This image, posted by leftist Facebook page The Other 98%, attacks the very idea of citizenship by pulling every liberal heartstring at once.
The premise here is that the continental United States is the product of militant colonialism and expansionism, therefore the government has no place in deciding who is a legal citizen or not. Essentially, it’s a bumper sticker with no real intellectual substance.
The biggest problem with this assessment is the belief that wars over territory in North America were non-existent before European colonization — that the native tribes who lived here before existed in a complete state of peace.
This is blatantly untrue.
As with any region with humans living in it, North America was just as much of a territorial battleground before colonization as it was afterward. Tribes hailing from modern day Mexico were especially aggressive. The Aztecs asserted power in the region by invading nearby villages. In the Northeast, the Iroquois nation began with five tribes vying for power.
The idea that Europeans somehow introduced territorial warfare is insane.
Because of this, it’s hard to understand where the idea of “stolen land” comes from, considering how even the native tribes were stealing land from one another for centuries.
~ Facts Not Memes
