Hereditary Guilt: a Worthless and Absurd Concept
Last week, Japan’s Emperor Akihito and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe attended the memorial service in Tokyo to mark the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender to end World War 2. The occasion brought about familiar calls for Japan to apologise for its colonial war and aggression, particularly to China and Korea, and its general cruelty during World War 2. Emperor Akihito did indeed express remorse for Japan’s wartime exploits, but this was in contrast to Prime Minister Abe, who whilst stating that Japan would reflect on the past with abhorrence, did not go so far as issuing a new apology for its wartime aggression. The reason it would have been a new apology was because apologies had been expressed in both 1995 and 2005 by the then serving Prime Ministers of Japan. Mindful of these earlier apologies, Prime Minister Abe said that future generations should not be “predestined to apologise” for their country’s wartime actions.
However, apologies for events in history have generally been more forthcoming from contemporary politicians. David Cameron has apologised for, amongst other things, Bloody Sunday (Edward Heath was PM), Section 28 (the law introduced by Margaret Thatcher outlawing the promotion of homosexuality in Schools) and the Hillsborough disaster and subsequent cover-ups (David Cameron apologised “on behalf of the government and indeed our country”).
Perhaps the absurdity of such apologies can be more clearly realised by considering, for example, the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007, when a tearful Ken Livingstone offered an apology on behalf of the capital city and its institutions for the slave trade. With reference to the same anniversary, the then prime minister, Tony Blair, apologised to Ghanaian president John Agyekum Kufuor, saying “I have said we are sorry and I say it again.” “We” presumably meant the British people rather than a misuse of the royal plural.
In the case of Ken Livingstone and Tony Blair, who were they apologising on behalf of? Britain is now a multiracial society and some of those people of Ken Livingstone’s “capital city and its institutions” include descendants of the slaves themselves. Do they need to apologise? And this argument can be confused a little more by including marriages between earlier immigrants, arriving before the slave trade, like the Anglo Saxons, and the descendants of the slaves. Indeed the popular black chef, Ainsley Harriott was shown in the BBC genealogy programme “Who do you think you are?” as believing that his great-great-grandfather, James Gordon Harriott, was a black slave, but during the programme he was revealed to be the descendant of a long line of white slave owners. Should Ainsley feel more guilty than most and think that the apologies of Ken Livingstone and Tony Blair were more applicable to him?
Of course it’s complete nonsense. No one can possibly understand the context of distant history enough to ascribe any form of guilt even to the people conducting the slave trade. Therefore to apologise for a country whose residents had as much to do with the slave trade as they did with the last ice age, is utterly meaningless.
It’s interesting that David Cameron and Tony Blair didn’t actually apologise for events they had direct control over, and therefore would have known the context and consequence of their actions. I suspect we’ll wait in vain for Tony Blair to apologise for today’s Middle Eastern crises, including the exodus of economic migrants through Libya, based on the initially destabilising overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
These disingenuous apologies by politicians on behalf of someone else seem more to do with a PR exercise, either to highlight the actions of their political opponents, to make a diplomatic gesture or for the political class to appear open and transparent having delayed justice for a political generation or two. This latter reason was likely behind David Cameron’s apology for the Hillsborough disaster. It seems that everyone in the country apart from The Sun (up to 2004), politicians and the South Yorkshire police, did indeed believe that there’d been a cover up virtually from the beginning. So for David Cameron to include the almost libellous “our country” in the apology gave the impression that everyone was misled and that the whole country should apologise. It was clear that one day the truth would surface (there were certainly enough enquiries) but likely only after the usual delay to ensure any politicians potentially involved in the cover-up were long gone, to the utter despair of the long-suffering families of the victims.
So would we be wise to trust the sincerity of politicians who won’t apologise for their own actions but feel the need to apologise on behalf of others for some event in the historical past? Such apologies taken at face value would seem to presuppose the existence of the concept of some form of hereditary guilt, as ridiculous as that may seem. In a reworking of the old adage, we should perhaps beware politicians bearing apologies.
So the burning question of the day is, should politicians apologise on behalf of their public for distant historical events?
