And you think whites also weren’t coerced? You think whites weren’t conscripted? You think they were absolved from the bureaucratic police state? You think their land wasn’t expropriated? Saying that whites benefited from Apartheid is like saying Nazi-sympathizing Germans benefited from the Reich. Did they have a better time of it than others? Certainly. Did they ultimately benefit? Hell no.
In any case, the vast majority of black South Africans today are descendants from East African migrant tribes who moved into Southern Africa around the time of European colonization. They drove out the “true” natives- the Khoisan people. And let’s not even start about the various inter-tribal conflicts and conquests.
Collectivized virtue is just as bad as collectivized guilt.
I’ve got to agree with HR here. For someone who seems to think they’re are on the side of the anti-racists, CA sure does come off as a racist. Grouping the rich variety of peoples in Africa into “the blacks” is about as ignorant as it gets. Not to mention remaining completely oblvious of the historical conquest of the Khoisan/Bushmen by the Bantu. If you’ve ever taken a moment to look at the East Africans and Khoisan, you’d notice that they’re about as different looking as the East Africans and the whites. And despite all of that, retribution only makes sense on an individual level - anything beyond just becomes nonesense. By the way, how is CA a moderator on here?
Yes, I am racist and I make no apologies. I married a good-looking blue-eyed blond because I wanted to have good-looking blue-eyed blond kids. Those were my first criteria in selecting a mate over and above all others. It worked. [What her criteria were, I have no idea! Money, probably but that is now my problem and hers!] Here is the kicker: everybody does that in some sense. We all discriminate.
I never used the word responsible. I said beneficiaries.
You are shifting the goalpost by inserting The State™ as an actor. The issue is that a violation of the NAP has occurred in the past and the descendants of its victims are seeking reparations. They may be doing so in a cluttered way but that is secondary to the rightfulness of their claim. They could be right. They could be wrong. They seem to think they are right and so do I.
The way I see things is that we are witnessing a transition to anarchy. It will be a rocky road but hopefully my kids will get there. With more people thinking as Tutu thinks I reckon more and more people in the future who attempt to violate the NAP along racist lines will start thinking of how hectic things may play out for their kids – such reckoning will be a good thing, in my opinion.
The europeans started settlement in southern africa when the africans in the region were still hunter-gatherer. If you agree with homesteading principle then there might be the case for the whites having first claim to the property. As there is so much land in south africa, even today, there was never much need to kick the tribes people off their land. Maybe in some cases for natural resources. But the whites did not enter the land and take over farms. The europeans lived a long side the africans and taught them, there has been many africans that have benefited from the europeans being in the region. There was obviously conflict at some point, as we have seen in the rest of africa. This conflict was probably the reason for creating the laws that became the apartheid. Similar to what we see in isreal, where the justification is protection. But eventually it turns to extreme racism for the sake of it, and generations afterwards the conflict becomes worse.
But from I do know, large areas of land is still held by europeans in some regions, that is still not farmed or used. If they were smart they would take this land and leave the farms and other residential and industrial property, to their rightful owners. As we have seen in zimbabwe stealing land away from its rightful owners does not help anyone.
uhh, no. “Blacks” are not native to Southern Africa. “We” “raped and pillaged” the San peoples in an eerily similar manner to what the “whites” did. Please get educated before you make such ignorant comments and advocate repulsive policies.
The San were hunter-gatherers once upon a time. Their culture had already been absorbed by the Khoikhoi by the time Europeans arrived in the Cape, hence the term ‘Khoisan’. The Khoi were a pastoral people, as were the Bantu tribes, as were most of the Europeans at the beginning of the 18th Century, when European cattle farmers began expanding out of the Cape peninsular area.
The trekboers traded cattle to the Xhosa in exchange for land as they moved East towards Zululand. They were under the impression that they were buying the land, but there is the view that the Xhosa thought they were just leasing it, or granting a usufruct. Apparently there isn’t private ownership of land in terms of Xhosa customary law - it always belongs to the local feudal lord, and he only has the power to lease it. You can make of that what you will. In any case, it’s not a question of whether one of the parties homesteaded it first.
If anyone homesteaded Southern Africa in terms of hunting and gathering, it was the San, and they were pretty much absorbed by the pastoral Khoi long before either the Europeans or the Bantu tribes from central Africa arrived on the scene. This is human history - a neverending story of people screwing each other over. I don’t see why some ethnic group somewhere should get to be scapegoat for what everyone has been doing to each other since the dawn of time, nor do I see how it’s going to help us break this stupid destructive cycle and finally start respecting property rights properly.
I wrote an article for www.mises.co.za criticising this Tutuesque view of collective guilt from an anarcho-libertarian perspective, incidentally. Care to address some of the points in there, Charles? Your profile says you’re an ‘anarchist’.
“Apparently there isn’t private ownership of land in terms of Xhosa customary law - it always belongs to the local feudal lord, and he only has the power to lease it. You can make of that what you will.”
Since I do not believe states or dictators have rights, I would make of it that there was no reason to respect the claims of an absolute and total dictator to the land. Just as I wouldn’t say that Stalin had the right to all of Russia. If someone went ahead and homesteaded some of “Stalin’s” land, by building a farm, house, factory, or mine, I would say that it is rightfully their property and not Stalin’s. Even if they had to pay a tax of some cattle to keep the dictator’s thugs away from them so they may work peacefully.
No. I stated my opinion already in this thread. Your article is not a pronouncement of the absolute anarchist truth and judgement.
However, I did read your article. What you say in your article is just talking past what I said here in this thread. What you think matters, I think is irrelevent and vice versa. The fact that a lot of white people also got the short-end of the stick in South African statism is secondary to the entitlement of black people to recuperate stolen property.
The homesteading principle is irrelevent because you guys seem fixated on figuring out information that can not be traced. What is certainly known is that whites were the last to get there.
Relevent question: Who was collecting taxes? Who was monopolizing the money supply?
Answer: whites
End of homesteading discussion.
The everybody-except-the-white people had no choices. They had to work and live in places and at jobs that were controlled by whites. That is the same as coercion and being slaves on their own land.
‘Anarchist’ can mean just about anything in this day and age, in any case. You wouldn’t think that one could support taxation and still be worthy of the description, but you wouldn’t be the first, at least. Are you an anarcho-capitalist/libertarian anarchist/voluntarist?
Because if someone only read what you’d posted in this thread, they’d say you were a cultural Marxist.
Let me ask you this, if a guy with a Hindi accent, black hair and brown eyes kills your father, do you have a right of vendetta against every single person matching that description? Four hundred years later?
Why are you thinking in terms of race groups? It is individuals who commit crimes. You just seem to be avoiding this obvious point, hence why you give the impression of being a cultural Marxist.
The last to get where, exactly? The whole continent? Even though hundreds or thousands of square miles were totally uninhabited at the time? Why not make it the whole planet? What about when European settlers thought they were buying land, the Bantu occupants moved away peaceably to live out their lives, and a dispute of title arises generations later? Summary judgement in favour of the blacks?
Besides, if they were the last to do something, it was conquer the land from it’s previous inhabitants. The guy who stole something before you stole it from him doesn’t have a superior claim to it than you. Besides, the Cult of The Bank of England conquered everyone in South Africa after the “Boer War”, about a decade before it retook the USA by bloodless coup.
THE STATE.
The Bantu peoples were NOT living in anarchic societies. They were feudal states, with a nobility claiming a monopoly on force and territory, and at least paying nominal homage to a king. EXACTLY like Europe between the Roman Empire and the Treaty of Westphalia. How else do you think it was possible for a powerful king like Shaka of the Zulu to raise a massive army and conduct the astonishingly bloody wars of conquest that he did, and for that army to later defeat British colonial troops as well as Boers in the field?
They weren’t big on money, generally, but they paid taxes to their local feudal lord in the form of agricultural produce, labour and military service. Just like in Europe before Westphalia, which - incidentally - happened very shortly before the first permanent European settlements were established here.
Why are you ascribing to this painfully distorted, leftist, politically-correct view that Africa was somehow morally or socially superior to anywhere else on the planet before white people arrived?
Listen, property rights have never been respected properly anywhere on Earth. If one insists on being a bitch about it, almost every single thing one touches has been stolen from someone - certainly the immovable property.
We can’t just hit a goddam reset button and go back to the Garden of Eden. Are you interested in ethics which minimise conflict or not? If your ethics lead you to conclude that force may be used by anyone against anyone, because technically it was initiated by someone’s genetic forebear once upon a time, you might as well not bother paying attention to ethics at all. You’d get the same results.
I believe the Non-Agression Principle is a good moral code. Call me anything you want from there.
I also believe that when the NAP is violated, the action is the equivalent to theft of property. The victims of the alleged theft are morally right to recuperate that stolen property and or to seek justice. How they go about achieving that is a different debate from whether I am an anarchist or not.
Also, I accept the natural world God gave us where property degenerates/depreciates/changes over time. In other words, giving back what was stolen is physically impossible to do even if all parties were negotiating peacefully. The best you can do in peaceful arbitration is give what the victim accepts. Thus, recuperating property MUST be a redistribution of something, anything else and that is a fact of natural law, if there is one in libertarianism.
I do not even know what a cultural Marxist is so I really do not care to address the inability of someone to intelligently extrapolate from what I write.
However, if I were to take a wild guess, I would say that you are struggling with accepting the fact of history that many peoples shared property in a communal sense. I have stopped struggling with that obvservation long ago and learned to accept it as posing an impossible problem for strict propertarians to resolve when historic claims are in dispute.
No but that is a dishonest/foolhardy extrapolation of what I said. I am taling about South Africa where all of the non-black people present are the progeny of foreigners.
I do not dispute that. I am saying that the victims of theft have a moral right to recuperate stolen property.
I agree that the majority of white people today are not thieves. My point is that they are holding onto stolen goods today.
I did not avoid it at all. I said quite clearly: “If you stole property from my father or from my grandfather, I smugly feel morally entitled to use mortal force to get my rightful inheritance back.” I believe that the black South Africans have the same prerogative.
South Africa, obviously.
Now you are being silly in this discussion and I am having trouble taking you seriously. You are just looking to move goal posts.
With all due respect, it is unreasonable for you to ask irrelevent questions (granted, I recognize that you probably believe they are relevent) in a debate unless you demonstrate the relevence of your question. Otherwise, I could keep badgering you to tell us what color are the warts on the hind end of every single man that walked through Africa in an attempt to prove that you do not know the topic.
However, if you want to follow that path of reasoning, go ahead. You are slowly discovering that being a strict propertarian can get dirty and no libertarian principles can wash it all clean.
What actually happened is in dispute. However, if I had to gamble, I would say, yes, summary judgement in favor of the blacks. I have a hard time believing that foreigners of yesteryear – whose progeny developed Apartheid of all things – engaged in honest exchange when they came to Africa. I might be wrong but that is where I place my bets.
That is not the way I see things.
White foreigners collected taxes and enforced that collection through the barrel of a gun.
Irrelevent.
How convenient for the Europeans. Too bad the Europeans were not libertarians and did not seek to free the African people from statism.
There you go shifting goal posts. I never said that Africa was anything superior. I said is that black people have a claim to stolen property. Just because they were living under previous defacto statism is irrelevent. You bring it up like it mattered. That is a weird. How does that history matter?
That is not my fault. Tell us when people should stop being a bitch about recuperating stolen property.
I believe they have every right to keep trying to get their property back as long as they can demonstrate the lineage of where it went. As far as I am concerned, I do not see black people immigrating to South Africa. I just see foreigners coming in. So, a black man like Tutu would be reasonable to find his inheritance in the hands of people outside his race.
Following the NAP when somebody violates it has no bearing on your question. [I will overlook the obvious fact that miniziming conflict is not even an intelligent expression and that conflict is not a quantifiable concept.] Nobody has a moral obligation to avoid conflict when they are disputing a claim. Leastways, I do not believe they do. Maybe you can open up the Libertarian Scriptures and recite a verse or a logical derivation thereof that says otherwise.
You may be right but as long as an alleged victim can demonstrate where his stolen property/inheritance lies, he has a valid claim to recuperate it and still hold true to the NAP as far as I am concerned.
This is incorrect and an error in your thinking. If you hold to the NAP as you say you do, you cannot state this and maintain consistency. The NAP does not give descendants of victims the right to aggress in this manner. What the victims descendants should do is sue in a civil court for return of property, ie a non-violent solution.
Mortal force is never justified except in the face of mortal aggression against you. To say that because someone stole property in the past therefore mortal force to take it back is allowable now is ridiculous. You’re sanctioning mob warfare by such a stance, when you should be leaving the execution of force to retrieve stolen property in the hand of an objective outsider tasked with justice in society, ie: courts, where objective standards of evidence and procedure can ensure justice for both sides. To take back stolen property with mortal force is both a violation of the NAP and an injustice in its own right. To murder another is to steal everything from them, the entire world, their whole life and future.
A past injustice does not justify a present injustice. If whites enforced taxes against blacks in the past that would not justify blacks taxing whites now. Revenge taxation will only further harm their country.
Agreed.
If by conflict you mean the physical use of coercion, then of course they do. You can only expect your rights to be respected if you’re willing to respect other’s rights. To live in a society is to agree to give up your ability to use physical coercion to solve conflicts and imbue it in an impartial institution. The point of this is to end the use of physical violence within society.
Personal use of physical force is only justifiable in retaliation against an initiator of aggression. No one holding land stolen a generation ago is initiating aggression against anyone. They are merely holding stolen property, and such a claim should be examined in a court of law and ruled upon. End of story. Your ethics are severly twisted, and you claim to hold to the NAP! You’re fooling yourself.
If by ‘conflict’ you mean suing the holder of stolen property for return of property, ie: a legal conflict or lawsuit, then I’ll agree with your original statement.
He has a valid claim to recuperate it, YES. But he cannot personally use physical force to recuperate it, NO.
Second, you had me until the last two sentences: “He has a valid claim to recuperate it, YES. But he cannot personally use physical force to recuperate it, NO.”
Maybe I am overgeneralizing your statement, but if someone steals my TV and is running away with it I cannot stop him?
Well, it’s not quite apples to apples because the example I was dealing with there’s a large time separation between the original theft and the attempt to take it back.
If the thief has just stolen your tv, you can take steps to recover it personally and physically, though I wouldn’t sanction going as far as using mortal force for theft of nonessential goods like a tv (as even a thief’s life exceeds the value of a tv).
Rather, in the example he gave, with a large amount of time having passed between the crime and the complaint, your only recourse is a lawsuit and presentation of evidence to an impartial body. If someone simply went out and took back land stolen from their grandfather, there’d be no way to distinguish that from an initiation of aggression because that land would not currently be in the act of being stolen, as in your tv example
The beneficiaries do not receive the title to the land. It’s seen as some sort of problem that someone who receives a house this way could sell it, if they wanted to, or do anything else with it as its owner.
This isn’t lawful redistribution of stolen property; it’s socialism.
I agree that it is socialism. However, the spirit of Tutu’s proposal can still be consistent with the NAP if we believe – as I do – that rightful ownership is automatically transfered from father to son.
It is you who is mistaken because you mistakenly attribute more to the NAP than what the principle states. The NAP does not define the nature of property rights nor how conflict should be resolved when aggression is initiated.
You and I can disagree on rightful transfer of property from one generation to an other. We can also disagree on individual versus collective ownership of property. Despite all of that, we can still both consistently apply the NAP in reasoning.
The NAP does not state that. You just made that up.
No, I am not. It is not my fault HOW people choose to deal with recuperating their own stolen property in a case where they have a collective concept of ownership.
You are sanctioning statism!
No, it is not. The NAP does not speak to whether mortal force can morally be used in self-defence. You are hiding an extra axiom in your reasoning.
I do not consider it a present injustice. I consider it to be this: If whites stole property from blacks in the past, the children – i.e., rightful property owners due to inheritance – are morally correct to recuperate their property regardless of who is holding it or who consumed it. Stop.
How they recuperate their property is a different argument that can not be guided by the non-aggression principle alone.
I never said anything about the motives of the actors.
What you wrote is nuts and false.
The NAP sanctions self-defence in person and in property but says NOTHING about how the defence/restitution is made.
That is not what the NAP says nor does any logic derived exclusively from the NAP say that either.
Wrong. I hold the NAP but you and I simply disagree on how to handle violations of the NAP in certain instances. I respect your adherence to non-violent conflict resolution and that certainly is what I prefer to see play out however, my ethics on this latter issue is because of beliefs that I hold OUTSIDE of the NAP.
Furthermore, of all ways in which Tutu’s dilemma could be resolved, taxation of the whites could conceivably be seen as preferably least violent. Tutu is not suggesting that black people rampage and pillage as was done to the blacks in the past. The onus is on Tutu to make his case of rightful ownership credible – whether he has done that I do not know nor do I care. I am convinced such a case may be possible.
Actually I wasn’t appealing to the NAP at all in regards to property rights, but rather to your statement of using mortal force to regain property. I argued that that constituted an initiation of aggression in its own right. You disagree so let’s put the microscope on this.
30 years ago, or w/e, X group takes property from Y group by force, initiating violence against them to do so, aggressing. X-group has violated the NAP by initiating force. The ethical remedy for the violation is not the initiation of violence by Y-group or persons to take back the stolen property after it has happened, certainly not “mortal force” as you said! That would be explicitly a violation of the NAP, that would be a new initiation of violence in the face of an aggression. The proper response is either the use of force/violence to defend your property while the original initiation is happening (which would fall into the category of self-defense), or if that fails, to sue in the law courts for redress of theft.
If this is true 30 years ago for the original owner, it’s even more true for the legitimate descendants. They cannot initiate aggression and remain true to the NAP–which only allows for the use of violence in self-defense.
The NAP is more properly thought of as the NIVP, the non-initiation of violence principle, as violence is properly used to defend onesself from initiatiors of violence; it is the initiation of violence that constitutes aggresion, and that qualifier of ‘initiation’ is the key factor. It’s not that violence is wrong, it’s the initiation of it. That then defines the proper role of the state, to defend others against initiators of violence/coercion, that phrase meaning ‘aggression’. To leave out that qualification simply support the anarchist’s arguments that the state uses coercion/violence and is thereby illegitimate. This isn’t true. What the anarchists evade and ignore is that there’s two kinds of coercion: initiatory and responsive (responding to intiatory force). Responsive coercion used by an outsider to the situation to stop those whom are initiating coercion against a victim is an exceedingly good thing and the ultimate aim of law. And if we could limit government action purely to the responsive use of force to protect rights and punish those aggressing against people’s rights, we’d have the best society imaginable within the libertarian thought-sphere.
It’s actually a corollary of the NAP. The NAP does not preclude violent self-defense, as a defender is not using aggression, but rather using violence to defend against an aggressor. If you consider that justice requires that the remedy to a transgression be commensurate with the crime, then any response to a crime that is not commensurate with the crime is an initiation of aggression over and above what the original act justified.
This is why we consider it wrong to execute a criminal for, say, stealing bread. We don’t do that in law courts and we should not do that in our own response to crime personally.
This is also why I object to your “mortal force” standard for taking back property. It is not commensurate with the crime and constitutes an aggression in its own right. Only if you were currently under mortal threat would a mortal response to end that threat be justified.
But you’re not leaving how to them, you said they could use mortal force, that’s sanctioning mob warfare. If you said they should sue in courts to regain property that would be, you know, not sanctioning mob violence while still achieving the idea of giving them back legitimately owned property. All that would result from forcibly taking back property would be that the strong man would end up with a lot of property. Legitimate inheritors would not receive their due. And they would not receive it under collective ownership concepts either for the same reason.
Sure, if you want to call it that. I sanction all legal actions which use force to stop the initiation of force within society, that is I support responsive violence to end initiatory violence, and to further be just it must also be commensurate. That is a good use of force and the only kind I sanction. It constitutes societal self-defense. It is also the proper role of government and why I will never agree with anarchists. I tend to call it strictly-limited government, as it doesn’t rise to the definition of ‘statism’ which attempts centralism on all fronts and I do not. I merely support a legal structure upholding law and its enforcement, and urge separation of economy and state after that, which should preclude me from the label of ‘statist’
Actually, the NAP explicitly allows violent self-defense. You see, it’s not the “non-violence principle” that would be pacifism, and that would preclude violent self-defense of any kind. It is the non-aggression principle, and aggression is the initiation of violence. Violent self-defense is not aggression, because the conflict is forced upon you, it is a response to aggression that already exists. And your response, to be just, must be commensurate with the threat.
Thus, if a trifle is being stolen from you, that’s not a threat to your life and mortal force in response = no. If you’re being attacked physically, you have no idea how far the attacker may take it and mortal force is generally justified (we could go into detail on that but I won’t now).
Sure, it must also be guded by principles of justice, and it is still subject to the NAP as it is action in its own right. Any such action is not outside the purview of the NAP, as you seem to be suggesting by sanctioning mortal threat of violence.
The property was taken by force and should be restored by an independent and dispassionate process of law, with objective standards of evidence and a defined procedure; ie: a court of law. There is no other way to remove violence as a conflict resolution tool within society without an institution to which disagreements can be brought and resolved with justice.
True, but when I said a retaliatory tax would only harm their country I wasn’t referencing the NAP for support of that statement…
There is only one thing that NAP has to say on how defense/restitution is made: you cannot use aggression or the initiation of violence to do it! That is explicit. And aggression is precisely what you said should be used. What’s needed to make restitution in this case is an uninvolved third party to judge claims via evidence and restore rightful title.
Well, again, if you hold to the NAP you must agree that aggression, that is the initiation of violence, cannot be used in response to aggression. To do this, the responsive violence used to end the aggression must be just, that is it must be commensurate with the violence foisted upon you, just enough to end the aggression and no more. Anything beyond violence used to end the aggression is itself an aggression and not-allowable by the NAP. Thus, to sanction “mortal threat” to return lost property is certainly an aggression, as the current owners are not threatening anyone mortally at present.
If you have a commitment to the NAP, then it must be integrated with the other beliefs outside the NAP that you hold. Otherwise you are not applying it evenly. The NAP is an ethic applied to all action, and if any actions can be said to be outside the considerations of the NAP then you’re not actually holding to it consistently. So what are these beliefs outside the NAP you hold which are causing you to think a violation of the NAP is okay?
Taxation is not “mortal threat” either. The problem with Tutu’s tax is first of all its racism, and secondly that it has no limited scope. These cases should be done individually, restoring property to the descendants and otherwise removing it from wrongful owners. This would limit the damages to the white descendants holding illegitimate property through no fault of their own, limit it to what their forefathers had stolen. To create a tax is simply to create redistribution in perpetuity usign a past theft as a rationale, and as I said, will harm their country, both economically and socially. No one will really begrudge giving up property their forefather had stolen, but a tax on white is a new injustice because of its racial basis and its unlimited scope.
Hah, it was you who were suggesting that! At least that’s what I read from you. Mortal threat!
Again, I made that statement in response to your stated situation assuming decades had passed between theft and the attempt to retrieve it and clarified the statement in later posts. Unfortunately I didn’t include the time element in that statement
So I’ll restate it thus. Let’s say a man can prove that a property was stolen from his grandfather. So he breaks into the house and runs off its current occupants. The current occupants call the police whom arrest the man and send him to jail, despite his proof. Why? Because he has aggressed against the current occupants.
The man may have a claim, but when he needs is a legally recognized and sanctioned claim.
And the family currently living in that house may not even be relatives of the man who originally stole it! Suppose the guy who stole it years ago later stole it. Then the man who should have inherited it does not have a claim against the original owners, but rather against the estate of the original thief, meaning if the inheritors of that man’s estate received anything in the estate, he has a claim on it.
