Stop apologising! By Simon Jenkins - Guardian UK
"There can be too much of any good thing. The week's obsessive celebration of the ending of the slave trade had reduced me to media hibernation. Every politician, churchman, radio and television presenter has sought to outdo every other in telling us that slavery was evil. Historians, musicians, playwrights, comedians, poets have joined in. The BBC's current affairs output has became a monotony of smothering moral self-righteousness. The judgment has been appalling.
The point of history is to find out what happened and why, and thereby gain wisdom. It is not to make the present feel smug about the past. Why invest events 200 years ago with words such as guilt, apology, atonement and reparation? Is there some more recent guilt we are trying to conceal? If the BBC board had been around in 1807 how many flotillas would they have been financing, and what moral turpitude are they known nervously concealing? By Sunday night my brain was starting to turn. Perhaps there was something to be said for the slave trade after all.
The acceptance of guilt for a crime of which one is not guilty is a familiar psychological transference. But when one is not 'one' but an organisation or institution and when the crime is two centuries past, the transference is ludicrous. When all sense of proportion is then sacrificed in one long howl of 'I can be guiltier than thou', I cry halt."
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