Comment by _gabe_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _gabe_ | Hacker News Reader

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> Everybody makes mistakes. But it takes real courage to own up your mistakes and fix them.

Yes, but like you said, this happened in the past. The current French citizens are not the ones who made these mistakes.

For the same reason that we don't punish the children for the crimes of their parents, we shouldn't be accusing people today of the crimes of their ancestors. I agree that it would be amazing if the French decided to help restore Haiti, but it's not beneficial to cast blame on the French people of today and demand reparations.

At the very least, if we demand reparations of them today how far back do we go and who else do we demand reparations from? The Germans committed atrocities against the Jews less than 100 years ago, but nobody is demanding reparations there? What about Mao Zedong, also less than 100 years ago? Or how about the evils going on right now in places like Saudi Arabia[0], Afghanistan[1], or the very alive slave trade of over 21-45 million people right now[2]?

[0]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/01/30/saudi-arabia-10-reasons-...

[1]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/01/18/afghanistan-taliban-depr...

[2]: https://www.endslaverynow.org/blog/articles/human-traffickin...

There's a nuance here that you are deliberately ignoring. It's not like I'm asking the French to atone for slavery (which is what you seem to be implying); the reality is even worse than that: the French made the Haitians pay 150 Million Francs for their own freedom (an amount 10x larger than what USA paid France for the state of Louisiana).

Think about it: THE FRENCH FORCED THEIR SLAVES TO BUY THEIR OWN FREEDOM FOR 150,000,000 FRANCS!

Please read the gory details here before replying: https://theconversation.com/when-france-extorted-haiti-the-g...

This is what's shameful and the French _should_ be ashamed.

If your grandfather robbed a family and left them impoverished, yes, you are not responsible for the theft, but you continue to benefit from it, and you are the one who can choose to make amends, not your grandfather.

If a Swiss banker today is in charge of the gold extracted from the teeth of Jews, Romani, communists, homosexuals, etc. murdered in concentration camps, must he give it back to the descendants of the victims? He was neither a Nazi nor the banker the Nazis sent the gold to originally. He is not responsible for their actions, but he is now the steward of this stolen wealth. What is his responsibility at this point?

Money seems different from gold because it is fungible and abstract. Your standard of living may be based in part upon some historical theft, but which part and how much? There isn't a particular dollar bill or pound note you can point to as stolen. Gold melted down from fillings isn't like that. But this just speaks to the poverty of our imagination, not anything morally relevant.

> The Germans committed atrocities against the Jews less than 100 years ago, but nobody is demanding reparations there?

As it seems, reparations were demanded (and payed) sometimes, cp. e.g. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/german-holocaust-repara...

> The German government and the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany announced an increase in funding for social welfare services for Holocaust survivors by $88 million on July 10, 2018. This funding increase will allow survivors to receive more frequent and better quality home care, food support, transportation and medical services. This allocation makes Germany’s 2019 total pledge to the Claims Conference $564 million.

(Emphasis mine)

I think this final paragraph in that article says it all. Who are the reparations going to? The Holocaust survivors. I'm not aware of any Haitians that were wronged by France in the 1800s that are still alive today, but if any of them are still alive that makes it much easier to figure out how to pay reparations :)

My general point was that it's ridiculous to pay reparations of wrongdoing to people that weren't wronged. And you can go down the whole path of how certain people are born into higher social statuses and whatnot, but that's a different argument and that ultimately boils down to the fact that life isn't fair or equal. There's nothing we can do about that.

What we can do is fight the crimes against humanity that are happening right now. We can make life better for the people around us. We can help influence our small circle of impact, and hopefully make the world a better place in the process. Focusing on the evils of our ancestors won't get us anywhere (unless we're studying them to avoid making the same mistakes). But maybe we can fight the crimes that are going on right now so that our posterity won't have the same arguments about how we wronged them by not fighting the injustice that is now.

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