You have no idea what you're talking about. You ought to read about this before making such sweeping claims. The Dutch invaded islands, killed and tortured the locals into submission, razed the island and enslaved the women and children to work on spice plantations.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/11/26/165657050/no...
> Current ancestors of those working classes are not responsible for their ancestors oppressors.
No one is arguing that. They're making the very reasonable claim that one group of people oppressed another and that this put the oppressed people at a significant disadvantage relative to those who benefited from the oppression, and thus that resources should be redistributed to balance that - a policy that makes perfect sense in terms of economic incentives.
I hesitate to say more. Yourexample is particular bit of history is actually for me family history, so I think I know quite a bit, but you tone and neglect of my argument makes it seem you have a bone to pick, which you can do very well without me.
I for one will never accept people being dragged into blood feuds, carrying over unto I don't know how many generations of descendants. That's just reusing classic nationalist/capitalists arguments.
I hope any reader got my point that inequality is a huge problem and that blood feud accounting is not a solution, just continuation.
> blood feuds
Again, no one is arguing for that. We're trying to create policies which incentivize good behavior and disincentivize bad behavior in the world, in the long term. The straw person that you're fighting there has been defeated, but this has not (from my above comment):
> They're making the very reasonable claim that one group of people oppressed another and that this put the oppressed people at a significant disadvantage relative to those who benefited from the oppression, and thus that resources should be redistributed to balance that - a policy that makes perfect sense in terms of economic incentives.
> Forcing colonialist countries to return their ill-gotten wealth is nothing but justice.
Even though I am a firm believer that we are not nearly doing enouhhto equalize wealth in general, that statement seems to be to be all about some sort of blood debt. That I cannot agree with, which I have tried to make clear.
The matter of these particular victims is in my view another one, and I wish the compensation would have come decades sooner (and any other victims that have died by now), and had been compensated much better, by trials preferably.
But that is a far cry from what I understood the GP meant with his or her post, in particular the first line.
Even though capitalists and their inheritors convinced many, 'countries' didn't have colonies, companies and individuals often did, and 'countries' sometimes were instructed by them to participate in their commercial endeavors. Most citizens ancestors in former colonial countries were often no less oppressed by their ruling classes and factory owners as natives in the colonies.
Current ancestors of those working classes are not responsible for their ancestors oppressors. To the contrary. Both people in now former colonies and former colonists are by and large co-victims. While capitalists wealth was largely spent in their native lands and so workers there profited through trickle down economics, we should be very careful validating that slowest of the slow of economic models. It is a malicious model, like colonialism was malicious. It is in workers interest around the globe to correctly identify their oppressors, and not be played against each other and let true inheritors of much of that ill-gained wealth 'socialize' their losses upon their states.
I'll not go into detail into how colonialism actually was differently implemented across Europe (e.g. you may say the State was far more core to colonialism in France, whereas in Belgium it was the king personally owning the colony, and in the Netherlands it was company property). The core of my argument is that the since there isn't a European alive who's ever profited off a slave in the colonies back, the only way to make former colonialists return all their wealth would mean turning this into a sort of blood feud that would never end.
Let's not take Israeli-Palestine as a model. Let's rather think of ways to engrain the idea equality between people worldwide is both fair and the most effective method in preventing conflict, and think of ways of how to implement such a global wealth sharing in ways other than accounting for past rulers/capitalists of fences over which very few had any day, let alone influence, certainly noone alive right now. Let's begin by cracking down hard on current day slavery, and all forms of labour related abuse.
Average humans in former colonist countries are not enemies with average humans in former colonies. The opposite.