabic-speaking Islamic culture to move back to the Nejd and Hijaz?

Can we reasonably demand the Indo-Aryan peoples to abandon the Subcontinent?

What of the Tai-Kradai peoples all moving back to the general area of Dien Bien Phu and up to southern Guizhou in China?

What of the whole Han Chinese people living outside its Shang era patrimony moving back to that partimony from all the lands south of the Qingling Mountains and Huai River?

What of all the Bantu-speaking Africans moving back to the hilly areas of Nigeria and Cameroon?

After all, a colonist is still a colonist, no matter how long he's been sitting on the land he now occupies.

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