The David Knight Show - INTERVIEW: "Not Stolen" - Debunking Marxist Myths About the New World

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

Historian Jeff Fynn-Paul takes on the foundational myths of the current attacks on history — including shutting down scientific exhibits about early Native Americans in the NY Museum of Natural History. His book "Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World" reveals the truth about what happened in North and South AmericaFind out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-showOr you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

All right, welcome back and joining us now is Jeff Finn Paul. He is author of many books and articles. We're going to talk to him specifically about one recent book. He's a professor of global history and economics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. And the book that we're going to begin talking about, of course, there's other ones that he's written that are touch on the same subject is the not stolen the truth about european colonialism in the new world and this is very important because as we see everywhere we got to pull down the statues we've got to rename the streets and the buildings and you name it because somewhere somebody was involved in slavery or colonialism and they stole the land and so this is the basis on which the economy and the culture is being, um,

uh, the culture more than anything is being re reset. So joining us now is, um, uh, Jeff. And, uh, so thank you for joining us, Jeff. I appreciate you coming on. Thanks a lot for having me on David. Thank you. Uh, let, let's talk a little bit about what happened in New York, because that is probably the most recent and strangest event that has happened with

all of this, you know, rewriting of history and culture. Uh, what happened at the New York natural history, natural history museum? Well, I mean, in 1990, they passed a law, uh, with a really nasty, uh, acronym NAGPRA and the idea was to protect Native American bones that had maybe been robbed from grave sites. And so that's rather understandable. You can understand how that's a sensitive topic. But recently under the Biden administration, they've started broadening the rules so that almost any Native American artifact is now difficult to display in an American museum. And the idea is that tribes should have sovereignty over all of

these artifacts. But the problem is a lot of modern tribes are not connected to artifacts that are hundreds or thousands of years old. they've been given to tribes that didn't they didn't really belong to in the first place and then the other thing that's going on is that um these things are basically being removed from displays so what we're seeing is the closure of a lot of uh Native American history museums and the left is always saying, Hey, we need to reclaim native American history, but this is such a weirdly counterintuitive move. They're literally erasing native American history from these museums so that neither native Americans nor the general public can understand their own history. There's a lot of weird, weird things going on. Yeah. Well, you know,

when you want to memory hole things, you got to do it. Eventually you do it to everybody, right? If you're going to memory hole memory hole things you got to do it eventually you do it to everybody right if you're going to memory hole history you've got to do it all of it or none of it and and it's kind of interesting to see that this is a bill a law from the 1990s i was just talking to somebody else on tuesday we're talking about the 1994 face act and the biden administration is taking some of these laws from the 1990s and using in a way that they've never been used before and the intervening 30 years or so. And so it is interesting to see how they're weaponizing these things and extending them in ways that perhaps they were never intended to be because

they haven't been, haven't been used like this since for three decades since their creation. So I think this is a very novel take on a lot of different laws. This is kind of a recurring theme of the Biden administration, isn't it? Absolutely. And I mean, you know, so they expand these powers and they claim that they're helping Native Americans. At first, it looks like is a just a sob to the dei people but you really wonder who this is benefiting and i think it's benefiting only a few people in a few tribes who maybe want to have more control over these artifacts but ultimately all they're doing is is basically destroying scientific evidence on which we can create native American history. Now who might benefit from that?

I think it's really people who are afraid of history because they want to sell such a left wing vision of history that they don't even want it to be contradicted by any real facts. Yeah. Yeah. They can invent the whole thing out of whole cloth. Isn't the natural history museum in New York. Isn't that the one that was at a night at the if i'm thinking of that is that the same yeah yeah i

mean okay it's such a long history i mean founded by teddy roosevelt and it's been collecting artifacts that scientists have been using for over 100 years and now all of this evidence is being literally reburied it's being broken up it's going to disappear forever and i think they had a teddy roosevelt statue that had sacaja we are something there right and did they remove that they were talking about removing it were they successful in doing that or i'm not sure what actually happened with that controversy but yeah i know that anything like that nowadays is embattled and it seems like right now it's only a matter of time until it goes it's much like what we see with um you know well we got to remove robert e lee but then they come after ulysses

grant as well or they come after an abolitionist as well they can't even be consistent with their own rationale they just really want to get rid of everything so you go to the natural history museum get rid of uh uh teddy roosevelt you get rid of sakai juwe and all and then all the other indians as well and it's interesting that they did it so quickly. You said it's a 10,000 square foot area that they had there, the Indians. And, um, it took them just a few hours to take that down the end of January. Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is, is when they reopen these halls, we've actually seen, cause they, they

did this with one of the halls at the same museum they dei wash it in such a way that people's ancestral stories are told as facts and scientific facts are shunted aside so if somebody says my grandfather told me the story no matter how crazy it was that now gets presented to the public as fact that's obviously doing a disservice to to everybody yes yes and it was uh just also in in january where they tried to uh get rid of william penn they're going to um remove him from his exhibit and put up indian information they said in the indian tribes that were there were some of the people who were pushing against it i mean it's because of local resistance that they were able to stop that and the indian said no he was a he was a good guy he was a friend to us you know and and so they

were able to stop it there you see this in many cases you're talking about a lot of these artifacts are very very old they're not sure really what tribe they belong to but in many cases i know when you're from florida well, I see in your bio here, you had Florida State University, there was a pressure campaign to try to get rid of the term Seminoles, but the Seminole tribe said, no, we're honored by that. And so it is strange to see this. And in many cases, it's not being done by some people within the Indian groups. It's being done, as you point out, people who are pushing this wokeism. I refer to it as Marxism

because it really is the same type of tactic that the Marxists used. Shiva and Fleet's been very good about saying, you know, this is exactly what they were doing in China. You know, it doesn't have anything to do with slavery or different indigenous people groups. This is just a tactic that they use. So let's talk a little bit about your book, Not Stolen, because that is one of the key things.

Identifying people as colonizers, implying that we're thieves, descendants of thieves, and therefore all of this stuff has to be eradicated, rewritten, and reallocated with reparations and that type of thing. Talk a little bit about that book, Not Stolen, The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World. Well, you know what? I totally agree with you that this is originally a Marxist idea. It's a very 19th century idea of how society works that says there's only two groups, oppressor and oppressed.

And so they come up with the idea that if you're the colonizer you are always the oppressor you're always bad if you were the colonized then you're always innocent you always do everything right and again we got rid of this idea in the history profession after the 1960s and 70s after the hippie movement died down we we got some sense and we realized that reality is multifaceted it's not always a versus b so what we see now with social media is the resurgence of the simplistic 19th century marxist idea where instead of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat it's it's the europeans and indigenous people or it's white people and black people or men and women um and so what they're trying to do is rewrite history

to take out all the cases where europeans were good were decent were noble were moral uh where they were trying to help the native americans they also try to erase all the times when native americans were nasty to each other genocidal wars slavery slavery, all that stuff. And so the premise of the book is to say, let's turn the clock back to the 1990s or the early 2000s when historians had a balanced view of Europeans and Native Americans. There were saints and sinners on both sides. But now since the rise of BLM, I suppose we're not allowed to say anything good about Europeans or anything bad about Europeans or anything bad about natives. And that's frankly, completely unscientific. No historian should support that.

And of course, kind of similar to all of that was the 1619 project. I'm sure that's a core part of your book addressing that. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, they say in the opening paragraphs, we want to rewrite American history to put slavery as the fulcrum around which all of American history revolves. And again, any historian worth their salt knows history has multiple causes and effects. There's trying to create a discord where there used to be a consensus. And it's frankly kind of a resurgence of 1960s black Pantherism. It's that kind of Marxism. And it has no place in a, in a modern scientific field.

And of course the weather underground at the same time, Bill Ayers and his people started talking about white skin privilege. They didn't invent it, but they started popularizing it. And then after he stopped bombing buildings, he started bombing mines in the educational system with the idea of white privilege. But, yeah, it was all really kind of a Marxist tactic because they realized that it wasn't working to talk about people. Americans believe that they had economic mobility. And so the kind of class warfare based on economic classes that they used in Europe wasn't working here. So they had to do something along the lines of racial division and conflict, right?

Well, I mean, if you look, black families in America haveica have on average been more and more wealthy every decade and then we have the election of a black president in 2008 and i think the left started running scared and they said unless we create a new narrative and new division black people and white people are actually going to get along and everybody's going to um you know help create a better american society that that was like their worst nightmare. And so they come back with this 1960s, 70s stuff. Yes, yes. And so, you know, when you talk about this, are you focused on the U.S. predominantly,

or do you also look at the implications as they're being used in the U.K.? Because they're also tearing down statues there based on slavery, because the UK was central to the slave trade. Of course, no credit is given to those people who stopped the slave trade, and then the UK basically stopped slavery by paying off the plantation owners. They don't talk about that aspect of it, of course. It is very transparently one-sided in their discussion of all of it but but give us an idea the scope of your book yeah well i mean i have

become a professor of global history here in the netherlands they're a small country and they think about the world at large and so i was an historian of the spanish empire but i also knew a lot about more recent economic history so So I just started taking on these big picture ideas, you know, so the book covers 500 years of European colonialism and contact with the natives. And it also talks about Latin America a little bit, Mexico, but also North America, so the United States and Canada with with a real focus on the U.S. But I start out with the beginning of European colonialism with the Spanish because there's so many things people think about Columbus, they think about the Aztecs and Cortes,

and there's so many stereotypes that people have been told, which are frankly just plain wrong. Most of the people in the New World actually lived in Mexico or in the Incan Empire. in mexico or in uh the incan empire there were very few in north america and when you look today most of the population of mexico 80 of them are mixed spanish and indigenous very few people are actually european uh you know full-blooded european so if the spanish were trying to commit genocide or move the natives out of the way, they did a terrible job. And in North America, there were so few people

that by 1820, European settlers outnumbered the natives 100 to 1, which is what we still see today. So these ideas of genocide and settler colonialism need to be addressed by looking at the bigger picture. Yes, yes. Talk a little bit about the 1619 Project, because one of the things that really concerns me, and that date I think was picked to try to preempt the American tradition of the Mayflower in 1620. So we're going to erase that, and we're going to make this all about slavery. And, of course, this is something that the Marxists have been focused on extensively, especially at Harvard. You had Pete, I call him Buttigieg, but his mentor there,

Sokvan Berkovich at Harvard, was always about deconstructing everything in terms of how Puritans and, you know, Protestant America had ruined everything. So that was his kind of his worldview, his lens of everything, that he would deconstruct everything by taking it back to those roots, those evil roots. And so it seems to me like that was a part of it as well. But for the early decades, the, how do you see this? They dismiss it as a myth. I think that maybe it's not, but I'd like to know your opinion as a historian. The fact that the early pilgrims who went to, from the Mayflower to that area seemed to get along for several generations with the Indians that were there for the most part. What do you think? Imagine that, yeah. So, I mean, the idea

is originally to discredit capitalism by saying that the roots of capitalism in America were based on slavery, which has now been thoroughly debunked by economic historians, but most historians today aren't trained in economics, so they can't even really read that literature. And that's so important because that's what the basis of the reparation stuff as well so you get into the the numbers and the figures in your book yeah yeah so i mean that's the thing i can actually come up with numbers and figures which most of my colleagues are happy to breeze over and or they their heads spin if they even think about them but talking about racism and getting along for the first couple of centuries, I mean, all the way up till the end of the 1700s, most Europeans believed that Native Americans were, quote, born white. And this may sound a little weird, but they actually thought they were the same

race as Europeans because they were from the same latitude. So they didn't think skin color was based on race back then. They thought it was based on where you lived in relation to the to the sun or to the equator so they actually thought Native Americans were the same race as them they didn't even use the term red man until after 1800. so the idea that their hatred of natives was based on racism is completely fallacious there's just absolutely uh no truth to it at all they thought we were all descended from adam and eve and uh and you see so many sources that say these people are just as clever as we are the only difference is our technology level yes yes and that really saying descended from adam and eve i've mentioned that many times as i've heard it said um you know from a a Christian perspective, there's only one race. That's the human race. The only

difference is the direction that we're racing. And the Christians would say, are you racing toward God or away from God? And the skin color doesn't really matter. And so that is, it's interesting that that Christian perspective has been there for many, many centuries. It's nothing new. Absolutely. Yeah. And so, you know, there were some scruffs on one side or the other. You had King Philip's War after several decades and some other things like that. But these are the types of things that, you know, happen within different European groups. Same groups will go to war with each other. You have civil wars. You have wars between different groups you have uh recrimination because of um somebody committing a crime in one

community or the other that type of thing would happen but it had been peacefully adjudicated and um it was um uh not the kind of um um the the environment that has been depicted in 1619. Talk to us a little bit about the economics. I know that we don't have the paper in front of us to look at the numbers, but talk a little bit about the economics aspect of that because that's very important in terms of the reparations thing

that is being passed around. And of course, money being added to grievances, that's going to be a very powerful political tool for them to to wield so talk a little bit about reparations yeah well i mean first of all you need to think about numbers and how many native americans there actually were how many were being wronged you see major websites saying for example that columbus killed seven million people in hispanola the little island where he first landed but they recently did a genetic study and found that there were only 30,000 people living there when Columbus arrived. I mean, so that's the kind of crazy numbers that we're

seeing. So you can imagine that any other economic figures, any kind of numbers at all are very difficult to pin down if we can't even get the population figure right. We see claims for reparations, you know, against some of the universities in the Midwest, things like that coming up today. And the real question is, how much was that land actually worth? So in the 19th century, most native tribes were still in the Midwest anyway, were hunter-gatherers. And so there might only be a couple thousand people living in an entire modern state. That's, you know, hunting and gathering does not produce many calories per acre at all. So once you turn to

farming, as Thomas Jefferson said, these people now only need about one one thousandth as much land to farm as they used to need to hunt and natives themselves started using firearms they started living near the settlers because they were a source of gunpowder firearms iron tools things like that and then the natives themselves helped deplete the game so sooner or later they were going to have to turn to farming and then the land once you farm it becomes much more valuable it's much more productive and then the the uh white settlers start building roads which connects it to the ports which creates more value in the land so uh if people are claiming value for land

today it's been developed for 200 years uh 200 years ago it was literally an empty scrub with a couple deer on it um and a lot of times those payments have already been made and settled in court years ago and of course people just bring them up again because it's basically a free handout and it was very disrupting uh they they started um deconstructing some of those things in Oklahoma and created a great deal of unrest and uncertainty. And, of course, we're just talking about reparations from the Indian side as well. But that's fascinating, the fact that when you look at the scale of people that were here, as you mentioned columbus and with other issues uh maybe that's one of the reasons why they want to shut down these indian museums so they can stop actually finding out real scientific information about the population that was there and and how extensive it was and and what was happening there maybe shut that down and tell some happy stories

from a different political perspective maybe that's the motivation huh oh i'm afraid so i think there are some groups who really do want to shut down the history and erase that history because it doesn't uh go with their own narratives uh in their current day which would entitle them to more handouts they don't want you to know their tribe was only in a given area for a hundred years before the white men arrived that they had picked out several other tribes before they arrived i mean history is a lot more complicated than they want you to think. That's right. And, and, you know, it's portrayed in a very simplistic way that, um, the only

conflict is between, uh, white Europeans and, uh, the American Indians that were there and yet they had a great deal of conflict with each other as well. They had slavery internally with each other as did every society. And that's why I mentioned, you know, when you talk about not stolen, you know, slavery in turn, it's a global situation. So it's a common thing throughout human history, but it's always portrayed as something that is uniquely European. And that is what these people are portraying it as in order to get reparations. Absolutely. And I mean, so every Thanksgiving, you see all of these articles appear online that mention

King William's War, that mention a couple of massacres. But as you pointed out, there were often decades in between these wars between Europeans and natives. And the Europeans were living in scattered houses all amongst the natives clearly that's because for generations they had no trouble with them at all so you know there everyone was trusting each other everyone was living with each other so the idea that there was a constant warfare that europeans were taking slaves um was not the case meanwhile um in mass Massachusetts many tribes thanked the Puritans for imposing a peace in a huge swath of Eastern Massachusetts which they said a piece of the likes of which we have never known already

within 10 years that's what the Indians were saying to the colonists thank you for imposing this piece because they used to enslave each other. So they were constantly at war, constantly in danger of being slaughtered or enslaved. And of course, it's that kind of tribalism that our current government is trying to reestablish. You know, for the longest time, we had that commonality. The people who were settling it there, they saw everybody as descended from Adam and Eve, all as created by God, all as human beings.

And so it was that commonality, as they said in the Mayfire Compact, part of the reason that they wanted to come to a new land was to spread Christianity. And that was part of the Christian ethic that is so despised was the fact that they wanted to bring out the commonality in people rather than focus on tribal differences. And those kinds of tribal differences, as they emphasize that now, that's going to take us back into a conflict that was already there in so many different ways. Talk a little bit about colonialism and slavery and other areas besides America? Yeah, well, I mean, what most people don't realize is that the Aztecs were huge slave drivers. Not only that, but when they enslaved people, they often brought them as part of the human sacrifice machine.

Their religion was based on, they're saying maybe 20 or 30,000 human sacrifices at the Aztec capital per year wow there's suspicions that these people were used for protein because they didn't they had killed off all the megafauna when they first arrived so there weren't many large animals so maybe this is what was going on but anyway there were huge slave networks all across mexico when cortez first arrived, he was gifted 20 women by a local chief. These women had basically been used as slaves, um, and, uh, had been trafficked from across Mexico. And, uh, so Cortez was encountering vestiges of this, uh, this thriving

slave market, uh, when he first arrived, that was just part and parcel of the way the world worked down there. And how did they react to that? Did he, um, uh, what did he do with those slaves? Did he continue in that tradition or. Well, that's the wild thing about Cortez is he, one of these women turned out to be exceptionally bright and a charismatic leader, and he used her as an interpreter for the Aztec court, it turned out she had been raised as a noblewoman, and her name

is Marina. Cortes took her as his mistress and had a son by her who he later ennobled. The Pope actually gave him the title of Duke, and so he was raised, even though he was a mestizo, to this great glory. And Marina basically helped Cortes conquer the Aztec Empire, as did tens of thousands of other native warriors who made the bulk of Cortes' army. So the Spanish then imposed something nobody ever talks about, which is a Pax Hispanica. On all of Mexico, these tribes were not fighting each other now

for the first time in history. They weren't enslaving each other. They weren't sacrificing each other. And so the quality of life for the average person, once they survived the diseases that the Spanish accidentally brought, then the quality of life for them increased dramatically. And so what was, as a Pax um a piece that they imposed across Mexico uh and it was uh but uh when how is this portrayed by the uh left uh differently that's just it yeah yeah I mean the web doesn't want to talk about that at all right so they'll say oh a hundred thousand people died in in Cortez's Wars they want to leave it at that if you Google it it'll say oh a hundred thousand people died in in cortez's wars they want to leave it at that if

you google it it'll say eight million people were killed in cortez's wars um that is highly contentious and at least 90 of those if uh of people who did die uh died of disease which again in the 17th century nobody could control or the 16th century. So the left will completely ignore the fact that the human sacrifice was stopped, that the tribal warfare was stopped, that there had been forced removals and genocides that no longer occurred. And frankly, anything they don't want to hear, such as in the 19th century, the United States introduced smallpox vaccines to Native Americans, saving tens of thousands of lives. All those facts just kind of go unmentioned, shall we say, by my colleagues. That's interesting.

And so when we look at it in terms of reparations, is there a reparations movement outside of America, or is this something that is really kind of spearheaded by the American Marxists? Are they using this for political purposes elsewhere throughout Central and South America? Well, you know, it really started with the kind of new Black Panther movement, the sort of BLM movement. Around 2016, they started calling Bernie Sanders a racist for refusing to support reparations. I mean, all these crazy things. And it really spread from there. So the British are getting some of this from former members of the British Empire

where the British were involved in the slave trade. And then indigenous groups across the world have gotten on the bandwagon, if you will, because they realize there's political win behind these sales for reparations uh but they still mostly um come from the african pan-african slavery movement now remember 90 of the slaves um coming to the new world did not go to the united states they went to brazil and other places but in latin america people are still a little bit more chilled out they realize that columbus is kind of you know they're mestizo a lot America, people are still a little bit more chilled out. They realize that Columbus is kind of, you know, they're mestizo.

A lot of these people are mixed European and native. They see Columbus as one of the fathers of their race and also their native ancestors as the other fathers of their race. And so they're not quite as into this reparations idea as we are in Western Europe and the U.S. So they're not tearing down a Columbus statues, uh, like they're trying to do that. Not as much. That's interesting. Um, so, um, when, uh,

when you look at this from a standpoint of reparations, again, I think probably the, um, the information that you have bringing truth to, uh, the size of the population, the economics that are involved there, I think that is going to be key for people in terms of takeaway from your book. I think that's probably one of the most important things that people could get from it. What are the other lessons that you would suggest that people can learn from your book? Yeah. can learn from your book yeah well i mean pretty much any of the stereotypes that you hear about stolen land for example or about genocide uh for example or even the trail of tears these are

things that we used to have a balanced scientific idea about but which now you're only allowed to believe one extreme version of what happened so um you know for the first 200 years the europeans in north america were very content to just stay along the coast and have trading forts i mean they made a proclamation line in 1763 which basically said no one's going to settle west of this ever they thought the native americans were going to be in control of 90 of the continent in perpetuity. So the idea that the Europeans arrived with the idea of stealing the land is totally wrong. They actually there was a huge real estate market, thriving real estate market where natives would sell land and get gunpowder and tools. You know, so people forget this stuff all the time, even the Trail of Tears. It was one of the most shameful

episodes in American history. 60,000 natives were removed to Oklahoma from the Southeast. But even then, the U.S. Supreme Court said that this removal was illegal and ordered Jackson not to do it. You know, and so people are saying, oh, the U.S. is this genocidal country. Look at the Trail of Tears. The U.S. Supreme Court itself forbade this to happen. And many members of Congress protested. Some Davy Crockett was a congressman. He actually resigned in protest at the removals.

Intellectuals and the public were in a huge uproar. Martin Van Buren, who was the vice president, said, wow, this was the biggest public uproar we've ever seen in the United States against any political action. So that says to me, there's a lot of good in American society, even in the 1830s, goodwill towards the Native Americans that my colleagues are absolutely refusing to acknowledge. I mean, there's a book out called Surviving Genocide about the Trail of Tears. And they're pretending that it was a genocidal movement. It was not uniformly approved by any means. And I talk about that many times.

I talk about the Supreme Court. Everybody's saying, well, the Supreme Court's made its decision. That's done. I said, no. You know, Jackson said, well, you made your decision. Let's see you enforce it. And the interesting thing about that is that the Supreme Court at first said well you can do it then when they saw it in practice they changed their mind within about a year i think it was and said no you can't do that and so as you point out you know it is um

there's a very simplistic um notion that is being sold to people that's the basis of of all of this um you know project 1619 all the rest of this stuff they want to paint everybody and these very simplistic stereotypes it's kind of ironic because they're always complaining about stereotypes and yet they're creating their own stereotypes out of all this aren't they absolutely yeah it's ridiculous i mean they're pretending that the settlers and natives never got along but you open up any source and you see they're all camping out in the same village together for weeks and months on end, obviously trading with each other, communicating with each other, most of the time getting along very well. So even stereotypes as simple as that.

Yes. And I can't remember the details now, but it seems like there was something about what kicked off all of this stuff were some complaints. But locally, I think there was wasn't it somebody who was selling them uh bibles and was a friend of theirs or something trying to intervene uh at the beginning of the cherokees being removed uh maybe you as a historian you probably know more details about that than i do what was it that kicked that off it seems like even at the very beginning and even at the local level before it went up to washington there was a lot of movement and support of the

Cherokees there locally from the Europeans. Oh, yeah. Well, there were several missionaries who had gone down there. They had taught the Cherokees how to read and write. They helped them create their own alphabet. They set up a newspaper. Samuel Worcester was one of the missionaries whose case was later brought to the supreme court against the removal so i mean he was instrumental in helping to bring the supreme court case uh and so and then for generations afterwards there were people who went along with the natives to oklahoma to help make sure the soldiers weren't too mean to them to help them set up stores. And, you know, even Jackson, even his officials were thinking, because gold had just been discovered in Georgia, they were thinking that they really ought to

remove the natives for their own good, because there were so many squatters moving onto their land that nobody could properly control. I mean, this was frontier territory territory the natives were outnumbered maybe 50 to 1 by this point and so there's even arguments some historians have made this in good faith that this was actually the best thing to move them beyond the borders of the united states at the time so again we see lots of countervailing logic and reasons happening on the ground that you really need to understand the historical sources before you can judge. Yeah, yeah. And of course, there was a lot of interconnection in many different ways.

You know, the Cherokee got along very well with the Europeans in general. I don't think there was, there wasn't really any violent conflict, I don't think. There was a lot of intermarriage. There was a lot of cultural exchange, religious exchange. When it came time a few decades later, about 30 years later, when the Civil War happened, Cherokee were supportive. Of course, they didn't like the fact that the federal government had removed them. I'm sure that had something to do with it. But there were close ties to the people in the area between the Cherokee, didn't they?

It seems like they, I don't recall any conflicts like you would see in some other areas out west. Yeah, well, I mean, the fact is half of the Cherokee leadership, a lot of the major players such as Major Ridge were at this point half Cherokee, half European. There was a Native American practice of adopting people into your tribe. So most of the leaders were part European. Many of them had been educated back East. There were some Indian schools that had been set up by missionaries for the idea of making them literate so that natives could support themselves and make legal arguments in Washington. So there was actually, Major Ridge himself had actually fought with Jackson in a previous campaign against the Seminoles. So they all knew each other, these elites. So the native elites and European elite, many of the natives didn't even want to

go with the tribe because they already owned land outside of tribal land. They were already running farmsteads and other businesses. So there was so much interaction on the ground intermarriage on the ground uh people knew what was coming for years before the removals um so this was no surprise so the tribes who did get removed knew what they were signing up for they had all been offered farms uh instead of removal which they refused you know and that was done on a removal, which they refused, you know, and that was done on a political vote. So, I mean, when you know the details, it's once again a lot more complicated and messy. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've talked many times about it, mainly from the Supreme Court standpoint, and a little bit about, you know, I knew a little bit about the missionaries

and their connection to them. I did not know that there were Europeans who accompanied them out there. What was the basis, though, that began, was a justification for removal? Where did that all come from? Yeah, well, I mean, even as late as Jefferson's presidency, even a little bit after that, the idea was that the natives in the southeast had been granted this land. It was because the land was granted by US property right, they were not ever going to be removed. And so this is one of the reasons why there was so much outrage when Jackson started this process to actually remove these natives beyond the mississippi um and that's why the supreme court was willing to to stand up for their property rights i mean so the idea had long

been all right they can't be hunter-gatherers anymore let's give them title to land and this will protect them and i think the real outrage that dv Crockett had was that, look, these people now own title to land. We can't just transfer human beings off their own property. And that's what caused a lot of the real fight. And what was the justification that the people were trying to remove them from? What was their justification for taking the land? So I had the treaty in it. It came it became politically expedient to do this after the

gold rush in the in the southeast so i mean there were there were a couple of u.s mints that minted only gold coins i think at dolona georgia and uh in charlotte i think in north carolina and so once gold was discovered there there was a huge rush of settlement into that land. There were skirmishes. If the Indians retaliated, they'd get massacred by, you know, 20 times as many white people as they had warriors. And meanwhile, the natives had actually been starting to increase in numbers. They were actually doing well on their lands there. And so Jackson was partially elected on the idea that he was going to free up this land for settlement by whites, even though the federal government disapproved and almost every northerner disapproved at the time. So it's basically we found gold and so we got to rethink this treaty.

Yeah. That's what was going on. Well, that's interesting. But as you point out, even though the origins of it, the basis of it was bad, you had people on both sides and people who were allies for doing the right thing. And I think it's an important thing for us to understand the reality of history, that it's complex. It's not one-dimensional. It's not very simple-minded as people who are propagandists want to present it. And we've had very simple-minded versions of history in the past that went the other direction,

off the other direction. And now we're getting a very simple-minded direction of history. So it's good to have books like yours that put the things in context. There's going to be good and bad people on both sides. There's good and bad in every person. And so, of course, we're going to have good actions and bad actions on both sides of this. It's very interesting, especially, um, Jeff in, in, in this area. I live in this area of, of, um, you know, the Gatlinburg area and that type of thing.

So the Cherokee thing is something that I find to be very interesting, especially since the connections to the Europeans seem to be so strong and the injustice at the same time was also there. But as you point out, uh, there are people on both sides, Davy Crockett, other people in the Supreme Court who tried to stop this at that time. Give us an idea. We've got a little bit more time here.

Give us a little idea of Canada, for example. What was happening there? Is there any push for reparations in Canada? I would imagine with the Liberal government, they're trying to find something there, but was there a great deal of conflict in Canada? I would imagine with the Liberal government, they're trying to find something there, but was there a great deal of conflict in Canada? Well, I mean, so yeah, let's just say with the Liberal government in Canada in the last few years, the reparations movement has really gone into overdrive. An enormous amount of Canadian federal money has

gone towards the tribes in recent years. They're saying that the tribal budget is growing faster than the Canadian military budget. And so, but the question is, is this money well spent? Is it actually helping people or is it just going to a few elites and often to white people, like maybe some of the lawyers who are representing the natives? And so there's a real question of whether this money and these reparations are actually going to alleviate poverty. There's also the question of government handouts in general.

Is it a good thing to encourage people to give them a stipend every year, or would it be better to encourage them to go get educated and get out there and make something of themselves? And then this is based on some of these perceived injustices in Canada, the main perceived injustice was the residential schools, which were going right up to the 1970s 1980s, where natives kids were taken off the

reservation and taught at a Canadian school, they were given Christian education. This, of course, is a highly taboo for some people. But when you look back at the administrators of these schools, there were things that were ineptly done. There were times when disease broke out at the school because just like in any school in the year 1900, you're going to have diseases break out. But most of the people running the schools thought they were doing good.

They said, I'm taking an illiterate kid I'm giving them skills I'm teaching them to be a carpenter I'm teaching them to sew and we're going to help them assimilate into Canadian society so the intention I think was pretty much good and noble even if in the execution it was a little bit 19th century sometime but when you look at the number of Canadian natives who were massacred by European Canadians, the most they can come up with it is about two dozen. So the idea that Canadian natives were massacred by Europeans is totally ridiculous. So they say, oh, well, maybe we didn't commit genocide here, but we committed cultural genocide. And they use the residential schools as an example of cultural genocide.

In the book, I talk about how that's all been taken much too far as well. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There was a lot of that about a year or so ago. And a lot of their narrative about what was happening in the schools was debunked. I'm sure you address that in your book as well. Really took that to an extreme, resulted in a great deal of people feeling they were justified to deface and destroy church property and things like that.

And I am concerned about the reservation system when we look at that. I see that as, if we don't learn a lesson from that i see that as a pattern that could be utilized in smart cities and that type of thing you know there is an effort uh again to try to remove people from their land and to lock us up in cities they've actually got a plan for that globally that we should all be worried about and i guess you're saying that they're in the netherlands as well you're in the netherlands right correct yeah i am yeah i mean partially because i had to leave the united states because if i didn't do my You're saying that they're in the Netherlands as well. You're in the Netherlands, right? Correct. Yeah, I am. Yeah.

I mean, partially because I had to leave the United States because if I didn't do my research on DEI related topics, they weren't going to hire me. So in some ways I've had to come to exile in Europe. Wow. That is, that is something, isn't it? You have to have intellectual exile in order to be able to do history. Yeah. But that's really where we are now.

Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a fascinating discussion. The book is Not Stolen, The Truth About European Colonialism and the New World. Jeff Finn Paul is the author. Jeff, where can people find this? Amazon or do you have a website

that you sell directly? Yeah, it's definitely on Amazon and other major booksellers as well. Okay. And I think, you know, if you look it up, Not Stolen, you'll probably, that'll be the easiest way to find it. You'll see the rest of the subtext there.

Thank you so much for joining us. It was great to talk to you. And it's very important if we don't understand what history is, that's one of the reasons why they want to eradicate it because then we are basically putty in their hands. It all repeats or rhymes in one way or the other. Thank you so much, Jeff. Appreciate it. Okay.

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