> I find it very sad that the Irish, Palestinians, etc., can
> remember and keep alive resentments going back
> centuries
Careful. Palestinian "resentments" do not go back centuries. They go back 56 years, or perhaps 87, but no more. And the fact that they are engaged in struggle now springs not from past "resentments" but from current GRIEVANCES -- the history has significance only insofar as it produced grievances and injustices that have not yet been corrected.
The same goes for Ireland, even though the history of dispossession there goes back much further. Even still, I think it's a stretch to say -- as Irish nationalist mythology would -- that it goes back 800 years. There were British plantations in Ireland going back to the thirteenth century, yes, but the systematic dispossession of that country can really be said to have begun no earlier than Cromwell.
None of this would matter if the oppression and injustice had been overcome. Similarly, racism is not a "natural" phenomenon springing from people's fears of the "Other," or similar mystifications. It is the product of the very specific historical processes that gave birth to capitalism and to "race" as the concept we know it today. So the slave trade, colonialism, plantation slavery, etc., are all important to understand not just as historical novelties but as very real injustices that created the world "racial" order we live in today, i.e., white supremacy -- which is why it's legitimate, in my view, to say that the descendants of the victims of these atrocities deserve reparations, since they are still suffering the consequences in the form of continued white supremacy today.
- - - - - John Lacny
People of the US, unite and defeat the Bush regime and all its running dogs!