Are you saying it’s ok to do it now because it was done in the past? I don’t think anyone is pretending that this stuff didn’t happen before. It’s not just ‘leftist brown people’ who have done it…many leftist white people have done it all over the world. And many rightist white people too. And many yellow and brown people of various political stripes have done it too.
Because one group does it doesn’t make it right that another group does. Nor is it a smart thing to do, in any case, whether it’s right or wrong. From a pragmatic perspective, it’s kind of stupid to do this today, and it was kind of stupid for them to have done it in the past as well. All it does is sew the seeds for future nastiness.
I understand your point, but there has to be, for lack of a better term, a statute of limitations on this stuff. If it happened to you, or you remember it in your life? Then yes, that deserves some compensation/correction. If it is a matter of us sitting in Starbucks and we realize that one of our ancestors screwed the other person’s ancestors over in 1878, then there has to be some “no harm no foul” doctrine come into place sometime, right?
I mean, history is filled with conquest. What year should we go back to which was the ideal and fair year where property and money was fairly divided and in the hands of who it should be in the hands of?
Should white people in the United States sail off back to Europe and let the Native Americans have it all in the name of doing what is right?
So a farm is easier to hand over than a high class development? Will there be any serious national problems if the newbie owners suck at being property managers of a high class development? I can only imagine you mean farms are easier because there’s less cash involved or something?
IMO, America as a state/nation should take responsibility for the incredibly poor plight so many Native Americans find themselves in, and take drastic action to rectify it. It’s no coincidence that the two groups that were treated by far the worst in American history – Native Americans and black Americans – fare the worst in nearly every statistical indicator.
One enormous difference between the US and ZA is the amount of aboriginal peoples left; this shouldn’t be taken as proposing a South African trail of tears. The ways you compensate a group which happens to still be the majority of the population, and one which is a clear and distinct minority, should be different because the situation is very different.
Expropriation of private means of production has been done many times in the past - and is usually followed by economic failure as people realize that the old owners were part of an ecosystem of information sharing and local knowledge and best peactices, and the new owners tend to be those with political pull rather than specialized knowledge. And even if they are people who know how to farm they know nothing about the specifics of the farm they just expropriated.
If there is widespread seizing of farms in South Africa, I predict a substantial drop in agricultural output.
You can’t repair what has been done to the dead. They’re dead.
OK, for instance, Amerindians are still in a bad situation by comparison to the rest of the US population. They have a legitimate claim over the whole of the USA. What would be a legitimate redistribution?
As I already wrote, my first thought is that neither the descendant of the thief nor the descendant of the victim would be existing if history had been different. If your parents have been deported to Auschwitz, for instance, and you were yourself born in 1950, you haven’t been victimized by the holocaust. Had the holocaust not happened, you wouldn’t be better off : you just wouldn’t have been born.
But apart from that, the first problem is : how far back do you go? You obviously can’t redress all past wrongs, so where do you stop and why? You take away my farm because great granddad stole the land from African natives. OK, fine. Now a different group shows that this land had been taken away one century before by the people I stole it from from a different group of the same ethnicity. I assume the land should now go to their descendants. Now, history shows that this whole ethnic group moved in two centuries before, and displaced another ethnic group whose descendants are now living in terrible conditions in a different country across the border. Should they be allowed in South Africa and given the land their ancestors owned? Why or why not? The Zulus are originally invaders who took land away from the natives more or less at the same time when Europeans took land away from Amerindians. If someone belongs to an ethnicity who was living in what is now South Africa before the Zulus came in, should he get Zulu land? Why or why not? “I stole it (or rather, one of my ancestors stole it), I get to keep it” shouldn’t apply to them either.
The second is : who “pays”? Let’s say I stole land from native africans. My first son made his farm prosper, my second son sold his share of the inheritance and started a successful business, my third son blowed all his inheritance on cocaine and hookers. Nowadays, my great grandsons by my first son are wealthy landowners, those by my second son are wealthy industrialists, those by my third son are impoverished blue collars. Who should pay? At which point exactly does the situation becomes : “even though you have done nothing wrong, and aren’t even benifiting from the “original sin”, you still should be paying for what your close or remote ancestors did?”
So did this happen back in the old days when the whites were expropriating farms in South Africa? I guess we’ve moved past whether it would be FAIR to expropriate farms and businesses to whether it would be efficient.
And sure, it very easily might not be efficient. Although in cases where the landowners just extract rents from the actual farmers who have the actual specialized knowledge of how farms work, it could be the opposite.
So in cases where there is was a systemic past injustice, but the exact perpetrators and beneficiaries and victims of that injustice are hard to identify after all this time, specific restorative justice can be kind of difficult. So one solution is generalized restorative justice. You don’t have to specifically expropriate the land of some guy who inherited his land from his white grandfather who chased off the former owners at gunpoint with the approval of the government. But how about a more general approach, like say, higher taxes on everyone to pay for restorative justice for everyone?
But in the actual case of South Africa, it’s not so far in the dead past that we can’t find specific perpetrators and specific victims. It’s not hundreds of years ago that this stuff all happened. It was 1994.
But it’s not a hijack. If there’s a “fair” and sensible way of handling the issue of reparations, it could be equally applied to any situation. If a principle is valid in the USA, it’s equally valid in South Africa.
I don’t think people are grokking one thing about the South African situation specifically - the people who had their houses taken from them, or were driven off their farm land? They’re still here right now. This isn’t “your 3 x great grandparent” this is your dad (literally - *my *dad is a participant in an active land claim). This is land that was stolen in *very *living memory.
But specific victims of specific perpetrators could, or at least should be able to, get redress. The issue begins to be thorny when the perpetrator was your late dad and the victim my late dad.
That an issue might be “thorny” is not an excuse to throw up our hands and do nothing, especially when millions are still suffering due to these injustices. At the very least, the present ramifications of past injustices should be studied in detail, publicly, by congress.
Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Not in the general sense of “whites stole something so it’s OK for blacks to steal something”, mind you - I mean it’s OK to take back land that was specifically stolen in the first place. Because that isn’t stealing, it’s taking it back from thieves.
And sure, there could be a statute of limitations on that sort of thing. But whatever that limitation is, it should be greater than living memory. Which in South Africa, it is definitely not.
I don’t see how it’s thorny *at all *- you are in possession of something your late father stole. We all know it’s stolen. So it does *not *belong to you. You could, knowing it is stolen, choose to hang on to it.
from the links I posted earlier most of the seizures are going to be the people who agreed to sell the land to the government for redistribution but are stalling to get more money when the real estate market goes up and they reappraise the land value
No. What makes the situation simple if dad is still alive is that he commited the theft, hence can be held responsible and compelled to indemnize the victim regardless of what happened since (assuming we ignore statutes of limitation). As soon as he’s dead, there’s nobody left who committed harm and has as a result a clear moral obligation to compensate anybody.
To begin with, while I was talking in general terms, you have chosen a very simple case where a tangible thing has been stolen (so, for instance, it can’t adress the issue of reparations for slavery, or for victims of genocide, etc…) and is still in my possession (so, if dad, and me as a result, became a millionaire thanks to his malfeasance but whatever he originally stole isn’t anymore in my possession, you’re out of luck. For that matter, you’re also out of luck if he blew the money on hookers).
And even in this simple situation, aplying a simple principle (like : “it was dad’s, so I can take it back”), you might run into a number of issues. I might have organized my life around the possession of this thing, and taking it back from me might cause me far more damages than those originally incurred by your dad (that I’m not responsible for to begin with), for instance I can have invested all my savings from 30 years of hard work into maintening and improving the house dad stole. I might have acquired it from dad not by inheritance, but by a transaction hence not be in a different situation than someone else unrelated who bought it. I might question why exactly I’m the only one supporting the consequences because I inherited the thing dad stole while my brothers inherited money instead. I might question your right to receive anything (everybody knows that your dad hated your guts, and you’d never have inherited it anyway). I guess I could come up with a nearly infinite number of issues, and that in real life a nearly infinite number of issues would actually come up.
Many of these issues could be solved by you receiving monetary damages instead of getting back this specific thing (like the inherent unfairness of taking it from whoever randomly happens to possess it at the moment), but some wouldn’t be. To begin with what amount (value of the thing stolen when it was stolen, or its current value that might be substantially different, for instance), from whom (just being dad’s son doesn’t even show that I benefited from the theft in any way, if for instance he was a deadbeat dad. And even if I did benefit it’s going to be impossible to decide in what way and how much) and to whom, since being the child of someone who was wronged doesn’t necessarily entitle you to be compensated for your dad loss, especially from me for something my dad did.
That’s a big reason why there are statutes of limitation for such things to begin with. After some decades, with all the circumstances of life in between, figuring out a resolution that is fair to everybody involved taking account all the specific circumstances of the case would be an absolute mess. In fact, I think that in France there’s a statute of limitations of 30 years even for things that I have personnally stolen from you.
In any case, regarding the specific issue of South Africa, I was unaware that these land grabs could have occured recently, which should make restitutions an issue relatively easy to solve, even though many details would need to be known, like “how was this land seized exactly and by whom?”, “how people acquired it?”, who are the people it would be taken from now?". For instance, if the government seized the land, sold it in auctions, and it was later sold again to a different person who is going to be expropriated without compensation, I think there’s a problem. Also, would I be wrong in assuming that even though some of these land grabs are fairly recent, most happened generations ago?