Modern Ethics Encourages Ethnic Cleansing

We intuitively know that ethnic cleansing is wrong. Humans are not so uniform that all members of every tribe are sufficiently dangerous to any other tribe. But the truth is that we reward cleansing through one simple mechanism: descendants of survivors are entitled to eternal litigation of grievance.

Described this way, it sounds patently ridiculous. However, the truth is that the only way we ever examine guilt is in the context of descendants - all of whom are assumed to inherit the guilt of their ancestors. The descendants of every great injustice of the past have always claimed right to restitution from the descendants of those who perpetrated it. If you're considering fighting a war of invasion against another people you are forced to consider that the echo will rebound generations later upon your descendants.

We have chosen to offer one way out of the dilemma: few enough survivors that their claims are small. Even today the Maori, the First Nations, and the various colonized nations of the world claim some kind of reparation from those who conquered them brutally. What is notable, though, is that the ones they conquered brutally claim nothing against them. For the Maori, this is very well apparent - they all-but-eliminated those that they were brutal to through violence and cannibalism.

After an immediate gustatory decimation, their numbers dwindled in the following decades to under a hundred until they were absorbed by other populations. Insufficient numbers existed to press a claim of restitution commensurate with the loss against the Maori - who were then free and clear to press their own much-less-justified claim against those who dominated them. And if the Moriori had survived in sufficient number, would any court of justice grant hundreds of square miles to a thousand people when those that killed them numbered a million? The relative size of things would itself seem to be an injustice against the descendants of the aggressors. The critical tool in place here is therefore the reduction of opponents to a sufficiently small number that they cannot politically or genetically sustain themselves as a single group.

This example, much celebrated, offers a way out of locked battle, but only under some conditions. In situations like Israel/Palestine, the goal of near total annihilation is not feasible. Palestinians live in a diaspora in neighboring nations, and Jewish people live in a similar worldwide diaspora. The existence of survivors of a complete annihilation of either state probably guarantees no peace. The reward for this process is only available therefore against small groups with no strongly-identified diaspora.