There is a vast legion of answers to that question, but let’s focus on a specific issue which fits into this category.
It is irritating to witness migrant communities, whether here in Sydney or in the United States, recycle the bigotry and prejudices of the mainstream Anglophone society onto other, newer ethnic groups. Only a few months ago, I published an article with a question to those Irish Americans who voted for Donald Trump’s MAGA platform.
Trump and his MAGA colleagues have openly expressed their contempt of migrants. His administration has deported (or at least attempting to) thousands of migrants to Latin American nations. He has used the powers of the 1798 Alien Enemies act to deport the people he deems a threat.
The irony is that the 1798 act was passed in order to target Irish Catholics, the latter regarded as the original internal enemy. My sincerest hope is that the MAGA Irish Americans will reconsider their political viewpoints, and recognise that the Trump/Vance team is using the age-old tactic of divide-and-rule.
A few years ago, during Trump’s first term in office, I wrote about the threat of deportation hanging over the Iraqi Assyrian and Chaldean communities. The latter two groups, having supported Trump by regurgitating Islamophobic hatred during the 2016 election, subsequently faced deportation to Iraq and Syria. Their tears of self-pity made for a human-interest story. It also demonstrated their remarkably narrow-minded politics.
No, I am not writing this article as an ‘I told you so’ point-scoring exercise. I am writing in the hope that those migrant communities who supported Trump politically will now re-examine their attitudes in light of the MAGA cult’s unrestrained bigotry.
When migrants arrive in a new country, full of hope and ambition to start a new life, they have to overcome the bigotry of the host community. In the Anglophone nations, nonwhite migrants faced enormous obstacles, and had to overcome them step by step to achieve a level of success.
Once established, the settled communities forget where they came from. Expressing a similar, parallel prejudice against newly arrived migrants only perpetuates a cycle of exclusion and hatred.
No, I am not suggesting that multicultural inclusion and acceptance is impossible – far from it. Overcoming racism and ethnocentric snobbery is a long struggle, and ultimately successful and rewarding.
Let’s answer the question above with an exploration of a controversy – stop falsely blaming the indigenous Easter Island people, the Rapanui, for their own demise. This requires a bit of background information.
Jared Diamond, professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote a book in 2005 called Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. In it, Diamond depicts a people, the Rapa Nui, over exploiting their natural resources, cutting down the trees, denuding the lush landscape, thus undermining their ability to sustain a large population.
Dwindling food and resources resulted in internecine warfare, communal violence, and even cannibalism, from about 1600 onwards.
European settlers arrived in 1722, to be confronted by an indigenous population on a downward spiral of destruction. Diamond coined the word ‘ecocide’, to denote a cautionary tale of a society outstripping its resource base. That is a general overview of Diamond’s case, and I hope that I have done justice to it.
However, this tale of environmental degradation and socioeconomic collapse, while a necessary warning, blames the wrong people. Archaeologists and geographers, working on this question, have instead found an indigenous Polynesian civilisation that was resourceful, cooperative, growing food to feed themselves, and building the mysterious moai – the giant statues that dot the landscape. All this was achieved prior to European colonisation which began in 1722.
This picture is hardly one of a society resembling a Polynesian fight club, with axes, fists, knives, and weapons deployed in an all-gladiatorial contest. This depiction of inherently violent indigenous people has never sat well with me. No, I am not challenging Diamond’s qualifications or expertise. But this myth of the ‘savage Savage’ has always bothered me, in ways I could not elaborate previously.
Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is correct to warn of the socioeconomic consequences of ecological destruction. What kind of economy can we sustain on a dead planet? However, he has chosen the wrong society upon which to base his ecocide scenario.
Archaeologists and geographers have consistently challenged the simplistic and sometimes quite false view blaming the indigenous Rapanui for their own destruction.
This is not a personal attack on Professor Diamond; he is an outstanding public intellectual and writer. He has published books which have expanded my knowledge. However, what bothers me is the use of the ‘ecocide’ scenario – a term that Diamond coined – to portray indigenous societies as inherently violent and destructive. This depiction is often used to rationalise our own capitalist society’s environmental overexploitation and destructiveness. If all humans are selfish and violent, what’s the point?
The point is that the current billionaire class, to justify their raking in billions, have been allowed to define human nature for the rest of us. No, there is no conspiracy between Professor Diamond and Bill Gates to connivingly misrepresent the Rapa Nui as violent and destructive. There is a growing and strong body of evidence against the simplistic ‘ecocide’ paradigm which has dominated the public discourse.
When the Europeans arrived on the remote island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), they were mesmerised by the giant moai (statues), and deduced that only a huge population could build them. Since 1600, the indigenous population must have been decimated – how could a small population be capable of constructing such structures over a long period? This assumption made its way unexamined into European writings on archaeology.
Diamond is not the first writer to worry about the alleged covetousness of the Rapa Nui; but he is the first to gain such widespread public acclaim for that work. Numerous archaeologists and field researchers, such as Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, have pushed back against the ‘ecocide’ scenario. For instance, Lipo performed a complex mathematical analysis of rock samples from Rapa Nui, rock gardens cultivated by the indigenous Rapanui people.
Growing a staple of their diet, the sweet potato, the indigenous people are estimated to have numbered no more than 16 000 prior to 1722. The assumption that Rapa Nui was overpopulated prior to 1722, and therefore subject to internal warfare, is a conventional wisdom derived from faulty bases.
The indigenous islanders were cooperative and resilient, nothing like the all-encompassing state of warfare as depicted by the European colonisers. How were the moai built? You may find a detailed answer here.
Earlier in this article, I used the expression the ‘savage Savage’ to describe Diamond’s portrayal of the Rapanui people. That expression was first used by science writer John Horgan, in the pages of Scientific American.
Dispelling the myth of the ‘Noble Savage’ is one thing; what Diamond, Professors Steven Pinker and Richard Wrangham have done, is recycle an old colonialist trope that the indigenous are savages. They form a cohort of academic hawks; rather than advocate harsh socioeconomic policies at home, they attempt to rationalise their implementation by retroactively projecting their punitive motivations to past societies.
The work of Lipo, Hunt and other researchers upends the ‘ecocide’ narrative, based on solid factual foundations. Critics of the ‘ecocide’ scenario are often accused of being motivated by ideology rather than scientifically rigorous evidence. I hope that this article prompts readers to examine the Easter Island ‘collapse’ skeptics with an open mind.
Antipodean Atheist 