Growing up, there was this prevailing idea that Native Americans were a mystical, magical people who were in tune with nature and incredibly peaceful. The Americas, at the time of the tribes, were peaceful, clean, and innocent.
Then everything changed once the Spanish showed up. Explorers and conquerors invaded the land, bringing sickness, death, murder, and greed. The natives, innocent and as pure as Baby Jesus on a Sunday, were conquered, colonized, and reduced to a shadow of their former selves.
Forty years ago, this myth that the natives were a peaceful bunch was so persistent that mainstream culture reinforced it constantly. Commercials, movies, and even songs constantly made Native Americans out to be the unfortunate victims of European evils. Kids were injected relentlessly with this idea, too. I can remember being young and one of my teachers teaching us about Thanksgiving, adding afterward, "and then the Pilgrims betrayed them and killed them."
Of course, none of that is true. While some tribes were better than others, the Native Americans had a habit of warring, conquering, sacrificing, and destroying just as much as any other race on the planet. The Europeans showing up and conquering them was just the next tribe doing what the Natives had been doing for ages; Europe was just better at it.
When Hollywood was being honest, they pointed out exactly this point I made:
Thankfully, this myth of the peaceful Native was deconstructed, for the most part, but it hasn't stopped the left from using it as the primary example and lens through which the general public should view "colonization." The sin is that white people came and unfairly took away land belonging to brown people and colonized it for their own purposes, stripping the natives of their ownership and agency.
A weird complaint from an ideology that thinks paradise can only be achieved when no one owns anything.
The DSA makes it one of its primary concerns, according to its own mission statement:
DSA is committed to the full decolonization of all the occupied lands of the United States: self-determination and full sovereignty for Hawai’i; Puerto Rico; Amerika Sāmoa (American Samoa); Guåhån (Guam); Northern Mariana Islands; Virgin Islands; and to all indigenous nations whose ancestral lands are within current U.S. borders; as well as to the independence to all other overseas territories and dependencies controlled, occupied, or otherwise exploited by the USA.
The DSA has a very similar stance regarding the Israel/Palestine war:
We understand the Palestinian cause for liberation, the fight against the ongoing Nakba, as the fight against US empire. Israel’s genocidal project enjoys endless support from the US, so long as Israel serves as the colonial outpost for US interests in the region.
To be clear, Israel is Israeli land and Palestinians are trying to colonize it, but a good socialist has never let facts get in the way of their delusion, and they're not going to stop now.
But that delusion is contagious. As I've pointed out, the idea of colonization being an evil at every level, no matter who's doing the colonizing, has been well circulated for some time.
The truth of the matter is that colonization is never pretty, but it can ultimately be good. The United States of America is proof of this. Without colonization, we wouldn't have the advanced civilization we currently live in and be enjoying the medical, technological, and scientific advancements we have today. America had to exist for that to happen, and that means that Europeans had to come in and dominate the Natives, who themselves were often bloodthirsty and backward.
I don't think anyone misses the ritualistic sacrifices where beating hearts were torn out of chests and babies were sacrificed into the fire... except for the modern feminists, of course.
In their heart of hearts, the socialists who enjoy using iPhones, top-notch medical care for their mental issues, and abundant food they never earn but still get, know that they likely wouldn't have these things if the Natives were left well alone. At the very least, they have to do Olympic-level mental gymnastics to reason out how a people still using sticks and rocks would somehow achieve the level of technological know-how needed to match the European pace of advancement.
But the bottom line they'll never admit is that colonization is a good thing. It's colonization that allows them to live in abundance and complain about it. They'll never admit that colonization isn't inherently sinful. In fact, it can be a moral good. That doesn't mean the colonizers are sinless. No one is. Any war or global event is more complicated than black-and-white morality.
Being on the losing side of being conquered doesn't absolve you of your sins, and the Left trying to sell people on that concept is just an avenue through which they try to be conquerors themselves, just without the guns and knives.
