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THE TWO MOST STOLEN ITEMS IN THE WORLD: a pen labeled Surplus Value of Workers Labor, and a lighter labeled Indigenous Land
THE TWO MOST STOLEN ITEMS IN THE WORLD: a pen labeled Surplus Value of Workers Labor, and a lighter labeled Indigenous Land
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How on earth did you get to that conclusion
Yasser Arafat used to use a similar argument. It’s a bad one regardless of who uses it, I think.
I’m not saying I really agree with the position, but I’ll explain what I think they meant for you. It was Jewish ‘holy land’ well before it was Christian or Islamic holy land seeing as Christianity and Islam weren’t even made up until many hundreds of years later.
You got downvotes, but I kind of agree. The land was stolen hundreds of years ago by people that have long been dead.
What are we gonna do now? Give it to people that weren’t alive back then?
Yes.
Alternatively, and equally as correct an answer: No.
Ok, so I steal your dads car. Years later, he dies, and they find me with the car. Well your dad is dead, so it’s my car now right?
EDIT:
To all the replies, what’s the cutoff? It sure seems to conveniently be the one where we keep everything and everyone else is fucked.
Should we give Japanese American/Canadian families back the houses and land they lost when they were interred? Why or why not?
If a car doesn’t count, but raw land does, what’s to stop the government from taking your house? They have the might, laws governing seizing of land is old, so fuck it, why follow it? Is that ok because they have the might?
If the actions of those ‘hundreds of years ago’ no longer apply, do Americans lose their constitutional rights? What exactly makes something ‘too far in the past’ to have actions done with it? Canadians got the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, is that old enough to break, or too new? What is the line in time, exactly?
More like several generations later and anyone who even saw the car in the original owners possesion is dead.
It does get muddy. Is there even any land on earth that hasn’t been stolen?
I think land and a car are completely different. A car is a product that has been built and sold for a value. Often it can be proved who owned it, and how they acquired it.
Land is a finite patch of earth somebody got to first and said “Mine”. Do we respect this rule of “ownership” no matter what has changed about the world and no matter how much time has passed?
Are we going to be talking about who said “mine” first for the next two thousand years?
Do we give the Native Americans all the land back and send 300 million people to Europe? Is that your solution?
Honestly at this point, yes. If you want there to be a better solution, come up with something that doesn’t involve genocide. It will come to you VERY quickly. (I’ll give you a hint: Returning ownership to its rightful inhabitants does not require an ethnic cleansing campaign)
Where do the mixed race people go back to? Like someone who is 25% Indigenous 25% Swedish 25% West African 25% North African?
You didn’t listen at all, but just to humor your question: death.
If you don’t have the strength to physically get it back then I guess you’ll have to live with the loss tbh
Should we give Japanese families back houses and land they lost when interred is a great question. My initial thought was ‘yes, of course’… but then I thought perhaps we ought to ask the natives whose land those Japanese families had ‘stolen’.
See, it gets complicated.
Apparently we just do fuck-all because it’s ‘too complicated’ from what I’m reading here; seems pretty cut and dry. Follow treaties people in the past signed? Nah, why bother. It’s in the past. I mean honestly, what rules should we even bother following from back then.
Look, we should do something. I’m looking for solutions. I want Japanese people to get their land back. I want Indigenous people to get their land back. I just don’t know how it’s even vaguely possible or feasible.
Also, following treaties signed under duress and in situations of radically unequally power dynamics isn’t too reasonable either. Not to mention that in much of Western Canada, for example, there aren’t many signed treaties at all.
It’s complicated, yes… But blindly yelling ‘land back’ doesn’t actually provide anyone any meaningful solutions. No one actually gets any land back that way.
I’m not sure the alternative to following treaties signed under duress is to not even follow said treaties. We can give them all sorts of land that we barely use, nobody is actually suggesting we give them back downtown Vancouver. The issue is we just shrug and go ‘yeah well people live in places now’.
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