I’m fairly certain people in Europe conquered other people in Europe over the centuries, and I doubt many of the conquered over there get reparations for it. I know that sounds callous, but I still feel that way.
I don’t see how this is at all analogous.
It is analogous because, although it’s hard for people to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”, to some degree it is necessary. If you want something bad enough, you need to fight for it. Having the government paying them does not necessarily ultimately lessen their suffering, but rather allows it to fester, because sometimes pain is necessary to affect change. Removing pain caused by injury does not necessarily help the injury to heal itself.
Let me rephrase my initial question. How is conquest analogous to racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing?
How is that question supposed to be any clearer?
Is it not?
I’m calling into question your comment about conquest in Europe, because I don’t see what European conquest has to do with what minorities in America experience. They seem to me like two completely different situations that are in no way comparable.
There aren’t minorities in Europe who suffer(ed) remotely similarly in comparison to what American minorities did/do?
Sure there are.
and Native Americans are still being affected by it today.
And financially compensating them in perpetuity is helping?
No, but putting some money into helping their communities become self-sufficient is.
A better analogy might be one of the various genocides that happened in Europe. I can certainly think of an example, a big glaring elephant in the room, and reparations were paid because of it.
You’re saying the Nazis exterminating Jewish European citizens is the same as
No, not the same, but certainly more comparable than simple conquest. Unless we’re thinking of ‘conquest’ differently. Do you have any examples of conquest in mind? Might help to clear the air here.
European colonists wholesale deciding they want more land and so took it brutally by force from the native people living here?
The colonists did a whole lot more than take land by force. Think massacres, torture, rape, re-education camps, and forced sterilization.
The Nazis didn’t expand across Europe to specifically take land from the Jews. They exterminated the Jews because they wanted to, not because the Jews were unfortunate enough to be in their way when they wanted something.
I don’t think intentions matter all that much here.