> > That still leaves the fact that every land owner in
> > the US is directly benefiting from the NA genocide
> > whether
> > they feel they are benefiting from it or not. That
> > is the guilt of someone who knowingly receives
> > stolen property, not guilt by association.
> >
> > John Thornton
>
>
> In the first place you are talking about individual
> guilt, not collective guilt, for supposed receipt of
> stolen property. Moreover, not all of it is "knowing,"
> since many landowners do not know even that they won
> land (if one owns shares in a REIT, for example), or
> about the wrongful appropriation of NA land (Don't
> underestimate the educational system's failures).
Yes I know I switched to individual guilt but that was in direct response to the idea that there was only guilt by association. Claiming you don't know that all that is the US was once populated and that the inhabitants were driven off strikes me as a bit hard to swallow. Maybe you know lots of people who think this. Just like receiving stolen property today, it can be hard to prove in some cases but even if someone takes possession unknowingly they still lose possession once the crime is acknowledged. This is what really drives the fear of accepting responsibility. The fear that minorities will demand "excessive" reparations.
> In the second place it is my understanding that some
> -- I don't know know much -- American land was
> voluntarily ceded by the Native Americans, not stolen
> outright, and not always on coercive terms. So whether
> every non-NA property owner is in receipt of stolen
> property is debatable at best; more likely, the
> situation varies with the particular circumstances.
There is almost no way the ceding of native lands could ever be considered non-coercive. How would one work out such a thing? Something like "Well since we "accidentially" killed 90% of you and you obviously don't need as much space now could you sell us some land so we don't have to feel bad about ourselves and just take it?" To talk about land being voluntary ceded to any conquering invader is hugely disengenious. At what point during WWII did the French cede their country to Germany?
> Third, I find it how advocates of this general sort of
> position (that non-NA landowners own stolen property)
> go all Nozickean and anachronistically apply notions
> of private ownership of real estate that are
> Euro-American and (in my understanding) often have no
> NA counterparts, and (b) are the most extreme
> reactionary, right wing conceptions of private
> property that exist on the political map.
They are the standards claimed to be applied by the European invaders. The fact that NA's had differing concepts of land ownership is irrelevant. We lost and the standards of the conquerers is to be applied.
> Certainly terrible crimes and moral wrongs were
> committed against the NAs in displacing them from the
> land, but wasn't part of the wrong precisely in
> privatizing it (or appropriating as government
> property with due compensation). At any rate there
> must be some better way of explaining what the wrong
> was than to apply notions of property and theft that
> would warm the heart of Robert Nozick, John Hospers,
> Richard Epstein -- not to mention George W. Bush, if
> he could understand them.
You can't undo it so you apply the standards the conquerers themselves claim they believe. So in a country where public lands are anethema we're just going to conveniently decide that privatizing native lands was the real problem and make all contested areas part of the public trust. To be handled by white male representatives of course.
> If we were to apply these right wing Euro-American
> notions to the situation, we'd probably have to say
> that, depending on the history, the NAs whose land the
> whites and Spanish appropriated was itself stolen.
> NAs had occupied the Americas for at least 10,000
> years, and except for a handful of super-isolated
> groups, behaved like everyone else as a general rule
> in grabbing each other's land. So often the US
> Govt/White or Spanish settler appropriation of Indian
> land was theft. on this right wing account of what
> happened, from NAs who were thieves themselves.
No NA's did not steal anything. You can't steal from no one. No one was here to steal from. The idea that NA's behaved except in a few isolated cases "like everyone else as a general rule in grabbing each other's land" is difficult for you to truly believe if you also believe, as you claim, "notions of private ownership of real estate that are Euro-American and (in my understanding) often have no NA counterparts.". How could NA's behave just like Europeans concerning land if they held differing concepts about land ownership? You can believe one or the other but not both. Certainly NA's killed each other for access to females, in rituals, to gain access to resources and other reasons but almost none of it was tied to the concept of land ownership.
> If you are talking about the different fact that all
> privileged groups generally benefit from the
> disparities in power with oppressed groups, it does
> not seem to me that this is usefully discussed in
> terms of "collective guilt," or indeed guilty at all,
> which implies a certain sort of response to conscious
> wrongdoing, when the point is that in these cases
> there isn't conscious wrongdoing. My vehemently
> anti-racist 16 year old daughter is not morally
> equivalent to General Sheridan, even if she benefits
> from his crimes. That sort of talk is politically
> counterproductive too, because it just gets people's
> back up and alienates possible allies. The point isn't
> to make people feel bad about what they haven't done,
> but to get them outraged against the wrongs done to NA
> and other oppressed peoples, so that they might do
> something to help win those peoples justice.
Who said collective guilt meant you daughter was anything like the moral equivalent of Gen. Sheridan? I don't think people should walk about wailing and moaning and being paralyzed by guilt but I do not see how you can completely separate guilt from responsibility. Whites have a responsibility to admit the crimes from the past that they directly benefit from and make a realistic attempt to make amends on some terms that recognizes that minorities should benefit in similar ways. In the US this means money/land and access to power/ increased representation. If you can pull that off without invoking guilt I'm all for it brother but guilt can be a powerful motivator and I'm not ready to throw it away as a tool to gain social justice just on your say-so.
John Thornton