Comment on How ‘Zionist’ became a slur on the US left
GBU_28@lemm.ee 8 months agoI’d be careful with the “living memory” argument. Lots of pretty recent colonialism and atrocity occurred outside of “living memory”
Comment on How ‘Zionist’ became a slur on the US left
GBU_28@lemm.ee 8 months agoI’d be careful with the “living memory” argument. Lots of pretty recent colonialism and atrocity occurred outside of “living memory”
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 8 months ago
It was quite deliberate on my part. You can partly undo things done to or by living people, not even close to all the way obviously, but you can return things taken, from those that have stolen them, and reasonably minimize collateral effects from that, because any uninvolved descendants of the guilty party either don’t yet exist, or can reasonably be assumed to have available whatever resources the perpetrating group had beforehand. When the original victims and perpetrators are dead, though, things become more ethically murky, because you can end up in a situation where it isn’t clear who specifically to return stolen properties to, those properties may no longer exist or no longer be useful in the way they once were, the people in possession of them now may both not be involved in the original atrocity and be dependent on them/have nowhere else to go, and the two groups may have had time for mixing to occur or new identities unique to the region to form. That isn’t to say that there’s nothing to be done about addressing historical atrocities of course, one can still try to offset the impact on the victims descendants, but that doesn’t really undo any of the impact on the victims themselves or punish anyone involved, because you can’t at that point, justice is time sensitive, it just helps a whole new set of people with negative circumstances that they were born into as a result of the atrocity.
GBU_28@lemm.ee 8 months ago
My point was gating significant or actionable injustices to only those occurring recently means all sorts of past injustices are de facto tabled by that position. For example, should slavery from the civil war era, or the colonialism of North America still be discussed and addressed? No one alive witnessed that
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 8 months ago
I wasn’t so much talking about what should be addressed, but rather what can be addressed. You can, of course, try to break the cycle of poverty that the descendants of slaves face even today, by things like education scholarships or monetary reparations. But, we’d want to do this regardless of the source of that poverty being slavery, Id imagine, nobody deserves to be born into poverty after all. The relevance of slavery to the discussion there is primarily just as an explanation for why that poverty is so concentrated in African American communities, because if in some alternative universe in which civil war era slavery had never happened but somehow that poverty still existed, we’d still need to do something about it. What you can’t do though is bring relief to the slaves themselves (at least those of that era, modern slaves of course can be, but that’s still within living memory), or punish the people that enslaved them. Not because of any kind of moral argument, but just because those people are dead. Sure, I guess one could argue that this effectively locks in injustice that has occurred long enough ago, but well, that’s just part of the nastiness of things like colonialism, the impact it has on a people is something that simply cannot be truly undone.
GBU_28@lemm.ee 8 months ago