How about all the Arab and BLACK Africans directly involved in the slave trade? Shouldn’t the outraged world be backtracking and holding them accountable? Or maybe this thing should go global. Make Spain pay for central and South American civilization collapse. Hell; let’s do genetic testing to look for Neanderthal DNA and hold Homo sapiens responsible for their eventual demise.

Thank you Legal Beagle for the insight on Native Americans and slavery. I was thinking of the role the 9th and 10th Calvary played in the oppression of Native Americans in the west.

quote:

Originally posted by k5blazer:
Thank you Legal Beagle for the insight on Native Americans and slavery. I was thinking of the role the 9th and 10th Calvary played in the oppression of Native Americans in the west.

By this timeframe you mention, the US created the Indian Police Service in an effort to have traditional enemies "police" each other and drive tribes from a consensus model of government (e.g. the headman system of the Navajo) into a more "structured" model to secure treaties, then use those treaties as a basis for military action to gain additional federal lands following the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadaloupe in 1848.

There's no outright "we're doing this" statement that I can find, but my hypothesis is that the use of "Buffalo soldiers" fighting against the Apaches, Kiowas, and Comanches was not accidental, but rather intentional to sow further discord between two groups of people with a common history of mistreatment and broken promises by the United States.

This later would lead to the Ghost Dance War, when the United States violated the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 by building railroads and putting traditional enemies inside the same reservations; in the Great Sioux Reservation, Crow Dog (a traditionalist) would explain that this was just the latest in broken promises and the US should be resisted, against Spotted Tail's (a progressive who wanted peace with the US) wishes, with a Winchester rifle to Spotted Tail's face. These events would come to a head with the the Wounded Knee Massacre and then, paradoxically, cause MASSIVE divisions within the civil rights movement in the 1960s and Red Power movement of the 1970s.

That history was, whether deliberately or not, obfuscated so that descendants of enslaved Africans and descendants of dispossessed Native people saw only the wrongs they had done to each other rather than the larger issue that /both/ groups had injustices committed on each other as a result of US racial and expansionist policy.

Again, I only speak to the history side because there is a potential for reparations commissions, however well meaning, can easily become a flashpoint for polarized political views and significant violence from both sides.

In West Germany AND in Israel, reparations became incredibly contentious on both sides (including a bombing campaign by a splinter group of hardliners in Israel against the West German government to provoke a NEW conflict) and almost didn't happen: "THOSE Germans were responsible, not us." "They cannot buy atonement and pay us once for a lifetime of suffering

I suspect that misinformation campaigns on both sides of a reparation dialog (in my mind, divided among pro/con rather than racial/ethnic/political lines), were one to ever happen in the US, would attempt to suppress history or focus on individual conduct (e.g. 7th Cav at Wounded Knee, 9th Cav during the Crow War) rather that look more broadly: those actions, which harmed all sides, was the policy of the United States as a government.

Reparations are government damages because of what individuals did on the orders of a government, not those of individuals exercising their own agency (which is what criminal and tort law would address).

Boston will need to keep a weather eye out for astroturf efforts to (1) incite violence (it's going to get real the moment Boston starts doing this in earnest, on BOTH sides); (2) getting individuals to focus on what people did to other people (which creates an in-group/out-group dynamic and a very predictable honor/shame/challenge response cycle), and; (3) suppressing historical analysis of government vice individual action in creating systemic inequalities.

Unless well-respected and pragmatic people like Adenauer/de Klerk (who recognize that there needs to be some redress for institutional racism that ALSO ensures a program of indemnification for material damages) and Ben-Gurion/Mandala figures (who recognize that there can be no true redress, but that compensation can offset income inequality and build a productive economy that addresses poverty and lack of opportunity), sit down and review historical wrongs by ALL parties in a neutral and fact-driven manner, there is a distinct possibility that even the most well-intentioned discussion, will fall apart.

How about Sacco and Vanzetti? They were wrongly treated too. them there I-talians coming over and doing anarchy and what have you. Is there reparations for ignorance? maybe my kids will benefit. this crap has got to stop. we're all here now, either we strive for success or we wallow in despair. the choice is ours. the government handing out cash because someone doesn't like what happened in the past is absurd.

quote:

Originally posted by egregore:
Reparations: the idea that people who were never slave owners should repay people who were never slaves. The time window for such reparations ran out around 1900.

Martin Luther King Jr. makes a compelling argument as to why this is a fiction in an intereview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXNpx2hj1tE.

Those same fallacies existed in the reparations to Indian tribes like the Lakota, when settling claims for Ghost Dance War, or Alaska Natives during the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

If you will permit a further comparison, imagine saying this in West Germany 1951:

Reparationen: die Idee, dass gewöhnliche Deutschevolk, die nie Nazis waren, Juden in Israel zurückzahlen sollten, die nicht in den Lagern getötet wurden. Das Zeitfenster für solche Reparationen lief um 1945 aus.

That's not what reparations are. Reparations are like Luxemburger Abkommen/Heskem HaShillumim [הסכם השילומים]) or Treaty of New Echota.

My summary would be: /We/ as individual did not do these things. But we elect a government and support a government who did these things. The government should help those harmed by the government to recover, so that as a nation we are a more just and equitable society.

(Ben-Gurion was more eloquent. "There are two approaches...One is the ghetto Jew's approach and the other is of an independent people. I don't want to run after a German and spit in his face. I don't want to run after anybody. I want to sit here and build here. I'm not going to go to America to take part in a vigil against [German chancellor] Adenauer." See https://www.ynetnews.com/artic...40,L-3439653,00.html)

Everything Dr. King describes about the condition of African Americans is equally applicable to the state of native people in the US, or to European Jews evacuated to Israel.

The Israeli claim was solely economic, because the Germans could never make up for what they did with any type of material recompense. Instead, they demonstrated resettlement of 500,000 Holocaust survivors at a cost of 1.5 billion dollars and an estimated six billion dollars worth of Jewish property confiscated, which was then paid by West Germany and used to build programs that jump-started the nascent Israeli economy and supplemented the income of individuals who were identifiable victims of Shoah.

Both sides (again, pro/con as opposed to any other division) must be clear of what reparations are -- are a mechanism of addressing historic injustice between a government and its people -- before they can decide if they are for or against them.

It's also important to be clear as to what reparations accomplish: elimination of (often racial) division and income inequality in a society that leads to paralyzing division (which you see expressed today in modern sentiments like the /r/antiwork and "eat the rich" movements).

Please don't misunderstand my post. I'm not advocating for or against reparations based on racial or economic injustice in the US.

I /am/ advocating for an understanding of what reparations are, and how they can be a useful tool when the state employs violence against its own citizens and subsequently faces civil war or economic ruin unless that violence is addressed, just as the United States in the Indian Wars and postwar West Germany during the Cold War.

quote:

Originally posted by DJ_Boston:
How about Sacco and Vanzetti? They were wrongly treated too. them there I-talians coming over and doing anarchy and what have you. Is there reparations for ignorance? maybe my kids will benefit. this crap has got to stop. we're all here now, either we strive for success or we wallow in despair. the choice is ours. the government handing out cash because someone doesn't like what happened in the past is absurd.

The Lakota have $1B in a trust account that is never touched, because they don't want the cash.

They /do/ participate in economy-building programs like ISDEA, because they /want/ to strive to do things for themselves but were forcibly dispossessed of their communual land.

Dr. Martin Luther King was interviewed by interviewed by Sander Vanocur, NBC News, May 8, 1967. His remarks were directed at the Negro (used here as a term of art to reflect the pre-Civil Rights Act condition of African Americans) but are extremely helpful in analyzing the purpose of reparations: to allow the ENTIRE nation to benefit from a more homogeneous society without economic divides compounded by a structurally racist society:

"When white American settlers in the new West tell the Lakota to lift himself by his own bootstraps, they don’t look over the legacy of war and removal. Now I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, but it’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps."

The United States decided to pay reparations to the Lakota; they hold defense contracts, operate their own college system and hospitals, and in doing so REDUCE the overall funds appropriated and expended by Congress for treaty obligations.

"When Germans tell the Israeli to lift himself by his own bootstraps, they don’t look over the legacy of Shoah, the confiscation of real property and wealth, and a forced escape from Europe. Now I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, but it’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps."

The West German government paid more than $7B in reparations and became one of the strongest Cold War economies, allied with its former enemies and ensuring not only peace with foreign nations but a sense of healing and restoration following Shoah.

Those are not absurd outcomes.