>it is probably not worth putting a time limit on sufferingI'm not a historian, but if you believe this, how do you propose to make things right for all the suffering of the past? You would need to examine history for winners and losers, every battle and atrocity and societal structure, and then assign blame to modern people who look like the bad guys, and victimhood to modern people who look like the victims. How do you deal with the (probably very common) case when a group of people that looks one way has been both oppressor and victim? How do you deal with issues like pedophilia, incest, or domestic violence, or torture, all of which have had very different moral weight historically?
To me, that's the tragedy of this ideology. The problem isn't the desire for making past wrongs right - that's a very good urge, and one I share. It's that the method for making past wrongs right is based on a very simplistic reading of history and a simplistic, and deeply unfair, idea that you can assign blame and victimhood based on similarity of appearance. There ARE cases when you can address great wrongs, but there is a kind of natural "statute of limitations" where it becomes actually impossible to do anything. Should the Jews still be angry with Egyptians? Or does the Israeli treatment of Palestinians wipe that debt out? What about the Jews who weren't involved? What about the blood libel, the assertion that Jews killed Jesus (nevermind that he was a Jew), and so it is right to hold all modern Jews responsible? What about all the tribal massacres in Africa, where the victims and oppressors a) look exactly the same, and b) would do exactly the same thing if their positions were reversed? How do you deal with the Aztecs, who were slaughtered by Europeans, but who themselves did human sacrafice and slavery, and who eventually interbred with the Europeans? Same for the Russians and Mongolians. (There are probably a hundred other examples of this - Vikings and the Anglo Saxons? The French and the Celts? Etc).
What we can do, we should do. Japanese internment at Manzinar was wrong, and they deserved all the reparations and apologies they (eventually) got, and more. Harvey Weinstien's female victims deserved to see him in prison (at least). Black neighborhoods deserve to have freeways rerouted to not split them and make them terrible, and money to rebuild. But do all white people deserve to be hated, and to hate themselves, because they look like a group of wrongdoers? No. Heck, some of them are recent immigrants. Ditto for black people. And the whole idea we can assign blame based on a person's appearance is a CORE racist belief, and yet now the zeitgeist holds that if you don't do it, you're the racist. The world is upside down, and this ideology is utterly unjust. In my view, it's not anti-racist, it's a new racism that doesn't seek to end racism, but rather to turn the tables and swap the roles of victim and oppressor. This will not, cannot, end well, and it's not the world I want for myself or my children, and I don't think it's the world any right-thinking person wants.
