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Comment by dracht | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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