For those of us, unfortunately, in the imperial core, what steps should we take to stop a US war with China over Taiwan? I’ve honestly been pretty scared since the war in Ukraine started knowing that China is next. We must avoid this at all costs to save the thousands of Chinese lives that will be sacrificed by the west in their bid to reestablish a unipolar world.
While I’m not discounting the achievements of the anti-war movement in support of Vietnam, the war still waged on for years. The same with Iraq. What should be done differently?
But those events have consequences for the living right now. If you’re in poverty while someone else is rich because their ancestors stole from yours, then the current situation is unfair. You could of course simply equate all past actions to a sort of “ambient” condition, presumably outside the realm of ethics, but that would not necessarily have the effect of negating them:
The problem is that it’s all a huge “what if” amenable for any narrative you want. In the end it provides justification for the never ending cycle of violence on people having no personal guilt.
Forcing people to be responsible for more than their immediate actions (e.g., also for guaranteeing other people’s rights, justice for everybody, etc.) is only concerned with what people should be expected to do. A cycle of violence is not any more justified than it would be in any other situation. For example, I can use violence to defend myself from immediate aggression; if I include an unjust status quo in my reasoning, then I might also use violence to free myself from the consequences of past violence, but that would not create a “cycle” wherein a stable, nonviolent state cannot be reached, since every “allowed” instance of violence would still only be associated one-to-one with an equivalent instance of “disallowed” violence.
I’ll give a more concrete example. If someone is trying to rob me, let’s suppose it is lawful to use threats to protect my personal property. Now, if my family’s wealth was robbed long ago, I would have a right to recover it, and whoever has it now would have an obligation to return it. If they refuse, then they are essentially under the same ethical case as if they were directly robbing it from me, so it would be lawful for me to threaten them too. If they escalate, that would be unethical, so it is simply impossible to justify any cycle of violence.
What you’re saying is that children should carry the responsibility for the acts of their ancestors.
Who’s the judge of whether it’s “allowed” violence? If we say that the status quo of Franco-German relationship is built on the past injustice, and that this should be fixed, who will count all the past centuries of wars and massacres and calculate the outstanding balance?
Because if you let it both sides do it for themselves, then they both will naturally come to the conclusion that they’ve been unjustly treated and that the other side has to pay for that. In the end it will be the stronger one, not the morally correct one, who wins. For a time, then the sides will switch => cycle of violence is IMHO unavoidable if you hold the opinion that past sins are never forgotten.
History is basically never so nicely clear-cut. I mean, have you studied your family tree and made sure that all of that family wealth was gathered via perfectly moral means? What if it turns out that your grand grandfather was a soldier who brought home some gold of dubious origins?