Are we paralyzed forever from opposing evil because evil occurred in our history?
Sincerely, congratulations. A lovely point.
The excesses or virtues of one's past behaviour should and can never justify any actions now or in the future; and that's true whether as revenge for historical wrongs, or over-compensation for the same.
To be sure, I exclude the punishment of unavenged evils - hence my support for the trial of Pinochet, or Serb war criminals, and similar... Correcting wrongs as they apply in the present is a different matter, I think. If there are still injustices now, those should be put right.
But excoriating the present generation for past sins, where the results of those sins have been put right - as far as is equitable, in the now - or simply become part of a personally forgotten history, is not right either. Otherwise, the UK might as well sue Italy - or Germany, or France, or even Sweden <g> - for invading, conquering, or driving out the earlier inhabitants of England, 1-2000 years in the past. For example, I hate to think what counter-claims might be made against the French for the lands owned as a result of Napoleonic Wars... or even WWI... how much are Alsace and Lorraine worth now?
Go back a hundred - still less a thousand - years, and there's not a nation in the world then that hadn't previously invaded and oppressed some other. And the nations that didn't exist in 1900 could certainly have claims from neighbouring tribes or peoples which Western cartographers simply didn't deign to recognise... |
