Reparations Are Just Another Form of Theft

The history the reparations mongers ignore

One of the more ridiculous recent headlines was this one from the Post Millennial: “Squad member Jamaal Bowman demands $14 TRILLION in reparations to black Americans.” You might remember Rep. Bowman (D-NY) Bowman as the guy who dodged time in the hoosegow for falsely triggering a fire alarm in a US House office building in Washington, DC, as reported by CNN.

Then there was this related but unrelated article from Native News Online that describes ethnic cleansing and the Ho-Chunk exile from Minnesota in the 19^th century. Related because its all about victimhood; unrelated because the events are separated by 150 years. That facts are that every ethnic group has a tragic history and story. By the way, that includes white European underclasses, too, such as the Irish and East Europeans (my own ancestors) as well as Russian serfs and many other white ethnic groups. But that inconvenient truth is always ignored by the modern-day race-baiters.

One of my long-time friends was triggered by the Ho-Chunk article and has allowed me to convey his commentary, which speaks the truth of the matter.

What was done to the Ho-Chunk (a/k/a Winnebago) tribe, as well as to ALL other indigenous tribes across what has now become the US, was nothing short of genocide, injustice, and treating them as sub-humanoids. These are simple historical facts.

However, and sadly, ALL human History is filled chock-a-block with such injustices, expropriations, massacres, and atrocities! There are few heroes with white hats down through the centuries. Quite the contrary. Everyone had blood and wrongs on their hands, driven by economic deprivation, blood lust, and racial hatreds. There are no absolutes of good and evil, or "black and white.” Everything and everyone is a complicated shade of Gray in-between through the melting pots of time and displacement and migration.

And despite what the Marxist BLM types propagate, black people don’t have the total human experience of slavery. For instance, forms of slavery were practiced among the pre-Columbian natives of all the Americas, and especially (brutally so) among all pre-colonial Black African societies. The locations of Native American tribes within recorded history (16th-20th centuries) and in the present often had been established by their being defeated and expelled in the distant past from prior ancestral lands by stronger, more warlike, and/or larger tribes. Such was the case of many Iowa-Minnesota-Wisconsin-Illinois tribes. 

Predators have been preying on the weak for the entirety of human History! In Europe, the Barbarian invasions that overwhelmed and devastated the Roman Empire always were the result of peoples like the Celts, Gauls, Alemmani, Lombards, Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Alans, Avars, Angles, Saxons, Weltzs, Seljuks, etc. being driven west across Central Asia and Eastern Europe to escape more powerful and even more warlike peoples--like the Huns, Sarmatians, Mongols, and Tatars.

Should the Italian descendants of the Romans be compensated for the bloody loss to the Barbarians of the Roman provinces of France, Britain, Spain, Germany's Rhineland and Bavaria, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Belgium, Luxembourg, Croatia, Albania, Portugal, North Africa, Egypt, Syria-Lebanon-Israel, Turkiye, Crimea, etc., etc.????

As ALWAYS, many such ethnic and religious atrocities are still going on right now. Here is a running list:

Russia invading and bombing Ukraine; Israelis and Palestinians mutually slaughtered in Gaza and the West Bank (all evil, regardless of which side you favor); the Serbs are still fighting with their Bosniak and Albanian Kosovar neighbors; Sudanese Janjaweeds are slaughtering and raping across Darfur and South Sudan; Ethiopians are slaughtering Tigreans and Eritreans; Islamist-Arabicized and Tuareg guerrillas are fighting to ethnic-cleanse Christian and Animist Black tribes in Niger-Mali-Chad-Bourkina Fasso; the Nigerian government army is brutally fighting the even more brutal Hausa Islamist terrorists of Boko Haram, and the Igbo separatists of what was Biafra; Rwandan and Burundian Hutus and Tutsis have not stopped slaughtering and ethnic cleansing each other since the holocaust of 1994; the lugubriously-named Democratic Republic of Congo is ablaze and awash in blood with the national army, foreign mercenaries, and tribal guerrilla groups murdering and raping indiscriminately across the entire country; ditto for the Central African Republic; the Burmese of Myanmar are ruthlessly ethnic cleansing the Rohingya and Karen minorities; the Han Chinese are suppressing and colonizing the Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang; the Vietnamese and Lao have long oppressed and expropriated the Hmong and Montagnard minorities; Iran is oppressing its Kurdish, Zoroastrian, Bahai, and Baluchi minorities; Syria is slaughtering Islamist and Kurdish rebels; Turkiye has been at war with its 22 million ethnic Kurds since the 1950s; the Sunni Taliban and Islamic State in Afghanistan and Pakistan are slaughtering and oppressing minority Shia (Hazara) Muslims; the Turkish government has never apologized for the Armenian genocide of 1915;  Brazilians-Peruvians-Bolivians-Ecuadorians are expropriating and suppressing their native forest Indian tribes; India frequently explodes in pulses of unmerciful communal violence between Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Jains; drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia are slaughtering thousands to take what they want and to do what they want; Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia believe the USA owes compensation for bombing several times the total ordnance loads of World War-2 on their territories, along with the human and environmental devastation of Agent Orange; urban Blacks in America's large cities are committing property and violence crimes on a staggering unprecedented scale against both Whites and against their own kind.

We could go on for several pages of such listings. So, what else is new?!?!?

The simple truth is that at least nobody alive today in the 2024 USA has ever taken a scalp, slaughtered a village, owned slaves, or was a slave, nor operated an extermination concentration camp against ethnic minorities. And that includes the sainted Rep. Bowman and his nine co-sponsors of HR 414. It is impossible to turn back history like a time machine and try to offset and compensate for past horrors and injustices without crippling the present and future, and without arousing new passionate hatreds that lead to yet more new atrocities!

It is far better to dispassionately examine the complete course of history and to identify/examine the bad warts along with the good for informed awareness and lessons-learned, rather than to suppress it or to exact revenge upon descendants not even born at the time the wrongs were committed. Otherwise, "THOSE WHO IGNORE HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT!”

There can never be sufficient compensation and "reparations" for what was done in the brutal past. Perhaps a formal written apology by the government and/or descendants of perpetrators to the victimized groups, and a symbolic gesture of contrition – even if it's just a $1 award – Is the best we can or should do now in 2024. I’ll take my $1 award, too, along with just about everyone I know whose ancestors were enslaved, locked to the land as serfs, or massacred and/or displaced somewhere or somewhen.

The best model for such a resolution has been the formal apology and small award to Japanese-Americans and their survivors who were interned in prison camps during World War-II by the FDR regime (an imprisonment validated by the Supreme Court in 1944!). They got $20,000 each and a written apology from the US government.

However, there will always be bitter recrimination over what constitutes adequate "reparations." Radical black activists in liberal Democrat states are demanding hundreds of billions of dollars and now trillions by the likes of Rep. Bowman! Excessive ridiculous demands for reparations predictably result in their getting nothing at all!

Germany paid enormous probably trillions in reparations to the Allies after World War-I, and then after World War-II to the countries it had invaded, and then to Israel to atone for the Holocaust. To this day, nearly 80 years later, there is still bitter bickering as to whether the Germans have paid or can pay enough compensation. In setting compensation/reparations, there was no differentiation among Nazi Germans and anti-Hitler Germans who had no alternative choices during the War, living oppressed under a fanatical totalitarian regime and suffering the utter destruction from daily 1000-plane raids of the Allied revenge. There are many who believe the fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, as well as the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were unjustified atrocities and should be compensated to those devastated.

Fairness and nuances of guilt or innocence are impossible to adjudicate in retrospective of such cataclysmic events. But I would probably not be here without the dropping of the A-bomb in 1945, as my father would have been shifted from the European theater to Japan for the invasion. US casualties for an invasion of Japan were predicted to be over a million. The bombings ultimately saved lived on both sides, as most historians agree.

There are further complications as to properly identifying the true descendants of long-ago past victims, and as to calculating the wildly subjective monetary worth of lost property, income, and opportunity, such as in 19th century Africa and the southern states in the US. There are estimates that no more than about 20,000 Southern landowners and merchants were involved in slavery while millions in the Confederate South lived their quiet individual lives as small farmers, shopkeepers, blacksmiths, etc. and had nothing to do with slaves and perhaps even opposed slavery. Why should their millions of descendants in 2024 have to pay anybody with a high melanin skin content billions or trillions in compensation, and how could their guilt or innocence ever be adjudicated correctly?

The correct answer is that reparations create more problems than they could ever pretend to solve. It's best for governments to formally recognize and apologize for past atrocities in writing, such as the Holocaust, slavery, and the genocide of natives in North America, South America, Africa, and Asia. The point is that the vast majority of people alive today have evolved morally and ethically to recognize the evils of the past, and are willing to continue to do so. But impoverishing them with reparations and humiliating, excoriating, or cancelling them as a group – and tearing down their cultural icons as demanded by the Cancel Culture – will only raise new hatreds all around while stealing from people who have committed no crimes.

Bowman and company need to withdraw HR 414.

The end.