Victor, I think I answered all of this in my post to Brad.
I think that it is strange for economists to mix responsibility
for felonies up with financial responsibility for illegality in
the observance of valid contracts between large political
and corporate entitites. Even an artist such as myself
can separate the two. If someone comes afterwards and
joins a company that has committed and benefitted from
an illegal act then the company still owes the debt and
if that late comer is a part of the company and is benefitting
from that relationship they also owe a part of that debt.
Why is that so hard to understand? It feels a little
slippery when one flows so easily between corporate
and individual responsibilities. It is the government's
responsibility to repay their citizens for any loss due to
their illegality at another time, not the people who were
victims of that illegality. Valid contracts also have
nothing to do with old battles and wars won and lost
although the Irish have been fighting that one out for
400 years and as I told Brad, Columbus was able to
come to America because the Spanish resisted the
Moors and others for 700 years until they were finally
strong enough to reclaim their rights and land.
Victor, it just makes more sense to me for us to deal
with these issues in a way that doesn't create a 700
year wound that will eventually destroy what has been
built. What makes you think that we have any shorter
memories than the Spanish? Spain was a multi-cultural
society much like the U.S. before the Castillians kicked
out the Moors. The Basques are still alive and fighting
the Spaniards over things that the Spanish did to them
that was as stupid as the Moor's and Jews mistakes
in Spain. And today the Jews are fighting the same
issues in Israel that happened to them. It just has to
stop someplace and ignoring the debts is not the way
you do it IMHO.
Ray.
Victor Milne wrote:
> If any value including justice is made an absolute with no limitations, we
> end up with a mess of insoluble complications, and much of what is
> ultimately solvable benefits the lawyers far more than the victims, as Ed
> Weick notes.
>
> Is there such a thing as collective guilt? Are all whites legally liable to
> compensate all Indians for the undoubted injustices? Or do we sort it out on
> the basis of family history? Ed makes a good case that his Central European
> ancestors had nothing to do with exploiting the first nations. I suppose I
> could do the same. My German great-grandfather was certainly not a very
> successful exploiter; in the mid 1870's he was in the workhouse (Victorian
> workfare) at Berlin [Kitchener], Ontario, and so poor that he literally sold
> my three-year-old grandfather to a prosperous merchant who wanted to adopt
> him.
>
> Even if we go with collective guilt, we find messy situations that cannot be
> sorted out.
>
> Do we prosecute the descendants of Danes for the extirpation of independent
> Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the eighth century, which same Anglo-Saxon kingdoms
> were founded by driving out the Celts?
>
> Do the modern Italians have to make reparations for the damn near successful
> Roman genocide against the Jews under Vespasian (68 A.D.)?
>
> Do the modern Jews have to make reparations (and to whom?) for the multiple
> genocides against Palestinian tribes in the Old Testament period? To cite
> just one example of many, God is presented as ordering King Saul (ca. 1010
> B.C.E.) to commit a genocide against the Amalekites: "This is what the Lord
> Almighty says, '...Now go attack the Amalekites and totally destroy
> everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and
> women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys." (1
> Samuel 15:2-3) As is well known, the Old Testament records that God deposed
> Saul because he failed to carry out this order to the letter. However, the
> genocide was completed in the expansionist reign of King Hezekiah (720-692
> B.C.E.) "They [families from the clan of Simeon] killed the remaining
> Amalekites who had escaped, and they have lived there to this day."
>
> All this is NOT meant to suggest that we can ignore Indian land claims or
> the claims arising out of the World War II Holocaust. It is meant to suggest
> that striving for absolute justice creates more problems than it solves. In
> justice as in medicine we need to do a kind of triage, ignoring the cases
> which are past help, dealing first with the most serious cases which can be
> remediated (but probably not fully healed) and leaving to the end the minor
> cases.
>
> Victor
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Robert Rosenstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: July 29, 1999 10:13 PM
> Subject: Re: Canadian Indian Claims
>
> | If there is no such thing as obligations to past generations, then the
> | idea of History is nullified. If an action such as a genocide has no
> | force after a given number of years, then as long as one can get away
> | with it for the requisite period, the action has no value except to let
> | others know what can be gotten away with. Consequently, except for a
> | nuclear winter in which the slate is wiped clean, there is no justice.
> |
> | Robert
> |
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