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Historical injustice depends a lot on where you start the clock.
I'll try to keep this mostly general, because much of history is under debate, especially about culture war issues, and litigating ancient history for current politics is a fool's game (if potentially entertaining). This phenomenon is not relegated to any particular side, it is rather the method by which fact and fiction become myth. It is how partially-understood history becomes dogma, and drives our current politics and society.
The history of humanity is a history of injustice, conflict and strife. When we look to history to explain our modern world and inform our modern politics, much of the divide between us can be discerned by where we start our "clocks". One notices that, for instance, in the Jewish/Palestinian arguments, one side likes to start the clock in the 1970s and one starts it in the 1930s. Real history, of course, is not divided artificially. Every conflict leads to the next, every injustice to the next. Progress happens on a long enough timeline, but there are enough reverses along the way to outlive any of us.
This is something to watch in ourselves, as much as in others. To think about where we're starting the clock, and whether something important might have happened before that to produce that situation.
To take a silly hobby-horse theory/hot take of mine as example, I think the british fought on the right side of WW2, but the wrong side of WW1. I think the historical context WW2 is completely dependent on WW1, and that of WW1 is inextricable from the Franco-Prussian war, the countries, borders and alliances it produced, and thus the clock should start in 1870 rather than 1913. Anyone who starts the clock in 1913 is a Francophile.
One thing I've contemplated about the approach to estimating historical grievances that must be repaid later on by the nominal 'victor' at the time is that it would seemingly create some unfortunate game-theoretic implications when engaging in a particular conflict.
If you wage a successful campaign of complete annihilation/genocide, leaving behind no survivors to later complain about your past misdeeds, then you have less risk of ever being made to acknowledge or have to compensate for said annihilation. So any time you engage in conflict, you should probably go for broke and try to completely eliminate the opponent from the gene pool, assuming you can define them tightly enough to do so.
If you seize the land out from under someone, and kill any and every person who might claim to be the rightful beneficiary of the land, you're effectively shoring up your own claim to the land such that nobody can really claim to have a morally superior right to it than you do, if only because nobody alive can trace their lineage to someone who used to own the land. Granted you may have to kill thousands upon thousands of people, but if the alternative is you end up being forced to return the land or pay massive compensation decades down the line...
Or try to reduce it to an absurd hypothetical: let us say that there is particular [minority group] that experienced hundreds of years of oppression and suffering inflicted by others, and then a systematic campaign to exterminate them down to the last man. This campaign failed about 100 years back, but it came so close to succeeding that in the present there is only one (1) surviving descendant traceable to that group. Rough estimates for the rightful compensation for the pain and suffering inflicted on these peoples is 1 trillion dollars. Is it somehow appropriate to award that full amount to this one surviving descendant, thereby rendering them the richest person on the planet, by far?
Would it be bad to just wait another 50 years until that person dies with no heirs and consider the debt 'extinguished?'
If nobody survives who could seemingly make a claim for reparations, then what possible method could you use to impose accountability in the present?
Practically speaking your odds of success in going the full genocide route are likely low enough that this 'strategy' becomes VERY high risk/high reward, at best. But man, ethics seem to get spotty in these "all or nothing" scenarios, where you carry the full moral blame and consequences for your act if anyone survives, whereas if your evil plan succeeds in full you're home free.
The other thing to contemplate is the question of why misdeeds/debts should be carried forward to be paid back later by one's descendants, whilst positive achievements/credits aren't?
Is there really no historical grievance if the victims are extinct?
I don't think that's enough. Historical grievances aren't just raised by the aggrieved party. They are raised by any party that benefits from saying "what we did in the past was vile".
Furthermore, there's a reason the full genocide route doesn't happen, and that's because the counterforce already exists in the past. The memetic counterforce that loses the war also sees itself as an aggrieved party, and continues its resistance, regardless to whether a genocide of the most central victims is successful.
A pure and complete genocide needs to be a pure and complete genocide not of the aggrieved party per se, but of the memetic counterforce.
This is similar to ResoluteRaven saying "You don't need to kill all of them, you just need to thoroughly assimilate them"
To put it in logical terms, ResoluteRaven is saying "Genocide is not necessary to prevent historical grievence, Assimilation is sufficient." And I am making the stronger claim, "Genocide is neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent historical grievence. Assimilation is both necessary and sufficient."
Though my definition of Assimilation here is something like 'memetic genocide' of which actual genocide may be a component. Assimilation doesn't have to be nice to be game theoretically functional.
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Positive achievements usually benefit the achiever's group primarily, and other groups only incidentally. Do we all still owe the British for sparking off the industrial revolution? Maybe we do, but then again history's largest empire is a fairly decent reward too. Misdeeds on the other hand are felt directly, they motivate people to demand redress far more than an Italian would be motivated to ask for compensation for his people's contributions to architecture.
There are cases where the credits of one group are carried over across generations, the memory of the Choctaw Indians donating money to Irish famine relief in the 1847 was the basis for a GoFundMe campaign to solicit a fairly successful fundraising campaign for COVID relief in 2020.
On the other hand, the benefits to the other groups might be outsized in proportion to the conditions they'd have found themselves in otherwise.
Being more direct, if you were the descendant of an extremely primitive tribe living on an isolated island where previously the only technology was sharpened sticks/rocks, fire, and MAYBE mud huts, and a colonial power arrived on the island, murdered half of your village, enslaved the other half for one hundred years, eventually released them from slavery and built a 'proper' society with modern technology for you to live in...
Well how does it balance out? If they had never arrived you, as a descendant, would be living in the same primitive conditions as before. Now you've got modern conveniences and a developed economy and you, personally, were never enslaved in the process.
So the benefit conferred on YOU, personally, is like a 100x increase in the standard of living than what you would have likely experienced otherwise, in exchange for a few generations of ancestors suffering greatly. So from the perspective of you, as an individual, do you inherit both the benefits of an advanced civilization AND the penalties of a history of oppression? How does that balance out in terms of what you're 'owed' in the present?
Thinking more on this it's clear that evaluating how things 'balance out' has a utilitarian presumption behind it, whereas I think the most plausible case for treating historical grievances with importance takes a more traditional view of specific 'crimes' commited which demand redress (greivances based on systemic inequalities where there's no obvious unjust act are a more recent innovation). So, as would be the case with any crime, you demand redress for the specific wrongs done and ignore the question of whether you'd be better or worse off in the counterfactual. Breaking into someone's house is still breaking into someone's house even if you leave a bag of money in their living room.
The most straightforward cases of this in history are the demanding of an official apology, the return of titles, legal rights, or land. The discourse of monetary reparations already veers too far into the murky waters of utilitarian calculations to be workable in my opinion.
Hence why I think there is a valid case to be made for agreeing to some specific number that will suffice to settle the issue once and for all.
Something that is more than a mere symbolic amount but also acknowledges that the outcome wasn't solely a harm or detriment in the long run.
But these are the sort of discussions that would need to take place in the process. Because returning you to the status quo ante would be to tear down all the trappings of advanced society from your island and leaving you behind with your village and sharpened rocks and sticks and fire.
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You don't need to kill all of them, you just need to thoroughly assimilate them (although this usually involves killing a lot of them). This could be thought of as removing them from the meme pool, I suppose. Modern French people are mostly descended from Gauls who were massacred and enslaved by the Romans, yet Napoleon's armies proudly fought beneath the Roman eagle and he adopted the titles of Consul and Emperor for himself. The same goes for Arab nationalists from Egypt, or Italian and German nationalists from any of the dozens of formerly independent states that once occupied the modern territory of those countries.
And of course if the progressive dream of "browning America" were to succeed and we became a completely ethnically and racially homogenous society (a surprisingly trad vision of the future if you think about it), then it would be impossible for any one group to pay reparations to another because we would all be descended from both the perpetrators and the victims of whatever historical atrocity was being adjudicated. Not that I expect us to get much farther than Latin America along the path of race-mixing, and they still have distinguishable groups with lingering grievances.
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Because the misdeeds and debts are carried forward to allow deconstruction of the culture of your target, so you can destroy their narratives, make them uncertain of how to act, deprive them of confidence and ideas.
Reminding people of praiseworthy past achievements wouldn't help.
Critical theory was created by people who wanted to change society in accordance with their ideas.
That's all there is to it. (added later: They were not even making any secrets about it either - they openly said as much)
If certain intellectuals are to be believed, of whom most prominent one is now James Lindsay, people using 'critical theory' do not even have a normative vision - they believe that by criticizing that what exists endlessly, a more just synthesis just somehow happens to arise.
EDIT:
added a clarification
Right, I've asked this question quite a few times of the grievance studies/critical theory types and there's no satisfying answer to date.
"Why is it that people living now can be held accountable for negative actions taken by their relatively distant ancestors... but also cannot be permitted to take pride or credit for positive achievements of those same ancestors?"
It is a strange theory that allows blame to propagate forward through time and across generational gaps to currently-living descendants and yet considers the preservation of familial wealth and status across generational gaps to be unjustified.
Seems like any grounds you use to discard the one can likely be used to discard the other as well.
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Machiavelli noticed this some time ago.
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i dont want to hear about the holocaust again when stuff like this is part of their religion. holocaust might have been the most justified genocide in history. compared to a typical genocide, the people killed were foreign to the lands that they were killed in, had refused to assimilate for 2000 years into the society's that they were making money off of, and would have done the same thing a long time ago had the roles been reversed.
Wishing death on your outgroup seems to be your routine, for which you've been banned repeatedly and you keep coming back to do it.
You also keep changing the groups you think deserve to die. First it's Catholics, then it's white nationalists, then it's Jews.
Maybe you're just an equal-opportunity hater, but I think you're a troll. Banned. Duration TBD, but probably permanent.
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That's an interesting hypothetical. I doubt Jews would consider them true Amalekites--having the right DNA seems much less relevant, from both a scriptural and common-sense standpoint, than actually being descended from them. Still, say we discovered some long-lost Amalekites who were unambiguously descended from them. I can't imagine they would do anything but define the problem away somehow.
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I think these are good points, but we run into a similar issue of incentives if there are not long term repercussions either. If we have a statute of limitations that nobody ever pays for their misdeeds, or any misdeeds that are done don't have to be paid if more than 50 years have passed, then there are incentives to destroy your rivals, steal their stuff, pass it on to your descendants, and then maintain control and prevent more sympathetic and guilt-feeling people from gaining power until the clock runs out.
I think the optimal incentive aligning solution might be something like a global penalty pool. Most of the damage done by terrible atrocities is done to people who die and thus cannot be compensated. And the most terrible damage will be when entire families are wiped out together, meaning the only people who could be compensated are more distant relatives, and the more complete the genocide the fewer legitimate surviving victims. So... make them pay anyway, it doesn't matter who they pay. We have a central pool, wrong-doers are forced to pay penalties into it proportional to the actual damages (including what is owed to dead people), and whatever portion of the money is damages to actually surviving people or their recent descendants can go to them, while money for dead people or people from long long ago can be used for humanitarian aid or something.
Obviously there are still incentive issues with whoever is in control of assigning penalties and determining how the money gets spent, but it solves the issue of rewarding victims proportional to how few of them remain. I am very very strongly opposed to being forced to pay reparations to people of certain races because multiple centuries ago people who shared their skin color were oppressed by people who share my skin color (but neither were our direct ancestors). But I don't think I would mind having some of my tax money go into a global pool for humanitarian aid, if it was spent effectively on people who actually needed it. I'll consider that charity.
I don't think many people are meaningfully able to notice a benefit that won't exist for 50 years, nor are willing to put up with repercussions (severe ones) that will last for 49, so I think 50 is a good line there.
I definitely believe in adverse possession for lands held that long.
Not everyone has to care, just enough people to make an impact, and people in power. People care about passing on wealth to their grandchildren, people care about the honor and fame that their name will carry in future generations. Their legacy. Not everyone cares, but some do.
Having something like "if you conquer this land you and your children and your grandchildren will be wealthy for generations to come, and your grandchildren will venerate you as heroes they are proud of" appeals to a lot of people. Having something like "if you conquer this land then you and your children will be wealthy for a few decades and the international community will watch your country like a hawk until they eventually find a weakness and then reconquer the land, bankrupt your grandchildren, and then indoctrinate all of your great grandchildren into cursing your name in schools" seems like a disincentive. It's a weird game theory thing, like mutually assured destruction, because obviously it's a terrible thing to actually do to someone, and the grandchildren did nothing wrong and don't deserve to be punished, but theoretically if the threat is credible (I'm not sure how it could be if it's happening more than 50 years in the future) then it would act as a deterrent that rarely needs to be actually used.
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Yes, and this gets into why belief in an all-seeing, all knowing, eternal God might in fact be an adaptive and helpful thing from a very broad civilizational standpoint. If you believe that some higher power is keeping a ledger of every deed and is capable of inflicting punishment upon you in this world or, possibly, eternally in the next world and WILL DO SO, then you suddenly DO have fear of long-term repercussions even if you manage to destroy every single earthly enemy you have.
Granted, you can have religions that are ambivalent to or even encourage the slaying of rivals, but the point here is that having a belief in a higher power is potentially a force for mediating the tendency to abuse your own power.
It's kind of the whole issue of human nature: what WON'T we do if we believed we could get away with it?
I would argue that, absent the all-seeing, vengeful god posited above, this is ALREADY the incentive. Under current circumstances, if you ever find yourself with the power to utterly crush any rivals to your control of [resource], you should do so without hesitation.
It's just very hard to get to such a position given the current balance of power in the world.
I'm somewhat of two minds about the whole thing, but I think my belief really comes down to:
A. You can't punish OR reimburse the dead.
B. You CAN try to prevent future harms from occurring.
C. If you can't return things to the status quo ante or close to it, then setting some number which the survivors agree is acceptable to settle the matter for all time is the only real way forward.
D. But calculating this number should account for the both negative AND positive events experienced by the survivors.
You're hitting on something close to the idea of 'genocide insurance' (isomorphic to life insurance, only instead of for one person, for an entire identifiable ethnic group.) which basically takes action on behalf of the genocided group to wreak some kind of vengeance so as to ensure there are repercussions to the attacker if there can't be compensation to the victims.
But the issue as it stands is once you have some massive fund or stockpile of wealth as part of this penalty pool there's now a meta-game about seeking control of or access to the wealth and determine under what conditions is it distributed.
This is known as creating future harms.
Example: everything that was done in the years 2020-2022, ostensibly to protect public health
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