Ice-cream maker Ben & Jerry’s is committed to “truth,” (social) justice, and the un-American way. It’s so committed, in fact, that it, the very soul of class and timing, observed the U.S.’s birthday by tweeting that our nation sits on stolen “indigenous” land and should return it. In particular, the “Chunky Monkey” maker mentioned that Mount Rushmore should be “given back” to the Lakota. But now Ben & Jerry’s can test its commitment — because its headquarters also sits on “stolen” land.
And a Vermont Indian chief says his tribe wants it back.
Oh, and you can put hot fudge, whipped cream, and a cherry on top of that.
Below is the ice-cream maker’s July 4 tweet.
Ben & Jerry’s is so serious about this, apparently, that it elaborated at its website. We “need to start with Mount Rushmore,” the company writes. “… The faces on Mount Rushmore are the faces of men who actively worked to destroy Indigenous cultures and ways of life.”
Now, first of all, “indigenous” has become a propaganda term. Native French, Germans, Brits, and other Europeans are never described as “indigenous,” mainly because the immigrationists are happy to replace them with non-indigenous people. In fact, commenting on the planned Islamization of her land, multiculturalist Mona Sahlin said in 2001, “[T]he Swedes must be integrated into the new Sweden; the old Sweden is never coming back.”
Ben & Jerry’s hasn’t weighed in on this — as it has on controversies involving Israel and “Palestine” — but it can lead by example with the cowboys and Indians controversy. As the New York Post reports:
On Friday, Don Stevens — chief of the Nulhegan Band of The Coosuk Abenaki Nation, one of four tribes descended from the Abenaki that are recognized in Vermont — told The Post in an interview that he “looks forward to any kind of correspondence with the brand to see how they can better benefit Indigenous people.”
Stevens added that if the ice cream maker is “sincere,” it should reach out to him as the company’s corporate headquarters — located at 30 Community Dr. in South Burlington, Vt. — is situated on Western Abanaki [sic] land.
“If you look at the [Abenaki] traditional way of being, we are place-based people. Before recognized tribes in the state, we were the ones who were in this place,” Stevens said, adding that the Abenaki view themselves as “stewards of the land.”
… Representatives for Ben & Jerry’s did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
The company also hasn’t yet responded to the Abenaki demand — but it did offer Stevens a coupon for a free pint of Custard’s Last Stand ice cream. (That’s a joke. Hat tip: a Post commenter.)
Unfortunately, far from funny, Ben & Jerry’s July 4 message was the epitome of classlessness. As British commentator Piers Morgan put it, instead of rejoicing “in America’s independence,” the company has “gone out of its way to trash its own country’s biggest day of celebration.”
For sure. It’s a bit like there being friction between your son and an age-mate and, instead of that kid’s father addressing the matter with you privately, he crashes your boy’s birthday party and denounces him in front of all the child celebrants.
Yet the classlessness is matched by the ignorance. As columnist Rich Lowry wrote Thursday, Ben & Jerry’s call to “return the Blacks Hills to the Lakota … raises the question: Once this transfer takes place, will the Lakota turn around and give the Black Hills back to the tribes they took them from?” Lowry later elaborated, writing that the company
refers to the Lakota “fighting to keep colonizers off their land,” without any mention of the fact that just a short time before, they were the colonizers.
As Elliott West notes in his new book “Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion,” the advent of a horse culture among various Native American tribes made the Great Plains and Southwest a killing field of warfare and disease.
“Two great coalitions — Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Lakotas north of the Arkansas River and Comanches and Kiowas south of it — clashed bitterly until making peace in 1840, then both preyed on sedentary peoples on the fringes,” West writes.
Lowry provides other examples of Indian brutality, too. But don’t be offended. As psychologist and intellectual Steven Pinker has pointed out, continual savage warfare — during which the vanquished’s men were often killed and the women and children taken — was the norm in primitive tribal societies everywhere.
Another commonality is “stolen” land. The modern Japanese took their islands from and partially subsumed the native Ainu, the Chinese dominated the Formosan aborigines in what they’d name Taiwan, and Charlemagne forged modern Europe by conquering multitudinous tribes whose names (Lombards, Avars, etc.) are largely forgotten. Should we now try to figure out who originally “owned” what, where, in every part of all seven continents and then move people around to achieve this conception of “justice”? You may as well try to give reparations to people with Neanderthal DNA for what homo sapiens allegedly did to their prehistoric ancestors.
What’s more, Ben & Jerry’s doesn’t go far enough. To paraphrase Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the first man to put a fence around land and call it his own is a liar. Yet we know that the communist ideal of “owning nothing and being happy” doesn’t work. So what’s the truth?
This: Western civilization — the greatest civilization to grace this planet, bar none — put an end to the brutality (mostly). It ended slavery, cannibalism, and other savagery; and established a system of laws, rights and, yes, land ownership, so people could live in relative peace and settle disputes via courts and not clubs. Perhaps the American Indians or some other people could have developed such civilization; maybe it would have been better if they did (and maybe not). But they didn’t. The West did that.
And civilization is like muscle: Use it or lose it. We can either preserve the greatness bequeathed to us, or squander it while pining after a mythical “noble savage” past — and regress to a very brutal one.
