Germans born in the 1950s, '60s, '70s and later have trouble in various parts of the world because many people in other countries blame them for the Nazi genocide and World War II, even though they weren’t even born yet when those things happened.
In the 1500s, the Europeans instituted a slave trade from African to America. In the US, this lasted until the 1860s, when a bloody war was fought to stop it. Nonetheless, many Europeans still blame Americans for having had a slave trade, even though the Europeans started it and the Americans abolished it. (Notice also that people from other slave nations, such as Brazil, don’t get the same resentment.)
In the past 50 years, more Africans have immigrated to the United States voluntarily than were forced over as slaves. Now there are problems with fights in high schools between African-Americans and Africans, because the African-American kids tell the Africans, “Your people sold our people into slavery.” Unbelievable, but true in many schools.
Do you think people are guilty of their ancestors’ sins? What about their imagined sins? What about the sins of people who are not their ancestors but are the same color or speak the same language they do?
In Ireland, the ‘English’ are still blamed for 800 years of suffering. Every 20 years or so it seems to be 50 years more. In fact, the English first came to Ireland in the later days of the 12th century and retreated in 1921. Today, I don’t think that there’re too many people alive who knew anybody who was involved in incedents that happened under British rule. Any sentence starting ‘800 years of suffering…’ doesn’t bring out the lustre of conscious reflection, because people usually use it to justify a squishy resentment against English people in general.
The slave trade was started by the Europeans in the 1500s, largely by the Spanish and the Portuguese. The American republic was founded in 1776, so nobody who originated the slave trade was still alive at that time. Some people were still trading slaves. Slavery was rare in the North, and most Northerners never owned slaves. Many black Americans owned black slaves. Many Northerners whose families had never owned slaves were active in the abolitionist movement and/or enlisted in the Union army with the explicit intention of abolishing slavery. The vast majority of Americans are descended from people who arrived after slavery had been abolished.
AND, there is no American alive today who is either a slave or a slaveholder (if you exclude procurers of prostitutes or owners of illegal sweat shops, but those people get busted relatively fast).
Close but no cigar. There are general trends of thought among feminists. There are specific voting patterns proven to be statistically common among American blacks. Leftists, or “progressives” as they like to call themselves now, have a certain common body of belief, with some variation, that even they admit to having. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to form political movements.
As you should have learned in elementary school, a few exceptions don’t disprove a generalization, only a stereotype.
And pointing out the typical real beliefs and behaviors of people who are still alive is nothing like holding living people responsible for things that dead people did 300 years ago.
Sounds like smoke and mirrors to me, Jamie. You spend most of your time on this forum knocking others - normally the easy targets - and marketing you squeaky clean image.
You’re an easy target, Molly. There’s no smoke and mirrors there. It’s clear to people who can think clearly.
You spend a good deal of your time on the forum trying to ridicule me, even if you have to change the subject to do it. And I sure can’t imagine how anything I post would present a squeaky clean image.
Yes, it is similar. I’m glad I don’t know anyone who does it.
There you go with one of your strategies again. All over the forum you change the subject when you’re backed into a corner and want to attack the person who did it. On this one thread you didn’t change the subject. So you attack me for my behavior on the forum as a whole, but when I point out your behavior on the forum as a whole, you narrow the discussion down to just one thread where you didn’t do what I said you do.
I feel Jamie’s thread could push people to belittle the claims discussed here:
“NEW YORK (CNN) – Attorneys for a former law student, who discovered evidence linking U.S. corporations to the slave trade, filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday that could seek billions of dollars in reparations for the descendants of slaves in America.”
Hey, Jamie, do you think the Japanese are right here?
“TOKYO, March 5 — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said today that if the United States Congress demands that Japan apologize for his nation’s use of foreign women as sexual slaves during World War II, his government will refuse to comply.”
I don’t think the situation matters anymore, because practically everybody involved is dead. The Japanese can apologize collectively as a nation for the acts of the dead people against other dead people, if they wish, or they’re within their rights refuse to respond to such a request, since, after all, they are a very different nation made up of completely different people.
Maybe they can postpone apologizing because they’re still waiting for an apology from China for its attempted invasion of Japan in 1281.
I think Americans lived their notorious reputation down. I don’t hear anyone say anything about this slave trading business.
But the situation with Germans is not as gladdening - here and there people are still blaming them for what their predecessors did to the world in days of yore.
And answering your question, I don’t think it is such a good idea to stigmatize the whole nation for the trouble their whacked out predecessors stirred up. What boots it to give them a guilt trip for the sins they never commited? It does not make sense to me.
I think people don’t need to feel guilty of their ancestors’ sins. Each and every one of the people has to be responsible for their own deeds. They might feel guilty of theirs…but it wasn’t their sins! It’s all unfair and non-sense to try to hold innocent people accountable for something somebody else had done! Sins or some other bad historical events in the past should not be taken into consideration only by people who speak the same language or have the same skin color but also the whole human kind. The reality speaks differently, though. You are ashamed of your brother’s sins, still…but of course, we all should be ashamed of sins…but responsibility has to be stressed!!!
Do you think some people need to be aware of the benefits they’ve received from their ancestors misdeeds? Shouldn’t those people feel a little guilty about reaping the rewards of their ancestors sins?
And should the descendants of the victims feel guilty that they also benefitted from those sins? Many of today’s African-Americans believe that they have benefitted lavishly from the fact that their ancestors were taken into slavery. They enjoy full civil rights under a relatively fair justice system, they have protected property rights, seemingly limitless educational possibilities without bribing an official or buying counterfeit credentials on the street (as many people do in Africa), and their economic opportunity can be limited only by themselves. Many of them feel quite fortunate.
Or, in the immortal words of the boxer Muhammed Ali upon returning from a trip to Africa, “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!”
And what if a person is descended from both the criminal and the victim? Who does he blame? Many African-Americans are descended from both the slaves and the slave-holders. Should they take partial blame and feel partially guilty? What about the grandchild of an East German woman and a Soviet soldier who raped her right after the war? Should he feel guilty for the Nazi Holocaust, or should he feel proud of having defeated the Nazis?
You see the whole issue of collective guilt for other people’s sins and crimes starts to get ridiculous.