Historical Justice Is Really Quite Evil

Historical Justice is truly a great evil. But what is historical justice and why is it evil?

Well, to help us define it, let’s look at the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s definition of historical injustice:

“historical injustice, past moral wrong committed by previously living people that has a lasting impact on the well-being of currently living people. Claims to material reparations for historical injustices are typically based on the nature of the lasting impact, and claims to symbolic restitution are often grounded on the moral quality of the wrongs committed. This article considers the theoretical underpinnings of arguments about reparations, responsibility for past injustices, and the rights of those wronged.”[1]

So, ‘historical injustice’ is a reference to wrongs committed in the past by people who are no longer alive or as Brittanica notes they were “previously living people.” This does not refer to the most recent history that we are now experiencing, but to relatively recent, or modern history, at least a generation ago, and futher back. But the definition is so broad you could choose to go back to any possible date in the past, choose a line of causality from some historical event, and built a case and a charge for historical injustice. Hence “historical justice” is the restoration of past historical wrongs, or perceived historical wrongs.

I say perceived, because it is entirely possible, in fact entirely likely, that those actions were not considered crimes or even necessarily wrong in the past. Cultural mores change over time, so one generation is almost guaranteed to be condemned by the next generation and their new standards. Even though this is the case, there are things which were done in the past that were known to be wrong then that are still considered wrong now, and which people believe should be addressed, or acknowledged in some way in the pursuit of restoring historical justice. But while it can be granted that some peoples have severely wronged other peoples, going back in time to find wrongs that need to be addressed today is an incredibly dangerous and destructive business. Let’s examine why.

Consider what it would take to grant "historical justice" to Indigenous Australians for colonization. In this article we are not going argue over whether or not there was historical crimes committed against the indigenous in the process of colonization, we are simply for going to grant there was such wrongs for the sake of argument. If you do grant that their land was stolen and you also grant that it must be returned or compensated, then you place yourself in the situation of seeking to address this historical injustice. All those people who go out of their way to acknowledge that they are on other people’s land admit they are thieves, after all, though they refuse to repent of their theft. If you want to be consistent in putting into practice what you confess, then you need to do something.

If you want to return it you first have to determine who was connected to what bit of land. This is almost impossible to prove because of the time that has passed, the lack of records, and the lack of archaeological evidence. This is especially the case for a nomadic people. Hence the assumption becomes just that this is all their land by virtue of Indigenous descent. But this is difficult to determine in many cases as well. For instance, there are people in Australia who are descended on one side from Indigenous Australians, and on the other side from people who are known, and recorded, to have committed crimes against Indigenous people. If justice is to be determined, how do you determine in this case who was wronged and who did the wrong? There are many other reasons this is difficult as well.

Once you have determined who is owed the historical justice, or restoration, and you have determined the land needs to be returned to its original owners, then you have to seek to expel all other people, which requires ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. A truly criminal task. This would be the case even if you only determined to give them back some of the land. Ethnic cleansing is usually resisted which means it often quickly becomes genocide. Many people think that genocide means you have sought to wipe out an entire people, this is the popular understanding at least. But the actual crime of genocide only requires that you have set in place the conditions for it to happen, or even that you have only targeted one part of the group.[2] If you even just put a people in possible danger of genocide because of your intention to harm part of the group, that is a crime. But in this case you have determined that this is necessary for so-called historical justice. However, this is distasteful, so you might go another way.

If you don't go the ethnic cleansing route you may go the repatriations route. This might sound more reasonable and more just at first glance. However, this requires you to take from people today who did not take the land off the Indigenous, as they were not there, to give to people today who did not have it taken from them, as they were also not there. You are punishing a party who did not commit the wrong for the benefit of a party that was not alive at the time to have the wrong done to them. This is basically using theft to try and fix a historical theft, or alleged theft, and it is clearly immoral. Those who were not there, as in not existing yet, cannot claim any crime was committed against them. They didn't even exist yet. And we have determined that historical injustice is by definition “about past moral wrong committed by previously living people.” Hence it is unjust and evil from this perspective as well. So you may go another way.

You might go the direction where you institute “justice quotas." By that I mean you use injustice to punish people alive today to try and advance another people. In this case you take modern people who had nothing to do with the alleged historical wrong and you sanction them. They are shunted out of jobs or shut off from applying for jobs they are qualified for, in order to give them to others based on their race, whose ancestors were wronged. So, you use evil oppressive tactics to sideline one group to advance another. This has the inevitable result of destroying the credibility of many organizations and professions which hire using such practices, but it also creates deep resentment all around. You steal from one group today, to give to others who you say their ancestors were stolen from. You might think that in doing this you have chosen the least evil way of achieving your so-called historical justice. But in reality you become the evil you are preaching against. You are now the one who is taking from people what it is not yours to give to others who were not wronged.

Achieving so-called historical justice requires, necessarily, doing great evil to people living today who have nothing to do with the original alleged wrong. This is very likely why God said the son should not be punished for the sins of the father. We read in Ezekiel 18,

“19 Yet you say, ‘Why should not the son suffer for the iniquity of the father?’ When the son has done what is just and right, and has been careful to observe all my statutes, he shall surely live. 20 The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself” (Ez. 18:19-20).

God understands the hearts of man, better than even we do. And he knows that the desire for revenge can be passed down through the generations. In order to limit man’s desire for revenge, or vengeance, he commanded that sons should not suffer for the sins of their fathers. Those who seek any of the ways above to address historical justice simply commit injustice in the name of justice. They multiply injustice and the result is they unleash great evil on people.

Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in modern Israel. The British, who had no sovereign right to Palestine, decided that they could take a chunk of it, and give it to Eastern European Jews to seek to redress historical grievances enacted upon them by others. The Balfour Declaration (of 1917) was a famous part of this process. But during World War 1 Britain defeated the Ottoman Empire, and from that time on increasing waves of Jewish settlers were brought into Palestine to resettle it under the British Mandate government. At first the British were determined to hold onto this region of Palestine, to maintain a presence in the Middle East, but they withdraw in the late 1940’s and the modern state of Israel was created. It is because Israel was created in 1947-8 that many people incorrectly believe Israel was established because of what happened in World War 2. It is true that the Jewish settlements in Palestine increased markedly because of that war, but the process of Jewish resettlement began long before World War 2. It was established to resolve historical grievances, namely the restoration of “their land”, Zion. The British, and other international bodies, were seeking to achieve historical justice.

But it was recognized at the time that such a settlement could only happen if the European Powers maintained a heavy and forceful military presence in Palestine,

“Much earlier, the King-Crane Commission, sent out in 1919 by President Woodrow Wilson to ascertain the wishes of the peoples of the region, had come to similar conclusions as those of Jabotinsky. Told by representatives of the Zionist movement that it “looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine” in the course of turning Palestine into a Jewish state, the commissioners reported that none of the military experts they consulted “believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms,” and all considered that a force of “not less than 50,000 soldiers would be required” to execute this program. In the end, it took the British more than double that number of troops to prevail over the Palestinians in 1936 through 1939. In a cover letter to Wilson, the commissioners presciently warned that “if the American government decided to support the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, they are committing the American people to the use of force in that area, since only by force can a Jewish state in Palestine be established or maintained.” The commission thereby accurately predicted the course of the subsequent century.”[3]

A commission especially convened to determine what it would take to make a Jewish state in Palestine, or re-establish Israel, determined that oppressive force would be necessary, and it would need to be ongoing. To claim that land has meant that many Israeli soldiers, politicians, settlers and their Western supporters and equippers, have had to commit the very crimes on Palestinians, that they said were committed on them at many points in history. To achieve historical justice for them has required them to enact injustice today.

Many Christians recognize this, find it shocking, and do not support this in the slightest. But there is a large and very influential segment of the church who recognize this and just see this as necessary. They believe they are living in the days of Joshua 2.0 and this is a mandated biblical conquest, a fulfilment of prophecy. Many of these Christians won’t deny that horrible things have happened in this quest to reconquer the land. But they are ok with it, because this process is simply correcting a “historical injustice” committed against the Judeans when Rome took their land off them and renamed it Syria-Palestina. They are supporting evil because they have run it through a grid of historical injustice.

Historical justice causes great evil. It is a clear Satanic perversion of justice, which is made clear by the passage we looked at from Ezekiel 18 above. Punishing the Palestinians of the 20’s and after for the crime of the Romans in the 1^st century is as far removed from true or natural justice as you can get. All it really achieves is guaranteeing that more people are victims of injustice who feel they have a right to get their own back. It perpetuates a cycle of injustice.

No Christian can justify this as justice on biblical grounds. It is by definition injustice using historical grievances to justify itself. These Christians must put forward novel readings of prophecy on very debateable passages to lay the ground work to assert it is God's will for all of this happen. So that they can override their consciences which would otherwise see the clear evil that is happening. They stand on the authority of passages that most Christians in history have seen fulfilled in the work of Jesus and his Church, or in the Millennium or New Heavens and New Earth periods. There is a grand tradition in the Church that has read many of these passages in ways that could never justify the reconquering of Canaan. There is also a grand tradition in the church that says interpreting many of these proohetic passages is incredibly hard, and they should not be asserted too forcefully, but held with an open hand. Hence when they are used to justify literal force of arms, they show that those who do this make the most aggressive possible argument from the weakest possible ground.

And many of these Christians are not consistent in their beliefs anyway. You know this is true because almost to a man and woman the conservative Australian or American Christian would deny the native Australian or American what they assert is the right of the Israelis.

It is for this reason that I feel confident saying this is the product of a woke mind. According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, “The meaning of WOKE, is aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”[4] We now use woke as a way of mocking the left, but the origin of this word comes from social groups who believed they had a clearer view of social injustice and social justice. They were, in other words, awake to such historical grievances, or woke. Historical justice is literally a product of woke ideology, hence Christian Zionism is woke, as it too asserts historical justice. And we all know that woke cannot help but cause great evil, even if it is done with good intentions.

And low and behold, that is what we see happening.

List of References

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[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/historical-injustice

[2] https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-prevention-and-punishment-crime-genocide

[3] Khalidi, Rashid . The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: The New York Times Bestseller (pp. 51-52). Profile. Kindle Edition.

[4] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woke