The Atlantic strikes again: David Frum on colonial history
Regrettably, it seems David Frum has decided to weigh in on colonial history again in The Atlantic. The entire article is pretty garbage, not to mention self-contradictory, as historian Jeffrey Ostler points out. Here are some highlights.
David Frum apparently does not realize that the Bering Land Bridge theory is not the only theory nowadays about the peopling of the Americas, and archeological sites have been located that pre-date it:
The encounter between Europe and the Americas triggered one of the greatest demographic calamities in human history. The Americas were first inhabited by wanderers from Siberia. When the most recent ice age ended, the land bridge to Asia disappeared. There would be little contact between the two portions of humanity for thousands of years. When the worlds met again, after 1492, they infected each other in ways that proved much more deadly to the Americans than the other way around.
He also blames the Indigenous population collapse almost entirely on disease, ignoring the numerous studies that have seriously challenged or complicated this theory.
Here he argues that Canada was "thinly populated” prior to colonization, un-ironically echoing the “terra nullius” justification for colonialism used in past centuries:
The laws of Canada, its political institutions, its technology, its high culture, and its folkways were largely imported from across the Atlantic Ocean. How could it have been otherwise? Canada was a thinly populated place before the Europeans arrived, perhaps 500,000 people in the half continent from Newfoundland to British Columbia, from the southerly tip of Ontario to Baffin Island.
And he argues that colonialism was inevitable anyway:
Sooner or later, the Old World was going to discover the New. How might that encounter have gone differently in any remotely plausible way?
It apparently does not occur to him that there might have been any alternative to genocidal colonization. But it’s okay, because he argues that there was no genocide anyway, at least not in Canada:
Canadian history is unscarred by equivalents of the Trail of Tears or the Wounded Knee Massacre.
I mean technically this happened before Canada existed as a nation state, but Frum should really look up what happened to the Beothuk.
And he ends his piece with a paean to the glories of colonialism:
Like Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders, modern-day Canadians live in a good and just society. They owe honor to those who built and secured that good and just society for posterity: to the soldiers and sailors and airmen who fought the wars that kept those societies free; to the navvies and laborers who built their roads, laid their rail, dug their seaways; to the authors of their laws and the framers of their constitutions; and, yes, to the settlers and colonists who set everything in motion.
He doesn’t explicitly say it, but by writing that we owe “honor” to the “settlers and colonists who set everything in motion”, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that he thinks colonialism was all worth it in the end, because it led to the creation of “good and just” societies. And I guess you could hold this view if you avoid looking too closely at the brutal violence and systematic genocides that occurred, or if you simply view Native peoples as footnotes in an otherwise glorious history.
Can someone explain why The Atlantic publishes such drivel? This is far from the first time too - see this previous thread by u/anthropology_nerd on another equally embarrassing Atlantic article.
Sources:
Mohamed Adhikari, “Now We Are Natives”: The Genocide of the Beothuk People and the Politics of “Extinction” in Newfoundland
Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, Alan C. Swedlund, Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America
David Frum, Against Guilty History
Livia Gershon, Prehistoric Footprints Push Back Timeline of Humans’ Arrival in North America
Alexander Laban Hinton, Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto, Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America
Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide