|
I don't believe in collective guilt, and even less in inherited guilt. Nations are not collectively responsible for the actions of a group of people, and nations or people are not responsible for what was done a thousand years ago. Every nation, state, or civilization has been guilty of something at some point in its history anyway.
Countries don't have to apologize for slavery because slavery has existed pretty much everywhere, everyone would need to apologize to everyone.
Slavery is older than written history itself, all ancient civilizations had slaves. In Europe during Antiquity, Rome, Greece, and the various Northern "barbarians" all had slaves, slavery was the result of incessant wars, and prisoners of war were generally turned into slaves by the victors.
With the spread of Christianity and feudalism in Europe, slavery was replaced by serfdom, which was only a slight improvement for those people at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Serfdom won't be abolished up until the18th and 19th century.
It makes no sense for a modern European country to apologize for slavery when most of its modern population descends from serfs who were themselves exploited for centuries by a small number of aristocrats. Old feudal regimes were eventually overthrown by the people and that's the end of it, even the modern descendants of aristocrats are not responsible for what their ancestors did.
And similar things happened in other civilizations on other continents, Egyptians, Arabs, Ottomans, Persians, Indians, Chinese, Amerindians all had plenty of slaves for centuries, that's a lot of people to apologize to.
|