Funny, I thought you believed strongly in the conservative principles of self-determination and personal freedom. Yet you’re capable of saying “I believe forcing our culture onto this land was preferable” without irony. Who, in your philosophy, is not entitled to self-determination, and on what basis?
But some wrongs can’t be reversed without creating greater wrongs to other people. Redress has to take other forms, then. That’s the idea behind affirmative action, something else you’ve declared in the past to be simply government-imposed racism and unacceptable, even when its purpose is to make whole (at least somewhat) those whose lives have been affected negatively by past government-imposed racism. It would help your position a great deal to start to explain yourself more fully.
The colonizers could have shared their culture with the natives (without forcing it on them) and the natives could have used it to enhance their own. I’m not in favor of isolating cultures; I believe that contact can vitalize civilization as a whole. The problem is that the colonizers used smallpox-covered blankets to spread their culture, not education. I believe most natives would have been receptive to education about how to farm and how to preserve language through writing. Together, the natives and the settlers could have formed a government based around the enrichment of both groups. It could have been done quite easily. But instead, the settlers launched a campaign of genocide and terror. And that is why I can’t support the American colonization; it’s not the colonization itself but instead the means used to come about it. I can never believe that the end justified the means.
For an example of how it should have been done, look at the French colonization/settlement of Canada. Sure, there were atrocities in Canada too, more than would fit in a post, but many of the French settlers did treat the natives as equals in their treaties and bartering, and tried to educate them about technology instead of shoving them onto reservations while they enjoyed the spoils of the land.
What what I can see, there have been three arguments made against intergenerational redress:
If an individual can receive redress for actions not taken directly against them, there is no non-arbitrary line between legitimate and illegitimate redress.
I’m not sure why this is a compelling argument. Even if there is no non-arbitrary line, why can’t we draw an arbitrary one? Say, two generations? I think most people would agree that if your granddad stole my parents’ home, and raised you in it, while I was given up for adoption because my parents were in the streets, it would be just for me to demand a room in the basement. Certainly some claims for redress are too attenuated to be legitimate, but that doesn’t prove that all claims are so.
Suppose the line is that a group may seek redress if they are still significantly affected by actions which still significantly benefit the group from which they seek redress?
The people whom redress economically punishes are not responsible for the actions of past generations.
I believe that in criminal law (and Bricker, please correct me if I’m wrong), if I purchase stolen goods, or otherwise benefit from some illegal action, I do not get to keep my gains (even if I didn’t know the goods were stolen, etc.). Why should this principle not apply to economic benefit gained from slavery? Sure, the taxpayers paying for redress have never enslaved anyone, but they’ve certainly benefited from slavery.
The actions we seek to provide redress for weren’t wrong at the time.
Yes, they were wrong at the time. While notions of right and wrong might change over time, right and wrong do not. And has already been pointed out, in most cases of ethnic cleansing and slavery, even many people of the time knew it was wrong. I agree that condemning Charlemagne is a little preposterous, because the concept of women’s rights wouldn’t just be foreign to him, but unintelligible. But the argument that slave-owners, and colonizers had no way of knowing that their actions were wrong is preposterous.
Finally, as a matter of social policy, if one believes that exterminating the natives has lead to social and economic progress, doesn’t it make sense to share that progress with those whose ancestors paid for it with their lives?
I’m pretty much in agreement with **Bricker **on this. Redress should be limited to the legal system, and if something wasn’t illegal at the time, it serves little purpose to prosecute someone ex post facto. I suppose one exception I would have made would be at the time of the freeing of the slaves in the US. There simply was no good way for most slaves to make it in society since they were explicitly kept ignorant and uneducated. At the time of emancipation, there should have been some compansation and/or government programs to ease their way into society. I’m not aware if there were any or not, but there should have been.
Well, no… but also, kinda yeah. Mexico isn’t a good example anyway since it has the same colonization-driven history as America and is so close to us that its economic relationship to America is fundamentally different than that of Wales (or other European country) to America. Your statement was that you should be entitled to reparations from England if natives have them from America; what I’m saying is that when your ancestors left they abdicated any right to intervention from England. They should of course have equal working rights here, but they are more or less at the mercy of their new government, which they willfully joined. There was nothing willful about the natives’ “relocation.” They didn’t have a choice in the matter. Even people being driven to go to a new land out of extreme poverty still make the decision to do so. The natives didn’t.
Yeah, and I don’t think that I am necessarily in favor of reparations as such (if nothing else, from a pragmatic point of view, I could not personally afford the extra taxes). I think that the question that I am getting at has more to do with the fact that we are at a point in history where there are still preserveable remnants of conquered cultures around and that there is value in preserving them. That being the case, the question arises as to the most fair and legal way to do so.
Many of the native tribes were agricultural rather than hunter-gatherers. Granted, by the time the US’s particular nominal set of forefathers settled disease had wiped numbers of them out, but I am not sure one can say for certain that the moundbuilders, for example, did not have a population density comparable or superior to that of the colonies. Of course, there is little question that the Central and South American empires were far more than just a bunch of hunter-gatherers. Why any of these cultures/nations/states, if they survived alongside and interacted with the European countries could not pull a Japan to some extent.
To posit that all other history remains the same is not realistic. If all European colonizers played nice one can certainly argue that the entirety of European history from the sixteenth century on would be very different. No huge quantities of bullion imports to warp the economy and support various wars and empires. Perhap an Anglo-Amerindian culture would grow to rebel against the British. Who can say?
I am not sure whether you are referring to WWI or WWII in your reference to the US intervening decisively. If you are indeed referring to WWI than I would suggest that a German victory, however unpleasant, could be considered better than having a rematch via WWII, and thats assuming the Great War doesn’t end in the more typical status quo ante bellum as a result of mutual exhaustion.
I’ll agree that my moral system agrees with most of everyone here that genocide is immoral, but I can’t agree that it’s a bad idea. It’s entirely possible that if ethnic cleansers had there way and nuked us all down to one color, we (the remaining we) could then go on and live in peace unto the ages. I don’t believe that ethnic cleansing would result in any greater peace than we have now, but given that there has never been only one race on the planet, I freely admit that I have no evidence to support my side–though of course neither do ethnic cleansers.
Myth. Lord Jeffrey Amherst talked about the blanket idea, but neither he nor anyone else actually did it. Smallpox spread very efficiently on its own as it was, killing as many as 95% of the native population.
I agree that intergenerational transfers to rederess past wrongs is unworkable (just because Paul robbed Petter doesn’t mean that Mary is responsible, or even that there is recompense possible: not all acts create value that can be used for redress, leaving the only way to get reparations stealing from othres), but Bricker et al seem to be saying that we shouldn’t even feel particularly bad about it or bothered by the source of advantages.
Especialy coming from someone who espouses conservative and vaugely libertarian principles, it’s a little bizarre to not think there’s something wrong with a system in which our forefathers can basically steal the goods (and even lives) of others and then declare it all in the past. With that sort of excuse in force, then there IS no real respect for private property, and no legitimacy to ownership based on inherited capital. It’s the ultimate in money laundering.
At the time we are talking about, very few people felt that they were doing anything immoral. Or as I often say, “Hitler almost single-handedly created the Anti-War movement!” Nothing in history was or can ever be immoral so long as mankind learns from it and seeks to prevent it in the future. The grand majority of everyone who ever lived is now dead and we are the people we are today due equally to their lives as to their deaths. Not agreeing with what they did doesn’t make what they did bad–that’s already done and gone–only the future can contain evil.
The other irony: it seems that Bricker is not just a supporter of the outcome and rationale of of Kelo, but supports an even more extreme form of it as justified.
If I think I can do better with your property then you are doing with it, it’s mine! That sounds pretty ragingly liberal to me.
I don’t know that he’s saying we shouldn’t feel bad about it. If he is, then I don’t agree with that. I’d also add that I don’t agree with Bricker’s pronouncement that colonization of the Americas was for the good. There were good and bad aspects about it, depending on whose perspective you take.
I’m not sure if you’re talking about me or **Bricker **here. But read the part I highlighted. You’ve mixed tenses in a way that makes no sense. It’s not our foreftathers who are doing anything now.
You know, davenportavenger sounds real nice and all, but I admit that his description of the perfect possibile future was going along great until he hit that part about it being “easy.” Ah, no. If it had been easy, it probably would have happened. However, it was almost impossible, and in the long run pretty much never happened. I can thin of a few instances, but they mostly didn’t work out. I mean, nice idea and all, but not even close to this reality.
Sorry: the recipients and beneficiaries of their forefather’s action can declare it all in the past.
Juts because there is no pragmatic way to work a recompense or redress doesn’t mean that it isn’t very troubling that a lot of source wealth and capital is built on things other than just hard work and the free market.
Bricker obviously thinks that evil is evil… now. He argues that standards have since changed, but that we can’t roll back the clock on the standards of the past because they were different. Frankly, I don’t see that as necessarily a very compelling argument. Plenty of people thought that murder and rape and destroying cultures for economic gain were wrong at the time. Sometimes this was reflected in a any law (there was no international law), but sometimes it was and people were simply powerful enough to get away with it.
I’d agree. Given that it DID happen, in retrospect, I’m not sure it makes any sense at all to speculate whether it was a net good or bad.
But Bricker seemed to be presenting a justification for the takings: namely that we were going to use their stuff in cooler ways anyway, so thank goodness we did. That justification is wildly at odds with any concept of personal property.
Of course, I’m not saying the natives were saints either or that there exists any simple justification of the past. A lot of Native lands were owned by whomever had killed enough other tribes to take their farms and women from them. I just don’t see the point of inserting a glib justification into the whole mess so that we can happily declare it all irrelevant to the present.
First of all, those bad things did happen, and it does no good to whitewash them. However, it often does little good to dwell on these wrongs either. Historical wrongs happened to most groups we can identify with, and if we all nursed our bad feelings on these various subjects, we’d be nothing but sore.
Injustice ought to be righted and direct victims ought to be compensated where it is appropriate. Indeed, there is so much injustice in the world right now that we ought to make eradicating this our priority rather than worrying about past wrongs. Those who fret about slavery too seldom worry about the permutations it takes in the here and now, nor join efforts to eradicate it permanently from the planet.
The only real way to make up for an unjust world in the past is to create a more just world now. This does not mean nursing the resentments of the aggrieved with special rights, programs or benefits. It means making them less aggrieved by giving them a firmer stake in a shared society.