Question about America

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, yes, it was. Cathcon is of course correct to point out that conquest and genocide are not unique to the United States.

a race of people can only claim a "right" to a segment of land insofar as they're able to defend it.

I don't think you've thought this all the way through.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

a race of people can only claim a "right" to a segment of land insofar as they're able to defend it.

I don't think you've thought this all the way through.

Is this suppose to be about Israel?  I have no problem with support for the Israeli state as an established American foreign policy priority, but to say they have some sort of exogenous "right" to the lands they now occupy is obviously silly.  One doesn't have to be a rabid Zionist to support contemporary Israel.

Actually, I was thinking of this. But more broadly, the notion that "might makes right" —while perhaps a factual assessment of the historical relationship between truth and power in a deeply cynical way —is rather lacking as a moral framework. It's difficult to meaningfully generalize about four hundred years of history involving relations between a dozen or so European powers and literally hundreds of Indian nations —but this story is not as simple as one group of people moving out and another group of people moving in. Large parts of it include actions that can only objectively be described as genocide.* I'm not suggesting you condone those actions, but it's very difficult to separate the deliberate efforts to exterminate Indian populations with the forced removal of those peoples from their ancestral lands. Maybe "theft" isn't the precisely right word, but if a militarily-superior alien power appeared in our orbit and demanded that we cede the Earth to them, I think most people would be rightfully p*ssed and perceive that to be unjust.

* Yes, Indians also perpetrated massacres and other atrocities. If we are being objective, however —and "was ___ theft" is an objective rather than subjective question —that does not change the calculation. And, of course, Indian attempts to exterminate European colonists were noticeably less successful.