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Some additional context from wikipedia: the island was originally 100% uninhabited in the 19th century when the French brought slaves there. Over the course of
by stvswn 11y ago
Some additional context from wikipedia: the island was originally 100% uninhabited in the 19th century when the French brought slaves there. Over the course of the next century, it was mostly privately owned, and the majority of residents were employees of plantations who were under temporary contracts and would return to Mauritania or the Seychelles after the contract was over. Ever since the slave days, there was a creole population, and that's the relevant group -- they were not indigenous peoples, but rather freed slaves and their descendants living on private land. In the 1970s, about 1100 people were forcibly removed after the British government took control of the island for the US naval base. They were compensated in cash. I think it's absolutely reasonable to feel like this was a dirty land grab, but whether they were really permanent residents, and how many they were, is in dispute. This sort of falls in the category of eminent domain seizures. I generally have a problem with those, but I don't spend too much time dwelling on the displaced populations that resulted from other government land seizures. Should we all feel guilty when we visit national parks? Or when we drive on highways? Or for the many military bases throughout the US? Do you think they just happened to find land with exactly zero residents?
- zyxley 11y ago> whether they were really permanent residents I think it's pretty strange not to think of somebody as a permanent resident of the place they've lived since birth.
- stvswn 11y agoI said it was in dispute, not that I agreed. If you squat on gov't land in the US and have kids there, would the gov't just cede the land to you after an appropriate amount of time? Maybe yes, I guess, but it's complicated.
- zyxley 11y agoThis kind of thing is why adverse possession laws are good for society as a whole despite the inconvenience they can cause on a personal level.
- aakilfernandes 11y agoIs 10 minutes reading an article and contemplating an unjustice really that big a burden on your life? No one is asking you to start self-flagellating...
- stvswn 11y agoI'm not arguing that it's too big of a burden to contemplate the injustice. I'm arguing that the scale of the injustice may not be as great as the author contends, and there may have been a competing thing of value that was gained by the injustice, and that it is naive to argue that a government removing someone from their home is always an injustice regardless of context.
- dragonbonheur 11y agoMAURITIUS IS NOT MAURITANIA
- stvswn 11y agoApologies for the mixup. You can calm down now.
- dragonbonheur 11y agoThat wasn't the only thing wrong with what you wrote.
- Intermernet 11y agoWhere do you draw the line in that argument? Would you be worried if the same argument and logic were applied to people who arrived in the US after Columbus, or people who arrived in Gaul after the Romans? If a line can be blurred back to the beginnings of recorded history, then the line doesn't really exist. >Should we all feel guilty when we visit national parks? No, you should respect that the national park has a disturbing history, and accept that as part of your national history. Sweeping it under the rug, or using already spurious laws like "eminent domain seizures" to justify it is not going to lead to progress in these matters.
- stvswn 11y agoI didn't say we should sweep it under the rug, I said that there exists context that the original author did not provide. Yes, the history of the population matters in these cases. I don't know where we should draw the line, but I do know that "we should never have military bases if one person has to be relocated" is not the line.