[PEN-L:8206] Re: Historical Responsibility

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Brad De Long wrote:

> >> But only the Chinese were used as human detonators, and it was not
> >> because they invented gunpowder.
> >
> >yes. and it is an extremely shameful part of u.s. history. henry, it
> >shames me.
> >
> >>>
> >
> >Why are you ashamed?  You can't possibly be complicit.
> >
> >mbs
>
> There is a sense in which I benefit from it--surplus extraction from
> Chinese-born workers building the Central Pacific Railroad--every time I use
> the Stanford Library. If I did not feel ashamed that my present comfort was
> purchased with such past brutality, would I still be human?

Good question.

>
> As Charles Maier put it--I think wisely--in a different context:
>
>         ...difficult to pin down any notions of collective responsibility.
>         Admittedly the latter notion is one of the most problematic
>         concepts for ethics or history. It is hard enough to assign
>         individual responsibility, which is one of the thorniest
>         issues, say, for judges, biographers, and others who must
>          confront personal action. Individual responsibility has
>         emerged as an especially difficult concept to apply to
>         agents of bureaucracies or military hierarchies. Obviously
>         it preoccupied Europeans especially as they debated the
>         appropriateness of postwar judicial sanctions and purges
>         against collaborators.... But it is still a somewhat
>         different issue from that of the degree to which West
>         Germany as a national society accepts responsibility
>         for the Nazi past, and for how long it must acknowledge
>         such responsibility. In what sense does collective
>         responsibility exist?...
>

For any long as racism exists.

>
>         The tentative and brief response, I would suggest for
>         the moment, is that insofar as a collection of people
>          wishes to claim existence as a society or a nation, it
>         must thereby accept existence as a community through time,
>         hence must acknowledge that acts committed by earlier
>         agents still bind or burden the contemporary community.
>         This holds for revolutionary regimes as well.
>
>         Insofar as past acts were acknowledged as injurious, this
>         level of responsibility stipulates that whatever reparation
>         is still possible must be attemped... Nor does this
>         responsibility have a time limit. Responsibility for a
>         burdened past can justifiably become less preoccupying as
>         other experiences are added to the national legacy. The
>          remoter descendants of those originally victimized have
>         a more diluted claim to compensation. But like that half-
>         life of radioactive material, there is no point at which
>         responsibility simply goes away.
>
> The situation of Chinese-born workers in the U.S. in the nineteenth century
> is complicated by the fact that for most immigrants, the experience was lived
> as a liberation and an empowerment. A U.S. that had banned trans-Pacific
> immigration in 1849 would have seen no Chinese-born workers crushed by rocks
> in the Sierra Nevada--but would also have been a greater oppression than in
> fact took place...
>

This kind of lesser of two evils reasoning is typical.  To be excluded from
America is worse than death?
Prior to 1875, the Federal government exercised no control on immigration.  In
that year, it assumed responsibility for the first time by excluding
prostitutes and persons with prison records. In 1882, idiots and persons likely
to become public charges were barred and a small head tax was imposed.
The Act of 1882 set a new precedent by completely prohibiting any further entry
of Chinese, and Chinese only.  The annually renewable act was made permanent in
1902 and was repealed only in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, as a gesture to an
"ally".
So Professor DeLong's argument does not work.  The Chinese railroad deads died
for nothing.

Henry C.K. Liu

>
> Brad DeLong
>
> -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
> "Now 'in the long run' this [way of summarizing the quantity theory of
> money] is probably true.... But this long run is a misleading guide to
> current affairs. **In the long run** we are all dead.  Economists set
> themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can
> only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."
>
> --J.M. Keynes
> -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
> J. Bradford De Long; Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley;
> Co-Editor, Journal of Economic Perspectives.
> Dept. of Economics, U.C. Berkeley, #3880
> Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
> (510) 643-4027; (925) 283-2709 phones
> (510) 642-6615; (925) 283-3897 faxes
> http://econ161.berkeley.edu/
> <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>