By Ben Macintyre (THE TIMES, 29/09/06):
TONY BLAIR has apologised for Britain’s failure to relieve the Irish Potato Famine a century and a half ago, the Pope has half-apologised for offending Muslims after quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor and now John Prescott is preparing to apologise for the slave trade, abolished 200 years ago next year.
There is, of course, no limit to how retrospectively repentant we could all be. The Pope could apologise for the Crusades, we could say sorry for roasting Joan of Arc and the Italians could ask our forgiveness for the way their ancestors marched in here in AD43, and then built all those unimaginatively straight roads that invite people to drive too fast.
Politics and celebrity culture have infected history with the mea culpa fashion. But apologising for events of a distant past is like apologising for the weather: we can bemoan it, but we cannot change it. We may express regret for specific historical errors, and seek to rectify them if possible, as in the laudable recent decision to pardon soldiers unfairly executed during the First World War. The stigma of those executions is still recent enough to touch living people.
But an apology implies acceptance of blame, an acknowledgment of wrongdoing and guilt. An IRA apology for the years of killing has real meaning, as do the apologies to the Conlon and Maguire families for their years of wrongful imprisonment. By contrast, an apology without some sense of responsibility, for events that occurred far beyond living memory, is purely symbolic, an empty gesture.
How easy it is to pluck an unpleasant event from history, offer an apology when no real contrition or consequence is involved, and then bathe in the reflected moral glow. Mr Blair has proved marvellously adept at apologising for events that took place before he was born or before he came to power, but has yet to make a personal apology for anything he has done during nearly a decade in government.
The Queen, famously, apologised to the Maoris for the New Zealand landgrab of the 1860s, and to Indians for the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, but few imagined that she lay awake at night beating herself up about the colonial past. These were simply rituals of penitence for diplomatic purposes, spinning history for political purposes just as Mr Blair’s regrets over the Irish famine were intended to smooth through the Northern Ireland peace process.
Slavery was unspeakably degrading even by the brutal standards of that time. We should condemn its cruelty while acknowledging that slaving profits underpinned the Industrial Revolution and thus our present-day prosperity. But a blanket apology flattens out the more interesting contours of history. In 1066 and All That Sellar and Yeatman divided history into “good things” and “bad things”; in 2006 and all that, we have gone step further, chopping up the past into “shameful things” and “laudable things”. Instead of being viewed as complex social and economic phenomena, slavery, wars and famines are reduced to ethical and moral concepts, to be held up for censure or blame.
The public apology for historical events owes much to popular culture, for the symbolic, usually insincere apology by the disgraced star has become a hallowed ritual, providing instant absolution and, if you are Kate Moss, vastly increased profits.
There are different species of celebrity apology: the “John Lennon non- apology” made after his “We’re more popular than Jesus” remark: “I apologise if that will make you happy.” Also the “Hugh Grant can-we-move-on-now apology”: “I did a bad thing, and there you have it.” And the Zinédine Zidane “metaphysical self-contradicting je ne regrette rien demi-apology”: “My action was unforgivable, but I can’t regret it.” What celebrity apologies share with historical apologies is an implied remorse without the need for genuine contrition. An apology is only meaningful if the breast being beaten bears some responsibility within it. There is no reason why a younger generation of Germans should be expected to continue apologising for the crimes of their grandfathers, whereas Günter Grass should be on his knees after lecturing the world for decades on the iniquities of Nazism while concealing his own membership of the Waffen SS.
Whatever Elton John may think, sorry is not the hardest word, but one of the easiest, particularly for the British. We apologise instinctively, as a form of polite tokenism which costs nothing and, so far from accepting guilt, usually sidesteps it.
“Sorry if you were offended” is a way of transferring responsibility from the person giving offence to the person taking it — a trick that His Holiness executed perfectly earlier this month. Politicians routinely say sorry when they mean: “Damn, I got caught.” Boris Johnson’s mock-penitent pilgrimage to Liverpool after dissing the city was a brilliant send-up of the public apology.
Liverpool’s ships transported about one million slaves from West Africa to the New World. The city apologised for its role in slavery seven years ago. The Church of England, which owned extensive plantations in the West Indies, apologised earlier this year. Perhaps those apologies will have comforted blacks in this country who still suffer from racism — an apology for slavery is certainly better than glossing over the facts or pretending that Britain played no part in the foul trade. But my suspicion is that the motive for such public statements of regret is less self-flagellation than self-affirmation, a way for the modern Church and modern Liverpool to feel morally superior to its predecessors.
The bicentenary of the abolition of slavery should be an opportunity to recall the horrors of the trafficking, to celebrate its elimination and to appreciate the dreadful suffering that helped to make Britain great, and rich.
But is should not be another opportunity for a shallow British apology by those eager to extract political capital from history without feeling a flicker of personal guilt. Instead of blaming the past, politicians would be better offering a few heartfelt apologies for events in the present. But there is little sign of that sort of penitence, I am sorry to say.