How do we address wrongs of the past?

I certainly agree that it is “troubling”, and I think the best thing we can do is make sure there are no legal impediments to the descendants of those affected.

I’m not really sure what to say about that. I do agree that it isn’t fair (or particularly useful) to judge people in the distant past by today’s standards. Finding out what the standards of the day were is not easy, but in this case I think we can safely say that almost no one in 16th and 17th century Europe objected to colonization on principle. Some may have, but it had to be a tiny minority.

I tend to make a distinction between pre-Darwin and post-Darwin (roughly speaking). Pre-Darwin, we really didn’t understand the relationship between different groups of humans.

No, I can’t agree with that either.

I think Bricker’s point is that some cultures ARE objectively superior to others, and that Western/European culture was and is superior to Native American culture. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but I wouldn’t call it glib.

Native Americans still warred with each other. Spreading their culture wouldn’t have saved many lives. Admittedly Democracy hasn’t been a move towards peace, but it has allowed for society to advance (finally) to a state where the common populace is educated and far-ahead-thinking as to start thinking of such things like “Oh hey, maybe killing those guys taking my job isn’t cool”–and where the common populace can put that into effect.

I agree. But being a little sensitive couldn’t hurt either. For some of these people, the past in which a lot of this stuff happened wasn’t really all that long ago, and the affects of it affect them in very real ways even today. That’s why I do think retrospective apologies are, at least, in order.

Again, as you say, it’s not particularly easy. To easy to simply dismiss, too easy to simply say that it was immoral. The reality was that it was power, not morality, that was overriding. If people did find it immoral, power tells you to shut the hell up. That’s part of how power gets away with it.

The problem becomes when all people in power have to do is keep people good and shut up long enough to grandfather in the “justice” of everything they’ve done. Or power decides that it’s got better uses for your stuff than you do. Justifying that stuff in the past and then saying “past this date, that’s no longer acceptable” just isn’t going to fly. It’s a tactic that worked in the past, and per the justification, it can work again. Post colonial communists certainly haven’t handed back any of the property they stole and murdered to get. And yet, they seem to have a ready-made excuse for this that comes a little to close to matching up with Bricker’s argument.

I don’t measure the goodness or badness of a culture with a body count, but if you want to go down that road, need I bring up the ~100,000,000 lives lost on the European continent alone in the last few hundred years due to wars and other government sactioned killings? (I’m counting the USSR as part of Europe for this purpose. That culture is undeniably European.)

It would be more accurate to say “we don’t know” than “myth”; at least according to that link, there’s no evidence either way beyond those letters. Personally I find it plausible, and if they didn’t it’s likely because smallpox got to the natives on it’s own before they could do anything.

How is World War 1 more important than genocide and slavery ? What we did was much worse than what the Kaiser did ( after all, the nations of Europe are still there ). Also, I doubt the exterminated cultures would agree that being dead is better; they wouldn’t call it “preferable”.

It’s simply impossible to equitably unravel the past and apply today’s standards of right and wrong to discover who should be recompensed, and how, and to what degree. THAT is my argument.

At the time, the standard of personal property was more along the lines of: whatever you can successfully defend is yours. What you can’t is mine. I don’t argue we should adopt that standard. I am saying we cannot unravel the myriad events that happened UNDER that standard with anything approaching equity.

Thought experiment:

Let use say the United States stole land from Tribe X. Overcome with remorse, we now seek to hand the descendants of Tribe X some sort of recompense.

But then Tribe Y comes along, and points out that THEY were forced from the land by Tribe X.

And an anthropologist comes along and points out that Tribe Y gained the land by wiping out Tribe Z; unfortunately, they killed them all and so there are no descendants.

Should Tribe Y’s greater crime (genocide) bar their descendants from recovery from Tribe X? Should Y’s descendants earn a greater share of the pie because they murder some of their competitors?

Should X’s heirs get anything, as they stole the land from someone theselves? Should they be rewarded because they merely drove off Tribe Y but didn’t kill them? Or punished because now they have to share the fruits with Tribe Y’s progeny?

I think that standard applied to land outside a given countries recognized borders, but not inside. Certainly you would not say that accurately describes 16th century England (internally), would you? How about 18th century America?

No, we had one standard for “us” and another standard for “them”.

I’m not disagreeing with your conclusion that we can’t unravel the past, but you’re premise in that paragraph is flawed.

That doesn’t explain all the stuff above about how it was a good thing we did it and so forth.

But on that subject, I don’t agree that it’s impossible: certainly not in all cases. The real problem may be that the recompense is impossible.

At what time? Are you arguing that a hundred years ago we were all basically in the Hobbsian state of nature?

I don’t think that’s a vey plausible excuse in many cases. There wasn’t really a “myriad of events” in a lot of these cases: people just took shit because they could. It wasn’t about the standards of the time, they just had the power to do so and they did it.

What prevents this sort of logic from being used again if someone is powerful and then retroactively shrugging off after the fact once enough time has passed? In fact, as I noted, it HAS been used recently in the case of communist revolutions. Yeah, sure, we may have property again, but you can’t apply “capitalist” morals to where I got my land (i.e. from your family): those were different times. And we’ve had it for years now.

Any morality worth its salt is not going to bow before the argument you are making: which is basically a form of temporal cultural relativism.

Correct. I was speaking of the view of land between nations, not between individuals. “The right of conquest” was recognized as a way to gain land and a throne.

You can stop right there in my case, because as I said, I don’t think much just recompense can be made. But this is largely a pragmatic issue, not a moral one.

But let’s draw the lines a little more realistically. In the case of the US and the Natives, for instance, there’s a pretty plausible argument to be made that there was law and such on the NA side in the form of treaties. Which were simply broken. And the country then proceeded to beat the shit out of and force into a system of apartheid (one which South Africa studied to create their own system) the remainders so they couldn’t mount much complaint or opposition.

Now, that seems like a pretty neat trick no? All a country has to do is keep people under their bootheel long enough so that when they finally let their descendants go, and create this system of equal treatment and open lobby, these people have the history of having the shit kicked out of them… and THEN a system of modern liberty which convieniently prevents them from kicking back in the same way they were kicked or getting back anything they would have had if the wrong had not occured.

In the case of the Indians at least, it seems like the US Government to some degree DOES argee that it was at fault, and even that semi-autonomous Indian nations can exist as a form of special treatment/partial fulfillment of the treaties.

As it has been said, sometimes the laws are “equal” in that they prevent both the rich and the poor from sleeping underneath bridges. But that’s not necessarily all that fair given the past-to-present situations.

So what’s the discussion about, then?

The reward should be given to tribe X, since they were in power at the time of the disorder to their world. They were the ones who were wronged specifically by the intrusion. If tribe Y wants a piece of the pie, they have to talk to tribe X, since they were wronged by tribe X. Simple!

(Although in the RL USA I would rather see all tribes benefit equally, since ALL of them had their lives disrupted by the unwelcome intrusion of the Feds.)

Christ, didn’t you read the rest of his post?

**Apos **makes a good point in that one needn’t go back further than the 19th century to find treaties that the US is in breach of. Some of these treaties are still being adjudicated, and they should be. IIRC, there is a tribe in Maine that has a legit claim to a huge percentage of that state (something on the order of 50%). I have to wonder if these claims are just deamed impractical to comply with.

If someone has info on the Maine situation, that would be interesting. I’ll do some googling later to see if I can come up with something. I don’t want to make an argument that I can’t actually back up with sites.

Neither am I. I was measuring based on whether a culture is capable of learning from its mistakes or not.

I’m not sure that either the myth or the explanaition why it didn’t happen is correct. What was the understanding of disease and its transmitance during the 1760s? Did they even know about “germs”? And that thay could stay alive for months at a time on blankets? Any science historians here?

This part of the question hasn’t really been addressed. For those of you who believe something should be done, what specifically would you like to see done?

Could you be more specific, Mr. Moto? How should the federal government, for example, address the injustices that transpired because of FEMA’s lack of response in the wake of Hurricane Katrina?

How do you give “the aggrieved” a firmer stake in a shared society without giving them special rights, programs or benefits?

The first thing that should be done is reform of the agencies involved., so that it doesn’t happen to anyone else. Further, it ought to be clearer to people exactly what the federal government will and won’t do, what the state government will and won’t do, what local governments will and won’t do, and what individuals and families will be expected to do for themselves if they are able to do so.

Keeping in mind that unscrewing a messed up system is the first priority, helping victims screwed by an unjust current system with some extra resources certainly isn’t wrong. But doing this without fixing the system would be.

You give them rights, programs and benefits that are not “special”. Predicate them on class or income, for instance, instead of race.