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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Feeling guilt over multigenerational sins is kind of silly.

War and conflict is a messy business.

The past feeds the present. It's important to recognize where you come from and how that contextualizes your existence where you are.

Is that guilt? I don't know. But trying to avoid it, I think, is blissful ignorance.

My position in today's society has been advanced by the crimes of my forefathers. The position in today's society of our indigenous people – those whose lineage survived – has been limited by the crimes of my forefathers.

For that I do feel guilt. I'd hope anyone would at least feel empathy. Ultimately it demands redress.

One should have the right, and responsibility, to define who they are, not their father.

Yeah. Reality doesn't really work like that.

It seems we're talking about perception here, so what is the 'reality'?

That you're making up a 'right.'

All rights are manmade though.

Are you talking about North America, and native americans?

Yes.

No, the article is about Australia, and I'm Australian.

Expecting other people to feel guilt over multigenerational sins is possibly silly, but ones' own feelings of guilt are certainly not. It's very human and admirable, even if it's irrational or not constructive or useful. I wouldn't hold it against anyone who didn't feel that guilt, but I wouldn't judge them if they did- I may just respect them all the more. These are the kinds of things that drive people to make the world a better place for everyone.

> even if it's irrational or not constructive or useful

But it can be both rational and constructive/useful if it reminds us of what we're capable of.

And what we directly benefit from at the moment.

Very true. I was referring to the futility of trying to right past wrongs when said wrongs are essentially unrightable, but if awareness prevents future wrongs, it's straight up pragmatism.

Exterminating a people for their land isn't war, and the blood isn't washed off when the kids get it.

Definitely. For whatever we inherit, I think it's important to inherit all of it. To see where we are going, we have to be willing to see where we have been.

That isn't to advocate for guilt, which I don't personally feel, so much as responsibility. Whether or not I feel guilty for what my ancestors did, I am certainly responsible using wisely what power I have. And that power definitely depends on their actions.

E.g., I'm in tech because my dad was. And he became a programmer because his dad was high up at a company that got an early IBM machine. But at that time and place, those were positions reserved for white men from families who could afford enough education. Past racism and classism definitely benefited me. Do I feel guilt? Not really, because I didn't do that myself. But I do feel an obligation to use my inheritance for more than just my own desires.

Your sentence makes no sense. If not war, what then, and why not. And of what metaphoric blood are you talking that decendants inherit? Your metaphor is too incomplete to make sense of.

Is armed robbery a fight? If not a fight, what then, and why not?

If I murder someone during an armed robbery, is it a reasonable justification to say "things happen in fights"?

If I give my children the money that I took from the person that I killed during that armed robbery, and it gives them a comfortable life, and the children of the person that I robbed live in poverty - should my children feel guilty?

If they do feel guilty, are they feeling guilty for my sin, or for their own?

> And of what metaphoric blood are you talking that decendants inherit?

I wasn't using a metaphor. People are filled with blood. It spills where they fall.

> If I murder someone during an armed robbery, is it a reasonable justification to say "things happen in fights"?

No, but but it's hard to be sure of the details if the events in question are many years before.

> should my children feel guilty?

It depends, 'guilt' is too vague. But if you mean guilty for committing the crime, then no.

There's usually a complicated relationship between crimes of the past, and future wealth. Simplistic arguments don't capture many relevant details, but here's one: If I inherit a dollar, but a lottery ticket, win a million dollars then later find out the money was blood money - do I owe someone money? If so, do I owe $1 or $1M? What if I hadn't won anything on the ticket?

I also thing the magnitude and type of resource matters. For example, a stolen $1 is unlikely relevant to future descendants, while millions might make a big difference.

> If they do feel guilty, are they feeling guilty for my sin, or for their own?

If a tree falls in the woods...

>> the blood isn't washed off when the kids get it > I wasn't using a metaphor

If you are talking about land/resources, you are saying they are literally stained with blood?

At what point does the blood wash off? Are the Britons entitled to reparations for the viking raids? Should Mongolia make right Khan's conquests? Should Germany get back the land that was taken from them through the Treaty of Versailles? Or does this eternal sin only apply when whites did something to non-whites?

Descendants of Vikings and Mongolians do not current hold title over the land they have historically conquered.

The allies gave West Germany back to Germans in 1949.

The Soviets lost East Germany back to the Germans in 1990.

Whites being given back their land after losing the war did happen only recently.

South Americans had their land returned by Spanish and Portguese forcefully.

Japan had it's country returned. China had Hong Kong returned.

New Zealand Maori's received financial reparations.

So are you suggesting only everyone else get their land back, and indigenous australian's, well.. water under the bridge kind of thing?

Germany lost a significant amount of territory that has not been given back.[0] East Germany (and the whole of rest of Eastern Europe) to this day is much poorer than western parts thanks to half a century of Soviet occupation. I never hear anyone make demands for restitution regarding that bit of very recent history. Any way, the argument I was making was that at some point the blood clearly does wash off, and where you draw the line is arbitrary. Why should a white Australian feel guilty for the Frontier Wars but a German shouldn't feel guilty for the holocaust?

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Ge...

It was as recent as 1960 the government was stealing children from their families. Even now, they are behind on every metric, life expectancy, education, employment, homelessness. Everyday, the only indigenous I see are homeless on the side of the street begging.

I wasn't even born here, and I feel guilty.

It never does. At some point the perpetrators and victims become so mixed up that there's no way to separate them, or all of one of the groups goes extinct.

...Unless the said person's inheritance includes land confiscated from Indigenous Australians...

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