the times | Saturday April 30 2022 35
Comment
the past to people who may look like people to whom
a wrong was done. How on earth is restitution to be
made on such terms?
In America there is a fierce debate over whether it is
“racist” to expect voters to show ID when they
exercise their franchise at the polls. Democrats insist
that black Americans will be put off voting if they are
expected to prove their identity. So how easy does
anybody think it will be to persuade black Americans
to do the necessary DNA tests to work out who comes
from slaves and who does not? After all, black people
in the US who have arrived in the past 150 years can
hardly be expected to be beneficiaries of this largesse.
And what are we to do about people who are
descended from slaves and slavers, slaves and slave-
stealers? Should African countries, residents of the
Caribbean and other places where people benefited
from the selling of slaves be asked to chip in to the
great reparations pot? It would be an unpopular
suggestion to make.
Whenever the UN discusses such issues African
leaders and others have a disagreement between those
who would like the money to be paid directly into their
own bank accounts and those who think some other
system might work. In reality, the whole system will not
just be a way of encouraging mass fraud and
corruption, but will also detonate race relations in
America in the name of healing them. A more fractious
and divisive idea could hardly be invented.W
orse is that there would be no
guarantee any such payment would be
a one-off. How do we know? Because,
deliberately or otherwise, memories
are short. How many people
demanding the latest bouts of apologies from the
royals know that the family dealt with this matter 200
years ago? How many people who think America
never addressed the issue of slavery understand that
the country almost fell to pieces fighting about that
very issue 200 years ago? Any payments would open a
demand for cheques that will never end.
So long as American blacks underperform, more
reparations will be demanded. The fact that other
ethnic minorities, such as Asian-Americans,
outperform whites will always be ignored as just
another of those too-difficult facts in a mono-
explanational world. As in America, so it will be here.
Just as no apology will be enough, no payments will
ever be enough. For there will always be a country
that needs more money. There will always be those
who see people prepared to prostrate themselves for
wrongs they did not do. And there will always be a
smiling politician eager to explain an easy way to
absolve yourself of your sin.
I feel sorry for the royals but the answer is easy. No
one alive did the sin. No one alive suffered the
consequences. History has moved on. Some former
colonies did well. Others did not. Only those who
don’t know anything about history are inclined to
think otherwise or think slavery is still a root issue.
They are a familiar type, these people. They are people
who tear at wounds long since healed and then cry
about their pain. It is an insult to our history, as well as
a demonstration of ignorance and cowardice, to
pretend that such people should get what they
demand. We owe them nothing. The debt is paid.Douglas Murray is the author of The War on the Westslaver. His statues have been torn down by activists
and also pre-emptively removed by local governments.
All of this has coincided with renewed calls for
reparations. The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates kicked off the
latest round of this debate in 2014 with a piece in The
Atlantic magazine making “the case for reparations”. In
it, Coates argued that African-Americans might look
for a precedent to the money paid to Israel by postwar
Germany. This argument caught on in record time. By
the 2020 Democratic primaries, all candidates for the
presidency professed some support for the idea of
reparations, and several were ardent advocates. One of
the first things the Biden administration did was to
look at setting up a commission to investigate the
possibility of paying reparations.
What any such commissions will someday have to
confront are the deep problems that everybody in
America as in Britain would like to avoid. First is the
fact that this demand is not as new as it sounds. The
case for reparations has been made for 200 years and
with every year that passes it becomes ever less
justifiable. Who today has actually suffered for the
crimes of slavery? Who today has actually perpetrated
the crime? As it happens there are estimated to be
about 40 million slaves in the world today. I have met
some on my travels. Indeed there estimated to be
more slaves today than there were in the 19th century.
But nobody is very interested in that. They are
interested in past wrongs, not present ones.
So the demand for cash continues. But here is the
problem. Today we are not even talking about a
wealth transfer from perpetrators to victims. We are
not even talking about a wealth transfer from the
descendants of perpetrators to the descendants of
victims. We are talking about a wealth transfer from
people who may look like people who did a wrong inshortly afterwards by Nelson scholars) was that these
activists had cited a letter which was a forgery.
Specifically, it was a forgery created by the anti-
abolitionist movement when the slavery debate in
England was still current to posthumously pretend he
would have been on their side. So much for truth.
The reparations debate involving Britain is in some
ways just a spin-off of a much more brutal debate going
on in America, on steroids and with megaphones. In
the US almost everything in the country’s history has
been put up for grabs and then spun through the same
remorselessly hostile spin-cycle of racism, slavery and
original sin. Three years ago The New York Times,
once the country’s paper of record, began a project
which set out with the purpose of resetting the
founding date of America. The date they chose was
1619, the first year slaves were brought into America.
Of course the republic itself wasn’t even founded yet,
but the NYT’s project sets out to make slavery the
original, founding sin of America. A sin that is seen in
America as unique, unprecedented and ineradicable.
Of course, nobody would deny that the legacy of
slavery in America has been long. But it is hardly as
though the country has failed to address the issue. The
US fought a long and bloody civil war over it two
centuries ago that almost tore the country apart. But
today, just as the Founding Fathers are condemned,
and are currently being removed from their plinths by
activists and authorities alike, so both sides of the civil
war are treated in the same manner. It is
understandable that people might not lament the
removal of remaining statues to commanders of the
southern forces. But in recent years the heroes of the
north have come under equal attack. Even Abraham
Lincoln, the man who saved the Union and freed the
slaves, is now attacked as though he himself were a
They are a
familiar type,
these people.
They are
people who
tear at wounds
long since
healed and
then cry about
their pain
“
CHRIS JACKSON/GETTY IMAGES; JOSH PAYNE/PAh