We caused the problem and it can’t be fixed

There are German families whose fortunes — or just their livelihoods — were derived from property stolen from Jews imprisoned or killed during the Holocaust. What are those German families’ responsibilities, now, to the surviving descendants of those Jews? The Jewish descendants had their birthright taken by force, threat, or intimidation. The hypothetical Germans are not the ones who stole the birthright (their grandparents did that), but they are living from its benefits. These Germans don’t have to be rich burghers; they may be regular folks who are providing for their children’s education, or trying to run a small business. Do the Jewish descendants have a right to take that away from them? Do the Germans have any responsibility to try to right the wrongs their grandparents committed? Or do crimes like this have a generational statute of limitations, in which — if you wait long enough — nobody owes anybody anything?

We Americans love the Holocaust. We have an appropriate, somber way of talking about it, and I don’t doubt our sincerity when we grieve for the injustice, the dead, the wounded, the orphans, the widows; but our grieving (I’m speaking of the majority who are neither Jewish nor closely associated with any Holocaust victims) is out of proportion to our responses to other holocausts that happened to peoples equally distant from us. I haven’t heard much Holocaust-like grief for Rwanda, Nanjing, or the Philippines. In addition to the pure scope and horror of what happened, maybe we love the Holocaust because (a) it didn’t happen to (most of) us, (b) The US’s actions in that conflict look pretty altruistic and heroic, and (c) such a positive response to genocide distracts us from the genocides (there were several) that many of our ancestors perpetrated, at first unwittingly but later with full malicious knowledge, against the nations that were doing justfinethankyouverymuch when the Europeans showed up and started taking lives and land.

Maybe it’s because I just finished reading Stolen Continents, and I’m easily influenced, but right now it seems to me that there can be only two possible reasons why a dozen generations of Americans have avoided the kind of identity crisis experienced by post-WWII German citizens: denial or ignorance. Our ancestors committed holocausts as systematic, cruel, and unjust as those perpetrated by the Nazis, the Chinese, the Hutus, or the Serbs. The culture of those ancestors is the culture we regularly celebrate in a patriotic furor. Some of the very people we revere as Founding Fathers ordered the massacres, land thefts, and wholesale destruction of cultures who really, truly did not deserve it.

The unformed but powerful feeling of injustice and unease I’ve felt ever since I was a kid living  near Indian reservations has lately been focusing into a clear, horrible picture of the way our nation’s history might have looked from the point of view of the people whose cultures and nations were progressively destroyed by the greed, egocentrism, and duplicity of the culture that ultimately gave rise to my current lifestyle.

I still believe in the noble intentions and acts of many of the people who founded the United States. But I can’t deny the historical record of the massive cost of our immigration and invasion. The pieces can’t be put back together again, and I am not sure what should be done to remedy things.