When Settlers Arrive at a New Land, How are the Rights of Aboriginals Determined?
There are two cases that I’m most interested in.
The English settlers that arrived in Australia.
and
The English control over the Arabian Penisula prior to 1925.
Why did the Bedouins get oil rights, while the Australian Abos did not get mineral rights, or any other rights really.
Why was the House of Saud set up and legitimized and declared by the British to be the owner of the vast oil reserves, and yet there was no House of Abo in Australia set up to give the native population there all sorts of property rights.
Two other corollary questions:
Was it mostly because of Lawrence of Arabia? Was his leadership of the bedouin tribesmen the key to their being declared the true owners of the oil rights in Saudi Arabia? Without him, might they just have been brushed aside as a bunch of local savages, like the Abos in Australia?
Why did Lawrence interfere in this matter? Was he insane? Did he have an illness that affected his thinking? What could he have been thinking? Did he hate the West, or Britain, or Western culture? Did he know that his actions would result in the establishment of vast property rights for the desert tribes?
Yes, one must read the Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Yes, the abos and the indians in north America were not as advanced as islamic culture had been in the Middle Ages. But they were not so far different from the bedouins which suddenly and for no apparent reason were declared to be the owners of the oil rights on the Arabian penisula. There’s a big difference between Averoes and Avincenna and King Saud and King Faisal. Islam may one have been an advanced culture but the Saudi Royals are straight up savages worse than any abos or indians in North America.
I just don’t see why they got such a good deal. They are believers in Sharia which has got to be the most barbaric system of laws and customs since the cavemen walked the Earth. No abo women, or indian women ever had to be treated as women in Saudi Arabia are treated today by men whose arrogance, stupidity, and viciousness is unmatched except perhaps by the great tyrants of the 20th century, who can’t be named on Lonely Answers Club.
October 25th, 2009 at 2:12 am
Firstly Dolpin, one must read Lawrence’s book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, to even hope to understand the man.
There was so much differece in the tribes of Arabia and the Aboriginal tribes of Australia. In Arabia, although the tribes did not get along with each other they shared a common language and they had a far more advanced society than the Aboriginals of Australia who were more like the native Indian tribes of America but even less advanced. Actually there is a great similarity between the taking over of land and resources in Australia and those in America. No one championed those civilizations like Lawrence did in Arabia, but one must also take into consideration that Lawrence had superior officers that had to go along with his ideas for the Arabs to get what they did and that the British had been in that area of the world for a long time already when Lawrence came upon the scene ( check out Gordon of Khartoum ).
Right now the Aboriginals in Australia don’t even have any casinos.