You made an equivalence between the descendant of a slave and a descendant of a poor white. The “descendants” in this equivalency cancel each other out just as it would if we were dealing with an actual mathematical equation. Which means that essentially you’re comparing a slave to a poor white, and positing that the former deserves no reparations because the poor white is a victim too.
So no, not a different case when you take your argument to its logical conclusion.
But when you mention that all groups have suffered wrongs (Saxons et al), you’re conveying something more than that there are logistical issues related to time. The statute of limitations for crimes in general has nothing to do with how many other people have been victims of crime, either recently or long ago. Time with respect to these crimes has to do with the obstacles associated with finding reliable witnesses and other evidentary issues. The commission of other rapes, thefts, and assaults in history have nothing to do whether a particular plaintiff deserves redress now.
I’m starting you think that you either misunderstand why the concept of a statute of limitationsexists or you’re applying it in a manner that is different than it’s intended purpose, which is adding complications to this discussion.
No matter if you’re talking about giving money to survivors or to their descendants, people who had no hand in the event will have to pay. With birthrates being what they are, this problem is inescapable. Even if we hold only people who were alive during the atrocity responsible, there will still be plenty of nonsupporters of the government’s actions who will have to pay. Again, this problem is inescapable. And at the end of the day, a moot point.
Governments exist in perpetuity. The debt the U.S. is racking up now will likely still exist decades from now, when most of the people living now are long-dead. And yet my great-grand children will still be expected to pay for it because it’s Uncle Sam’s debt. And by association theirs.
When China decides to cash in its bonds decades from now, will it be a “fundamental injustice” that my guileless progeny will be held accountable? Of course not. That’s the cost of living in a country like the U.S.
Okay, but you started this thread in response to monstro’s post about American slavery. Then you made attempts to exclude Israel from the discussion. So if reparations for American blacks wasn’t to be a central example in your thesis, what other examples did you think would be the center of this debate and have the most relevance to the readership on this board?
I did not make the argument that the two cancel each other out like a mathematical equation.
I’d rather defend the arguments I’m actually making, thank you very much.
Well, obviously I’m not talking about an actual legal statute of limitations. I made that very clear already.
There is a very good reason for that: historic wrongs done to a group or class of people, rather than to specific living individuals, are not “crimes” or “torts” such as would be subject to a legal statute of limitations. These are not “wrongs” known to law and the process of obtaining redress is a political not legal one.
The point of a statute of limitations on “historic grievances” is precisely to point out that distinction.
For individual crimes or individual torts a ‘statute of limitations’ is intended to address concerns created by the passage of time - namely, lack of witnesses, failure of memory, etc.
Crimes against ancestors, or “historic greivances”, naturally raise other issues: the fact that, if one goes back far enough (and you are arguing against limitations based on the passage of time, remember?) just about everyone has a “historic greivance” of their own; as one moves further and further into the past and the number of one’s ancestors multiply exponentially, the number of possible grievances multiply as well.
Fact is, everyone has ancestors, many have been hard done by, and the best policy is not to recognize any such claims on the part of decendants who have not themselves been personally harmed.
Well, obviously stuff that happens now has an effect into the future into perpetuity: that is simply cause and effect, and I’m not arguing against legislating against cause and effect.
The issue is this: does moral import act, or should it act, like cause and effect, passing down in perpetuity forever unto the uttermost generations?
This strikes me as positively theological, like the Church holding people responsible for the crime of Adam.
To my mind, people are morally responsible for what they themselves have done, and in the case of governments, for what could arguably have been done in their name. The people of England are no longer morally responsible for the acts of Oliver Cromwell, even though they are clearly affected by those acts.
I made no attempts to “exclude” Israel from the discussion: indeed, I “discussed” Israel myself. If you like, I could quote myself doing so. See posts 19 and 27.
What I did not want was for this thread to be hijacked into yet another interminable discussion of the Arab-Israeli affair, which surely you will grant is a realistic concern!
The discussion in the other thread certainly triggered the thought (or rather, that in conjunction with the article). But I was very clear I was making a point of general application, not specifically aimed at that situation alone.
Of course, every-one who has (or imagines they have) a legitimate historical grievance assumes that their greivance is the most significant and important one. This is part of the damage that greivance style thinking does, and if you ever get an Armenan discussing the Turks, or a Turk discussing the Greeks, or an East European Jew discussing Europeans, or a Ukrainian discussing the Russians, you would know that.
Hell, speaking of slavery - my mother in law was actually a slave, something few American Blacks could claim: she was a Ukranian enslaved by the Germans. After Germany lost the war, the ethnic Germans were swept out of Poland (where many had lived for generations) with fire and sword, and she was moved in to replace some of 'em. During the war some Ukrainians cooperated with the Germans in exterminating the Jews, partly because they believed that the Jews had cooperated with the Stalinist Russians to exterminate them - and after the war, the Stalinists were back with a vengance.
Talk of “historic greivances”, who on earth could ever untangle a mess like that? Yet presumably if she lived in America, not Canada, she would be on the hook to pay … for stuff that happened before she stepped foot in the country.
Well, I suppose it depends on whether or not we are talking about reparations. I can certainly understand why some groups would continue to hold Historical Grievances against other groups for long periods. I’m more than sympathetic…after all, I used too (and probably still do to a certain extent) have personal historical grievances against the Spanish. But I’m not looking for the Spanish government to have to pay me and mine reparations.
Certainly.
No…I DO think that there are many groups (black people in the US being one of the major ones, but closely followed by Native American’s…I can think of many other groups as well off the top of my head) who have extremely legitimate grievances, and probably will for generations to come.
It wasn’t simply that the Confederates (paper) money became worthless that rendered many formerly wealthy into poor people. And really my point was that over time wealth accumulated in certain families tends to dissipate. What that means is that you’d be hard pressed to find that wealth that was accumulated during the slavery period in the US, since much of it has since been dispersed, confiscated or otherwise lost. Not only that, a large part of it isn’t even in the US…remember that the slave trade was an international phenomena, with many countries and groups participating in it and being enriched by it.
No worries.
It would be highly problematic to find the wealth that was associated with the original slavers, even if you just limited yourself to simply looking for it in the US alone…and even if it would be legal to seize it. You’d also run into the problem of providence…how do you prove that a given individual today is descended from a slave? Records for slaves were, afaik, pretty sketchy, and family histories muddled. What percentage of slave in a given individual would qualify for whatever reparations you do manage to get?
I think that blacks have legitimate grievance against the US for how they were treated in the past…I just don’t think that reparations, in this case, is either possible or manageable. Nor do I think it’s desirable. But perhaps I’m misunderstanding the OP…if we aren’t talking about physical reparations of some kind then I’d say there isn’t a real, practical Statute of Limitations on Historical type Grievances.
Do you consider affirmative action programs to be redress? If so, then there are many - you can list almost any traditionally-shat-upon ethnic minority in a Western democracy. If you mean direct compensation to individuals, then not so much, by definition.
Without that, what little of your position remains has no meaning. If there is no tangible right to recourse for a tangibly-caused grievance, there is no value to maintaining that grievance, and no reason for others not to commit the cause of a grievance. The distinction you’re trying to draw between wrongs done to individuals and wrongs done to groups of individuals, on the basis of a shared characteristic of identity, is just silly. Wrongs have been done to peoples as well as people, and because they were members of those peoples, and the effects do continue into future generations. The more desperately you try to get around the core of the argument you have brought up, the more painfully obvious it is, you know.
You do need to think this over some more. And then you might be able to come clean about why, despite the quote you yourself put in the OP referring to irredentism, you wish to omit land from the discussion and talk only about money.
Yes Malthus (you tricky bastard!), come clean about your nefarious hidden agenda. We all know that you started this thread to serve as a hidden gotcha, years down the road, in some I/P debate. The only question, and what still has Elvis puzzled, is whether this thread is in service of the Indian or Pakistani side of that I/P debate.
Your deceptions know no bounds.
Anyways, for what it’s worth, while the sentiments in your OP are noble enough, they’re not going to happen any time soon. As long as people are pissed off (whether or not there is global support, global condemnation or global apathy), especially if it’s two groups of people who’re pissed off at each other, then they’re going to continue to hold to historical grievances whether or not there’s any logical/factual foundation to them, whether or not it’s beneficial to continue their feuds, etc…
If all the Blues hate the Reds, and the Reds hates the Blues, all the global tisking will do little to nothing when it comes to actual outbreaks of violence and even less when it comes to day-to-day racism. The only way to do away with historical grudges is to work for warmer relations between the two parties and/or have a younger generation come to power that decides that the cost of continued hostility no longer justifies the benefits.
Please. You’re the first to mention that example. The problem is that there is only one that the OP has tried to declare out of bounds. If you’re serious, do note that the killings there stopped with the establishment of a firm border, recognized and accepted by both sides. The enmities continue but are dissipating as well, in recognition that the division was essentially fair. There’s a similar story in the former Yugoslavia. Draw your own comparisons.
It’s evasiveness by the OP, and now derision by you, neither of whom are willing to address it, for reasons that are apparent anyway. But you already know that. :rolleyes:
Grudges do tend to dissipate when the physical reasons, and the attitudes that drive them, are dispensed with. But not before then.
They will always look for grievances. A year or two ago, an asshole Jewish lawyer in Hungary wanted to sue the United States for hundreds of billions of dollars for failing to bomb the railways leading to the Nazi death camps. Give people money or any other advantage for their grievances, and they will always find new grievances to charge you with.
The mere fact that we exist is a grievance to some people.
Yup, obviously the notion that people will actually give up such greivances is idealistic in the extreme.
The lesser issue (and one which is more practicable) is whether or not one could persuade a sufficient number of people to agree to give no practical credance to enacting restitutionary measures based on such grievances - not the least reason for which is that such measures, if granted, to not alleviate the greivance, mut merely serve to exacerbate competing grievances (why should group X have an ‘official stamp of approval’, and not group Y?)
I do not believe this is possible. Some grievances seem to just echo on forever…or at least for a long time. Some slowly fade away, as the past injustices are superseded by a better situation (or by fresh injustices perhaps).
I believe that, eventually, the Historical Grievance of, say, former black slaves in the US will fade away as blacks become more and more fully integrated and accepted into American society and culture. This has happened to an amazing degree already in the last 40 years, and while I think there is a LONG way to go, I expect that (not that I’ll live that long) 40 years from now it will be just as remarkable a change. They will look back on our time as we look back on how things were in the 50’s and 60’s and shake their heads at how backward we are…as those in the 60’s looked back at how things were at the beginning of the century.
For Native American’s though, I can’t see THEIR grievances ever fading away. For the most part they won’t be fully integrated into American society, and they will continue to be treated like 2nd class citizens, continue to be virtually segregated (granted, this works both ways), etc etc. The very environment those living on reservations are in will continue to reverberate their own grievances against the US…I don’t see that changing.
The same goes for Israel and the Palestinian’s…I don’t believe that the Palestinian people will ever give up their historical grievances against Israel. Especially since I can’t see any happy outcome for them at this point…they have poisoned the well too much, caused too much hate and discontent, and done themselves and their cause too much damage. They will never even get half a loaf at this point, and that resentment will linger for generations, maybe longer.
Well, I’d posit that sure, you could get a huge number of people to agree that the grievances of certain groups should simply be forgotten. The problem is, folks are notoriously, shall we say, selective in such agreeing.
For instance, some people argue that of course Native Americans shouldn’t get back the US but other people who have claims to land deserve to get that land back.
Some argue that the population transfers during the partition of India/Pakistan were only just and proper and spared further bloodshed, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ work has forever tainted America as a quasi-genocidal state.
We don’t even need to really discuss the number of people who are “very concerned with Middle Eastern Justice” but who don’t have a word to spare for all the Jewish people expelled from Arab countries and who wouldn’t know what “Hama” referred to if their lives depended on.
In a nutshell, I think it’d be nifty but it simply aint gonna happen.
“History is nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Human history is the history of one group exploiting, oppressing, butchering, conquering, etc… each other. Hell, no modern nation state was formed as a result of peaceful agrarian peoples quietly tilling their fields and peacefully agreeing with their neighbors as to where the borders should lie. There are legitimate (and non-legitimate) grievances across the board. The only real way to get rid of them is not by agreeing to tutt-tutt them after a certain statute of limitations has passed, but to improve relations int the here-and-now as well as improving conditions so that grudges hold little to no meaning for everybody except the lunatic fringe. For instance, while modern Irish Americans certain had ancestors who had to go through some shit, the opportunities afforded to an Irish American in 2009 are pretty much equal to the mainstream. If in, (say) another 50 years even ‘systemic racism’ in America is a vestige of history, racial grudges along the black/white dynamic will be greatly reduced if not eliminated.
Much like how many young women these days don’t define themselves as feminists because they see no need for it, partially because previous changes have helped to significantly narrow the gap between the sexes (or genders, or whatever.)