>At the risk of invoking common sense: Things that you did nearly a hundred years ago are not especially relevant to the discussion of what you're doing today.

>At the risk of invoking common sense: Things that you did nearly a hundred years ago are not especially relevant to the discussion of what you're doing today. For a person, yes, for a country, not so much. A country has "continuity of the state" (if I recall the term correctly). Besides that legal difference (under international law), what a country has done in the past cannot be erased from the country. Even if all the old perpetrators are now dead, the deed remains within the country's history, and affects relations within its population (descendants of the perpetrators and/or the victims), relations with other countries if it was a foreign affairs issue, etc. For example you have freed the black slaves. You also stopped segregation (in the bloody 60's !!!). That doesn't mean that there is not a friction between black and white people in the country still, based among other things on historical reasons. And it doesn't mean that the black people that live today have it as if those things did not happen at all. Their past also affects their future. For example, a guy that arrived as a poor _white_ immigrant in the US in the twenties, is far more likely to have made it (and his descendants) than a poor black guy freed from some Southern cotton picking farm and left with nothing + plus the prejudice of the era + plus unfavorable laws (Jim Crow etc). Which kinda explains why blacks are the disproportionate majority of the prison population in the US. Besides that, what a country has done in the past is probably indicative of the idea the country has for itself and it's role. That kind of state and populace thinking doesn't die with a generation or two. For example the US likes to play global cop, Germany has several times brought war to Europe (and the world at large), other countries had colonial history for 3-4 centuries and continue to feel "entitled" to the countries they occupied in the past, etc etc.