WRONG WAY ON REPARATIONS
By Ed Feulner
Washington Times, DC
May 21 2007
The United States motto is written on most of our money: E Pluribus
Unum, "out of many, one." But if Congress has its way, plenty of
our dollars will be spent to separate Americans into ethnic groups
instead of bringing us together as one people.
The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the "Guam World
War II Loyalty Recognition Act" May 8 and didn’t seem to consider it
controversial. The bill breezed through by a wide, 288-133, margin
and didn’t even undergo the usual debate; lawmakers voted to suspend
the rules so it could pass swiftly.
But this bill should not have been noncontroversial. This is no
mere measure to rename a Post Office or federal building. If this act
becomes law, it would require the Treasury secretary to pay reparations
to "Guam residents who were killed, raped, injured, interned, or
subjected to forced labor or marches," as well as to "survivors of
compensable residents who died in war or survivors of compensable
injured residents." The bill could cost taxpayers $126 million.
There are several things wrong with this picture. First, it wasn’t
the United States that abused the people of Guam. Imperial Japanese
troops occupied the island in 1941 (immediately after they attacked
Pearl Harbor) and held it for more than three years. As elsewhere,
the Japanese invaders treated the population cruelly.
Guam’s congressional delegate, Madeleine Bordallo, ignored that
history as she tried to explain why the bill was necessary. "There
is a moral obligation on the part of our national government to pay
compensation for war damages in order to insure to the extent possible
that no single individual or group of individuals bears more than a
just part of the overall burden of war," she told the House.
But the U.S. bears no blame here, and no responsibility. We fought to
prevent the island from being taken by the Japanese, and fought to
free it again. Some 3,000 Americans were killed and more than 7,000
wounded in the 1944 battle for the island. That’s a price paid in
blood that can never be made up with mere dollars.
Besides, World War II ended 62 years ago. And that brings up another
critical point: If the U.S. is supposed to make restitution to people
harmed decades ago by one of our (then) enemies, where do we stop?
Residents of the Philippines could demand handouts, since that
country was also under U.S. protection before being captured by the
Japanese. Korea and China could also make a case, since they also
all suffered from Japanese domination.
And that’s just Asia. Nazi Germany was equally cruel to residents
of the countries it occupied. We certainly can’t afford to make
restitution to everyone in Eastern Europe. Yet we would likely have
to, since it would be difficult to find a religious or ethnic group
that didn’t suffer during World War II.
But things wouldn’t stop there. Once you’re on a slippery slope,
it’s difficult to stop. We might find ourselves making payments to
the survivors of Bosnian Muslims killed by Serbs during the 1990s,
the descendants of Armenians killed by Greeks during World War I,
and certainly the descendants of African-Americans brought to this
country as slaves.
The Guam bill is little more than a reparations foot in the door.
If it succeeds, we can expect a flood of similar complaints from all
corners of the globe. The United States, a country that has fought so
hard to spread freedom around the world — and is still fighting to
protect newly won freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan — would be forced
to pay reparations as if we were a human-rights abusing rogue nation.
Our country is unique because it opens its arms to immigrants from
everywhere and gives them the chance to become citizens. If we start
allowing ethnic groups to make claims on the Treasury because of
where they were born, we’ll quickly lose the unity that makes our
nation work.
We simply can’t afford the "Guam World War II Loyalty Recognition Act."
Ed Feulner is president of the Heritage Foundation.