Comment by mjevans

2 days ago

At some point, all land has been taken either by direct force, or by the threat of force.

All land, everywhere. It is NOT a natural right that anyone owns any land, nor that any countries exist. That is something everyone's ancestors fought each other for and created as a system of human society.

Of course that's written in the past tense. Facing reality rather than the fantasy presented in history books and documentaries; not only did our ancestors do that, it hasn't stopped. The bloodshed still happens today in so many places. Those we might hear about in the news, and others forgotten even in the news because it is considered normal and thus ignored.

We are not yet a species of plenty. Scarcity still exists, at the very least in the real form of land where people want to be.

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mjevans

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defrost  2 days ago

Seems overstated and contrived to use 'all land'.

  Antarctica is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent.

  Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean [ and ] is the fifth-largest continent, being about 40% larger than Europe, and has an area of 14,200,000 km2 (5,500,000 sq mi).

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica

There was no one to "take it from" and when it was divided up by "Great powers" that was more by competition (race to open routes) and some notion of good sport:

  Antarctica was claimed by several states since the 16th century, culminating in a territorial competition in the first half of the 20th century when its interior was explored and the first Antarctic camps and bases were set up.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Antarctica

Then there are the more remote parts of Australia, nominally "taken" by the English (despite not being reached for some time) and later returned (post Mabo) to the descendants of what seems likely to be first settlers some tens of thousands of years past (the multiple waves of settlement arguments and other aspects of the History Wars in the Black Armband / Quadrant circles are looking thin in these days of genetic markers).

But that one's a complex can of worms that takes some time to unpack.

JumpCrisscross  2 days ago

> At some point, all land has been taken either by direct force, or by the threat of force

You're broadly correct. But there is land that was settled within the historical record.

The Levant, obviously, is not that. It was settled prior to the historical record. It is the coast closest to our cradle of civilisation. Every human with ancestry outside Africa has some sort of claim to lineage to that land.

  • mjevans  2 days ago

    You're sort of making the point though.

    'within the historical record' -- No one still makes a big deal about it because it happened long enough ago.

    There are places that are not widely contested today, generally most of their present borders are assumed to be generally stable. Or places with obvious natural geographic bounds and mostly internal conflict through history.

    Yet at some point were those places not battled over? Even the internal conflicts count, even if as a whole the majority of a country's population of today considers themselves of one people.

    The regions that remain in conflict are considered such largely because of the people who have, at some point, lived in an area long enough for it to become a notable part of their history, they have not unified as a people OF a place, but as a distinct ethnic group (be that religious or otherwise) who happened to have at some time lived in some area.

    They have all been 'wronged', and all* (generally an assumption but likely to be true) have 'wronged' others (at least in 'aggressive self defense' if not in some other way) at some point.

    -- put into a metaphor --

    There's a public park owned by the people (earth) which has a single tree that many children have made memories with. However two or more groups of childhood friends want to continue making memories with that tree and disagree with each other and how each other interact with the tree.

    What is the solution?

    The evil answer from a fiction writer is to destroy the tree to remove the problem. However that does not make a right.

    Using any method to give the tree to one group would be a wrong to the other groups.

    The groups cannot agree on how to share, nor how to all be full adults and make memories with the tree in peaceful coexistence.

    Thus, lacking an accepted answer, the problem remains unresolved.