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Comment by femiagbabiaka | Hacker News Reader

Not surprising. The US has not paid reparations to most of the people it has wronged.

Amazing what sort of atrocities people will commit when fear and emergencies are invoked.

You don't have to invoke all of that to commit atrocities, just appeals to convenience work well enough to convince someone to forsake the rights of another person. Settlement of this country should have never happened, this is all stolen indigenous land whose conquest was legally justified by the handwaving of a patriarch of a religion hundreds of years ago. White settlers at the time saw native peoples as a pest much like a coyote is a pest to livestock, and much like coyotes they were allowed to kill off these people pretty matter of factly without recourse. There was no fear or emergency justifying that action, only that the white person would like to make profit grazing their cattle in the buffalo country on land that was offered to them by their government for next to nothing.

That’s true. We did see that in recent years with people even such as Noam Chomsky arguing for ostracizing undesirables and withholding food from them.

  > even such as Noam Chomsky arguing for ostracizing undesirables and withholding food from them.

wow, when was this?!

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/noam-chomsky-says-the-un...

  > Speaking on YouTube’s Primo Radical on Oct. 24, Chomsky said that for the unvaccinated people who are segregated from society, how they obtain groceries should be left up to them. “How can we get food to them?” asked Chomsky. “Well, that’s actually their problem.”

hmm... while a bit harsh, im not sure that files under "withholding food" from the unvaccinated...

I think that’s exactly what he was saying.

He's really saying that these people made their bed and are forced to sleep in it, and they can't expect society to go out of its way to accommodate their disregard for society in general.

No, he said they should be ostracized and removed from society and food is then their own problem. The force of violent coercion is implied and quite obvious.

Has anybody ever paid reparations to anybody? Inter-Generational debt just isn’t a thing.

This kind of stuff can easily be searched for. Here's a low-mid quality article:

https://www.vox.com/2014/5/23/5741352/six-times-victims-have...

All but the last of those examples only paid out to the living survivors of the atrocity, and the last only earmarked 5% for descendants.

So it does seem that inter-generational reparations are indeed very rare.

>$10 million out of court settlement with the victims and their families

>$2.4 million today would be set aside to compensate the 11 or so remaining survivors of the incident, $800,000 to compensate those who were forced to flee the town, and $160,000 would go to college scholarships primarily aimed at descendants.

Inter-generational reparations exist explicitly in two of the six examples in that article.

Japanese interns that didn't collect their payment from the US left it up to their heirs to collect it, so I'll even add that as a technicality of inter-generational reparations.

Also I'm rather sure Israel is still getting payments for what happened in the 1940s... But I could be wrong there.

Inter-generational reparations are indeed rare if you don't look very hard for examples of it happening.

Now compare that to all the instances where people committed atrocities against other people. It seems like you’re talking about something vanishingly rare.

War reparations from the conquered/losing side appear in history now and then.

Assuming your reparations claim was correct, injustice becomes ok if it happens often enough.

Who said that? Stuff can be “not okay” but also “not the problem of anyone currently alive.” We have a concept of a statute of limitations in law, for example.

Just being pedantic here, but there's not limitation on, say, homicide.

Whether or not there is a statute of limitations is generally dependent on the severity of the offense.

But again, just a nit-pick. To my mind, the mistake is in paying any sort of reparations to anyone, ever. As a nation state, unfortunately, some things you have to go all in on. Not paying reparations is one of those things.

I am OK with forcing state and local governments to pay out for egregious acts taken in explicit contravention of Constitutional rights. But that's because as a nation state we should also go all in on defending the constitutional rights of our citizens. I know that's talking out of both sides of my mouth, but the reality is that nation states can incur far larger obligations than state and local governments can. A nation state could end up with an obligation that realistically simply can't be paid.

> Just being pedantic here, but there's not limitation on, say, homicide.

There is though ... the lifetime of perpetrator.

>Just being pedantic here, but there's not limitation on, say, homicide.

Right, but sons aren't held responsible for their father's crimes. And while the Father's estate can be liable for wrongful death, that is generally limited in time. Certainly, you can't just go after all descendants decades later.

It's not just a slippery slope, but fair compensation is essentially impossible to determine. The average Japanese America is far richer than the average American--significantly so. Should you discount for that? Doesn't seem fair to penalize them for being successful. But the other hand, maybe that shows that the lasting harm wasn't that bad.

A lot easier to just let the past be the past and to police our actions going forward.

Yes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_Agreement_between_...

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