AIBU to ask when a crime against humanity becomes just “history“

[Flyingfish2019]

About me: I have relatives still alive today who had to do forced labour. The regime who did that to them is no longer in power, the statues gone, streets have been renamed. I think it is good that this has been done.
My relatives never talk about that time and out of respect I never discussed it with them.

However: I heard about the statue of that slave owner coming down and the first thing that I thought was that it was a good thing to happen but then when I heard the discussion about erasing history I thought they had a point.

I thought of the king of Egypt who where the worst kind of slave holders yet the pyramids are not demolished though they where build with slave labour. Because we say that this is just history. Same with Roman and Greek sites. Romans and Greeks used slave labour. But most obviously most people think that this is just history.

So my question: do you agree that a crime against humanity becomes just history one day and when is that day reached... and no I cannot answer the question myself and it’s not a rhetorical question.

I would tend to say that yes, it becomes history one day but I could not really say when the time has come.

About a hundred years?

@slippery Could you explain why you think it is 100 years?

I think when things pass out of living memory, that's when they become "history". I also think the concept of history is a bit shit in many ways, because without the input people from who experienced an event from all sides, not just the dominant or victorious side, "history" tends to be presented in a certain way.

Input of people

When no one is alive to have any memory of the events maybe?

When both the perpetrators and victims are dead. No one left to prosecute, no one left to compensate.

It's actually about 20/30 years; a generation

As I see it, if the repercussions of the events have an impact on today's society, then it becomes more than just a historical event. For instance, the legacy of Imperialism and slavery is directly responsible for the racism and structural inequality that still permeates society.

I agree. It becomes "just" a history when there is no one alive who suffered by it.
I agree with pp. 100 years seems appropriate.

Also, people are generally forgetting that there is the thing that nothing is simply black and white. Yes x was in salve trade which we now know is abhorrent (yet it is still happening all over), but x also built half a city, schools, hospitals.

History is full of grey.

I mean there are still paintings being sold which were made by Hitler🤷🏻 Horrible man, beautiful art. Ghandi was a peacemaker but gosh, his character is certainly shitty.
And so on.

The two terms aren't mutually exclusive for me.
The issue is that the term only came into being historically recently (after WW2) so things that may have had the term applied to them before that will only have it applied retrospectively.

I think more and more events will be classified as CAH in this modern age.

Everything becomes history. Some historical events will be considered CAH.

To those who say: when everybody involved is dead... but what if the crime against humanity has long lasting consequences. Say: a genocide. Let’s say people gets genocided, there are few survivors several generations later there is a child that grows up which now is not any longer part of a culture because all the people who were his tribe are dead and gone/have never been born because their parents have been genocided. So the parents have to bring him up as part of the main stream culture (maybe those who committed the genocide). When does this fade into history?

Again: The Romans genocided whole tribes in the areas they invaded and I would say that this is just history but when do thinks like this actually fade into history?

For instance, the legacy of Imperialism and slavery is directly responsible for the racism and structural inequality that still permeates society.

I don't agree. There has ALWAYS been racism. It's the fear of different. Even animals are known to bully other animals if they have different pigment.
But unlike them, we have emotions and different brains so we should be able to work on it.

I think the big difference between a statue of a slave trader and places like the pyramids or the colosseum is that these places aren’t there to glorify an individual in the way a statue of an individual is. These places while built on slave labour have huge historical significance and tell us a lot of stories rather than being about particular time scales that define what is history.

I thought of the king of Egypt who where the worst kind of slave holders yet the pyramids are not demolished though they where build with slave labour.

I think I've read that it's not true the pyramids were built by slaves. Just googled and got this at the top:-

There is a consensus among Egyptologists that the Great Pyramids were not built by slaves. Rather, it was peasants who built the pyramids during flooding, when they could not work in their lands.

The slave owner who that statue was of died almost three hundred years ago, so none of his life was in living memory.

I think what makes slavery - specifically slavery in the USA - more than just history, is that those events are still impacting society today. The racism and the associated structural inequalities that slavery caused are still here.

I think it’ll be difficult to call it just history until those effects of slavery have gone.

I agree that it's when everyone involved is dead. Even if there are consequences for their descendants, no-one owes them compensation directly because of their parents victim status.

It's fine to help people who meet some objective criteria for needing help, but help shouldn't be contingent on an inherited status as a victim.

History is everything that happens in the past, including atrocities. Atrocities like slavery or genocide do not lose that label just because they go from current times into history.

Even 9/11 is now history. I think something is history when it is first taught in history classes in a school where the children were born after the event.

Well when it leaves living memory it’s surely just history? That doesn’t mean that it ceases to affect the present. We are still affected by things that happened thousands of yours ago. The last witness to those events dying though marks a substantial change in the way those events are perceived and marks a convenient point to make the distinction.

WW2 is history to me, even though I have a living relative who experienced it and was a trained pilot in the RAF.

I think of history as everything that happened before my birth. So there will be some people here who lived through things I view as history (born late 70s)

We coveted Thatcherism on my history degree, and she'd only gone out of power the term before - it wasn't a new course, either. History is as much about the present as the past, which areas of history we choose to study.

It can surely never become ‘just’ history.

Statues are different because the celebrate and cause people to, literally, look up to individuals. They continue to perpetuate the idea that giving money or using power erases the way that money and power was established.

If my child was murdered I wouldn’t want the murderers donations to the National Trust to be considered as a reason to stop them being held to account.

@CherryPavlova: Would you also say that statues of Julius Caesar need to be removed then? I think he clearly was in favour of slavery and genocide.

You can't hold someone who has been dead for over hundred years to account anyway though. Plus it's different to basically build a city to donate to National trust.

I’m not terribly keen on statues of powerful men, to be honest. I’d be indifferent to losing a statue of Caesar.
I love powerful statuary but oversized images of men who abused power don’t do it for me. No great thoughts provoked from looking at a bronze of Churchill or Caesar. David is altogether in a different league.

The effects of slavery and the subsequent discrimination are clearly obvious today. I'd say that's the difference between a statue of a slave trader and one of an ancient Roman Emperor.