So if the Nazis had managed to kill off ALL the Jews then there would be no problem because there are no victims left alive. Can I murder an orphan and get over it?
Maybe since I’m still alive the statute of limitations is still in effect. Can I steal from an orphan, kill myself, and then have my children inherit what I stole?
Just as a thought experiment, here’s another argument, based on the history of slavery and on modern legal principles:
Who do we punish more harshly and hold more morally responsible, currently, whether rightly or wrongly: the helpless drug addict, the dealer, or the narco-kingpin who manufactures the stuff and sells it to the dealer? Most would agree the kingpin/original drug manufacturer is the worst sort (certainly Hollywood agrees).
In the slave trade, one could analogize the roles thusly:
[ul]
[li]Southern planter: helpless addict unable to stop acquiring slaves [/li][li]Yankee & European ship owners: dealers who brought the slaves to the planter[/li][li]West African tribes: original suppliers of the slaves to the dealers, “manufacturing” them through capture of rival tribes.[/ul][/li]
Under this analysis, no matter what reparations you squeeze from the descendants of slaveholders (or the US government as their proxy), you should squeeze proportionately more from the descendants of West African tribes (and of course regard them as an order of magnitude more guilty, morally).
Now if you reject that analysis on the grounds that West African tribes were induced by profit to fill a hunger and that the slave owners were driving the whole thing, that’s certainly a defensible proposition. If so, however, should you re-think the common assumption that the drug addict/user/consumer is a victim and not the driver of the whole process?
Just thinking aloud. 
Human beings aren’t physiologically addictive substances, so the only people who were victims were the slaves themselves. Southern planters were greedy, not addicted.
[quote=“Sailboat, post:42, topic:502127”]
Just as a thought experiment, here’s another argument, based on the history of slavery and on modern legal principles:
Who do we punish more harshly and hold more morally responsible, currently, whether rightly or wrongly: the helpless drug addict, the dealer, or the narco-kingpin who manufactures the stuff and sells it to the dealer? Most would agree the kingpin/original drug manufacturer is the worst sort (certainly Hollywood agrees).
In the slave trade, one could analogize the roles thusly:
[ul]
[li]Southern planter: helpless addict unable to stop acquiring slaves [/li][li]Yankee & European ship owners: dealers who brought the slaves to the planter[/li][li]West African tribes: original suppliers of the slaves to the dealers, “manufacturing” them through capture of rival tribes.[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
That’s ridiculous. If we accept this highly dubious analogy, you’ve lumped two key groups together:
The kingpins are the archvillains, of course. But the peasants who farm coca leaves aren’t. The tribes who capture rival tribes are closer to farmers; the slaveships are the kingpins.
The analogy is highly dubious because cocaine, for example, isn’t self-aware, doesn’t have family relationships, doesn’t suffer horribly if it’s shipped in overcrowded conditions, etc. If cocaine screamed, wept, sobbed, and suffered when cut with a razor, I’d think the “helpless addicts” were scum, too.
How many years, and on what basis?
It’s an insanely stupid idea, because anyone with eyes can see that “historical grievance” has long-term consequence. Today, academics and politicians are still dependent on a network of connections and friendships that serve to exclude blacks, because there are few rabbis due to overt discrimination in the Jim Crow era. So if you want to set the statute of limitations at 500 years, maybe I’ll be OK with it. OTOH, Florence still gets shit-loads more tourist dollars than Sienna or Pisa because the de Medicis used the spoils of conquest to build wondrous churches, hire Michelangelo, and create unsurpassed art collections. Understood in proper context, I can understand why the Siennese and Pisans are still ticked off about it. Perhaps those of us born to privilege should quit whining and assume that if people are still pissed off about something, perhaps it’s because it’s still having deleterious effect.
–Cliffy
Oooh, you said “squeaky wheel”.
So what’s the deal, then? No redressal for anyone except those who were directly affected? And leave it to the culpable institution to decide who was directly affected and how long to take before writing the check Isn’t that…um, CRAZY? Even forgetting the whole statute of limitations thing, leaving it up to the government who was responsible for the wrongdoing to do the rightdoing on its own accord DOES NOT COMPUTE. Again, it’s like expecting the thief to pick a fair sentence for himself.
If Congress writes a law saying it’s pefectly legal to keep people named Malthus imprisoned indefinitely, and fifty years later a new administration decides that’s crap and you get freed, are you going to just shrug your shoulders and say, “Statute of limitations, dude.” Or are you going to fight for what was taken away from you? Or how about this? The federal government frees you, but makes it a law that you can’t sue the federal government ever. Are your children supposed to just forgive and forget? Or should they be able to beseech an outside authority and say, “Lookahere, we had some human violation thingies that went on here and we need some redressal from someone.”
You’re essentially giving the government all the power. The power to screw people over and over for years and years, and then screw them again once they decide to treat them like regular people. That’s completely unacceptable to me. What IS acceptable is establishing an independent, international body devoted specifically to such matters. The UN, for all its faults (all of which I’m not familiar), is at least something.
I do not agree. How can one make a “compelling case” for ancestral harms going back to the 1700s? If so, the “harms” surely multiply into the thousands. Everyone had ancestors who were “harmed” by someone, and everyone’s history goes into making up who they are.
All limitations are based on the same notion: that the passage of time ought, for various reasons, make a “wrong” moot.
The reasons of course may differ in different cases (indeed, that is why different wrongs have different limitations periods).
When it comes to group wrongs, the problem, more specifically, is that every single group out there has wrongs to complain of, and in most cases the “wrongs” and “redress” are contradictory.
Take land claims. Every bit of land on this planet pretty well has had various different groups pass over it, get displaced by other groups, and those groups displaced by yet others … which group are you going to “return the land to”? How can you “return the land” to one group and totally ignore the equally legitimate claims of the group that those people stole the land from? At some point the merry-go-round of reparations has to stop, or you will be returning southern England simultaneously to the Celts and to the Saxons.
This is why it is a Bad Thing - it creates the spectre of indeterminate liability.
Well, certainly. Oppression would not be oppression if the victims had meaningful access to the courts.
The Saxons couldn’t sue the Normans, either.
The victims were in point of fact still alive, and so not subject to a proposed limitation period. This example cuts against you.
Again, reparations for people actually suffering harm aren’t covered by a historical limitations period.
:dubious: How is the very basis for a historical grievance limitations period “shifting the goalposts”? That’s where the goalposts were planted in the first place.
I would totally agree that descendants of Holocaust survivors are owed nothing by present-day Germany, just as I, decendant of great-grandparents fleeing the Tzar, am owed nothing by Putin’s Russia.
The difference is that someone actually suffering a wrong at the hands of someone else is generally entitled to redress. This is not, however, genetic.
They are, alas, all dead.
Everyone is “disadvantaged” by their history. Sadly, it isn’t possible to disentangle the extent to which any one person’s actual situation is “caused” by some past historical calamity now, it never has been and never will be.
That’s why it is better to address actual need (which, presumably, is “caused” by a person’s past acestral history, no?) than to attempt to cherry-pick favored groups for reward.
Every case for reparations has to go through a rigorous court system. If a squeaky wheel presents a compelling case for reparations as determined by the courts, then so be it. That’s the way things should work.
[/QUOTE]
Indian Casinos are an example of a government trying to redress an historical wrong.
Slavery reparations would be hard to justify if it came from the general treasury. My family left Scotland in 1915 and became coal miners in Pennsylvania and then Colorado. Then they went to Detroit to work in the factories. What share of slavery do they pay? Then some people have settled in America the last decade or so. What should they pay?
I understand the principal, but it would cause a lot of wrongs attempting to correct actions that not all people are responsible for nor benefited from.
I must say, I find this sentence most interesting. I never considered that the shortage of rabbis was due to Jim Crow discrimination, or the relevance of lack of rabbis to the political-academic sphere.
Food for thought indeed.
So … Florence should pay back Pisa and Sienna now?
Did you intern the Japanese? If you paid your taxes in 1992, that means you most certainly did. What an awful person you are, interning those poor people.
:rolleyes:
Again, a “historical” statute of limitations has no impact, by definition, on living people who were actually harmed.
If I’m freed after 50 years in Jail, the “harm” was suffered by me, personally, right up to the minute I was let out. It is a different case from my distant descendants suing in the year AD 2180 beause their direct ancestor was wrongly jailed.
I was against reparations. How does money compensate for what we did to them?
If you are for it ,then the people who decided to build and run the camps should have had their family fortunes seized. They did the wrong. They should have paid.
What else could we have compensated them with?
They acted as agents of the government, which in turn acted as agent of the people, who were generally strongly in favor of it.
I’ll suggest 100 years. It’s a nice round figure, it’s the extreme outside of a human lifetime, and it’s 4 generations. The world changes a lot in 100 years.
As for “basis”, the idea is that the basis for pursuing the grievance gradually evaporates over time, amid all the complexities piled up from subsequent events. Historical might-have-beens become increasingly abstract while any “spoils” have long since been subsumed.
Fair enough, if, as Jackmanii points out, the actions that created the grievance have stopped and genuine efforts to compensate for the continuing effects of it are at least under way. Otherwise the clock never starts.
It is also necessary, obviously, for all to dispense with the notion of ancient ancestral rights to land or property, such as those that have created the Middle East situation that we know all too well.
The difficulty being the same as it always was - there is no such entity as “white America” or “black America”. There are only individual white and black Americans.
The federal government represents all Americans, not just white ones. My son, for instance, is neither black nor white. But he pays taxes. If the federal government pays reparations, he is being taxed on behalf of “white America”, to which he does not belong. Same for any black who pays more in taxes than he gets back in reparations.
I’ve heard talk about how the Washington Monument was built with slave labor. Maybe so. But blacks benefit just as much from the Washington Monument as whites do. If the US owes anything, it owes it to the slaves, and they are all dead and can’t benefit.
Reparations don’t make sense. You can’t penalize people who didn’t do anything wrong, to pay back people who didn’t suffer any loss. And once you start arguing in favor of historical guilt, you lose. Any group you belong to has a grievance if you go back far enough.
Besides, there’s no such thing as race, as tomndebb has a habit of pointing out.
Regards,
Shodan
Do not drag me into this discussion, particularly by misrepresenting what I have said.
But some wrongs are more egregious than others. Some wrongs are more recent than others. The effects of some wrongs have longer lasting effects than others.
You have to appraise each on a case-by-case basis. Just like you do with all crimes.
If your argument revolves around the passage of time and the logistal obstacles inherent to that, then why are you introducing arguments that don’t hinge on time and could just as easily apply to a living atrocity survivor? To you, it may not seem like that what’s your doing, but I see otherwise. The plight of the poor hillibilly could have just been used as an excuse to deny slaves redress while they were alive. When you make appeals to how everyone in history has been wrong and point out the unfairness of people having to pay for actions they had no hand in doing, you’re making arguments that could have just as easily been used against Holocaust survivors. Why should they have gotten money and land, when the Saxons and other ancient peoples didn’t? Not every German supported the Nazi government; why should their taxes have gone towards paying reparations?
If you’re just arguing that time should heal all wounds, then why should any group get reparations? Just let the hands of time set things right.