> However, should the government be held
>responsible? Afterall, the government is
>unbroken since the time of slavery and
>injustice*, so is the governement at fault, or
>when those people ask for recompense, can the
>government look back and say: "It was a younger,
>irresponsible government. It is not our fault"?

I think the answer to this is more complex than I'm going to make it out to be, but the short answer is, yes, the government is responsible. Now, I also believe in a sort of statue of limitations on these things, too--For instance, I don't think the Russian or Chinese governments have the right to order the current government of Mongolia to pay restitution for the actions of Genghis and Kublai Khan. We're just too far removed from those events for that to make any damn sense.

But I think the act of making governments pay for their actions is a well founded one. Germany was forced to pay restitution for "starting" WWI as part of the Treaty of Versaille (and that went a long way to starting WWII, but that's another story.) Affirmative action and other similar programs are in a sense part of the restitution the US government pays for slavery and for the enslavement of Africans and the years and years of persecution and segregation which followed its abolition. And although the reservation system certainly wasn't set up as something to compensate natives for having taken their true lands, I certainly think a lot of the benefits that brings them today (such as government support in some cases and the whole "Indian Casino" industry) is perpetuated by a desire to do just that.

And although it can be debated endlessly wether the *current* US government owes reparations to either class of people for what former incarnations of the government did to them (my personal thoughts are that we're at the point where everyone needs to be looking forward instead of back) it's certainly true that governments *do* have a responsibility to answer for their actions, including those actions of past governments. It's harder to pinpoint when that responsibility ends with governments, though, which is why we still have so much debate today about such subjects. I don't really have any answers for that, and doubt anybody does.

-- Dave