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NBC News contributing “journalist” Simon Moya-Smith, 39, who is also a lecturer at the University of Colorado at Denver, recently put out the following tweet:“Before white people came to this land, there were no jails, no homelessness, no laws against homosexuality or abortion. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples emphasized health, housing, freedom to love who you love and the fact that we need Mother Earth. She doesn’t need us.” Before white people came to this land, there were no jails, no homelessness, no laws against homosexuality or abortion. For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples emphasized health, housing, freedom to...

The indigenous peoples who populated the New World prior to the arrival of Europeans were arguably even worse than the hated white men who eventually conquered them, in terms of civility and wanton violence toward their enemies. Indeed, far from things like slavery and genocide being introduced to the continent by Columbus and his successors, such acts of atrocity were already occurring widely among the various warring tribes of natives, who routinely enslaved, tortured, ritualistically slaughtered and even feasted upon their defeated enemies. That’s right — many indigenous peoples practiced cannibalism upon those they had conquered and oppressed. Is that...

Were Native Americans really kinder, gentler and more spiritual? I used to, on some level, accept the popular notion that Native Americans were more spiritual and in tune with nature than European Americans, and that it was European Americans who brought war, sexism, and environmental degradation to an otherwise innocent, peaceful and Edenic Native America. As a kid I bought slim paperbacks from the Scholastic Book Club that taught me that Native Americans planted dead fish in their agricultural fields in order to fertilize them. I learned that North American Indians didn't have the wheel, bronze, iron, or steel, or...

Well, it’s Christopher Columbus Day again. And this, of course, means that it is but another occasion for leftists everywhere to repudiate their own civilization. For a few decades now, the 15th century European explorer’s face has been held up as that of Western civilization, i.e. the face of all that is evil in the world. Columbus is the proverbial poster child for the White, Christian, Heterosexual Male, i.e. the contemporary left’s version of Public Enemy Number One. Columbus Day assumes a new significance this year, however, for monuments to Columbus are no longer alone in being targeted for destruction...

Sometimes to understand one’s own era you have to immerse yourself in another. I pick up my copy of Paul Edmonds’ Peacocks and Pagodas as an example. This — though you’ve probably never heard of it — seems the best-regarded book ever written on the people and society of Burma. You may know it as Myanmar. What could be more esoteric, and yet profoundly revealing, about much broader issues? My copy is a first edition from 1924 and in its long life and travels it once belonged to T.N. Jayavelu, Antiquarian Bookseller of Choolai, Madras, India. But now it resides...

HUMAN beings have spent most of their time on the planet as hunter-gatherers. From at least 85,000 years ago to the birth of agriculture around 73,000 years later, they combined hunted meat with gathered veg. Some people, such as those on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Sea, still do. The Sentinelese are the only hunter-gatherers who still resist contact with the outside world. Fine-looking specimens—strong, slim, fit, black and stark naked except for a small plant-fibre belt round the waist—they are the very model of the noble savage. Genetics suggests that indigenous Andaman islanders have been isolated since the...

Nicholas Wade is a science writer for the New York Times, who used to be as Politically Correct as anyone in that mob on 42nd Street. No longer. Wade has discovered the new anthropology, now informed by a radically improved understanding of the human genome. The new evidence is clearly explained in his recent book, Before the Dawn: Recovering the lost history of our ancestors. It looks at the deep human past --- tens to hundreds of thousands of years --- combining written records, archeology, anthropology and the human genome. The result is spectacular. If this book is any...

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GERMAINE Greer this week went on BBC television and appealed for help. "It's about time, I reckon, we resuscitated the Communist Party." No one on the panel with her blinked at this evil idea -- although whether because they agreed with it or thought Greer was crazy and best ignored, I can't tell. I'd understand if some thought the latter. On the same show, Greer, famed for leading the feminist revolution with her The Female Eunuch, offered a nutty excuse for Saudi Arabia's ban on women driving cars. "I get a bit worried about certain heavily veiled ladies driving because...