John Howard refuses to say “sorry” to the stolen generation. The British Museum refuses to return the Elgin Marbles. The west may no longer talk of white man’s burden, but there is also little mention of the Opium Wars, or the Rape of Bengal, or the supression of the Mau Mau in Kenya. The Japanese are rightly castigated for whitewashing Nanking in school textbooks, and the Turks criticised for their cruel attempts to supress the history of the Armenian massacre. Each country is is blind to the unpalatable parts of its history. All are hypocrites, but none more so than the colonial powers and those nations like Australia, the US, (and perhaps Israel) which are founded on disposession.
My own home, Tasmania, is founded on a frightful genocide of the original 4 to 10 thousand inhabitants. Most non-aboriginal Tasmanians pretty much know this history, but dismiss it as something that happened a long time ago, when the world was a very different place. The same attitude applies to the stolen generation, even though it continued until the early 1970s. I’ve seen hints of the same thing in the US, where Martin Luther King is idolised but no one wants to quite admit that their families, institutions, and culture were in the very recent past the cause of the apartheid which the freedom march protested.
- It’s a short step from there to denial. Here is John Howard in 1996:
- ‘This ‘black arm band’ view of our past reflects a belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination.’
But I am not arguing that this generation is responsible for the sins of the fathers, rather something more subtle.
The history of each nation and each culture includes both good and bad. For each Mississipi Burning there is an underground railway. We must be willing to face up to the evil in our past, own it, examine it and analyse how it came to be and how it was confounded. Without this it is not just that we have no right to own the virtuous history, we also have no ability to do so. Without clear eyes for all the past we can claim the good things our culture has done, but we cannot bring them into the present day. Instead they become monuments; the cause of arrogance; tools of the propagandists. If we wish to make the triumphs of our past part of what we are, we must also be just as familiar with what we have done that we do not wish to do again. Most importantly we must see why evil was attractive if we are to withstand its seductions – and we cannot understand this so long as we say “that was another day, we are better than that now.”
This is the nub of the matter. We are not better. We were human then and we are human now, but we can be wiser.
So John Howard we should say “sorry.” It’s not to make someone else feel better, it’s to begin the process of understanding how people just like we are could do a bad thing which caused terrible suffering to a lot of people. Because I can see us, all of us in this world, making a lot of mistakes at the moment and doing a lot of bad things, and I think we’ve made a lot of those mistakes before and we should by now know better.