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Notes -
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?
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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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