From Newsgroup: alt.buddha.short.fat.guy

The desire to seek restitution from those who have harmed or wronged us
is normal. Our instinct for justice is inbuilt. Yet, in recent decades,
there has emerged in the West a perverse distortion of this impulse: the demand for financial compensation from people who have done no wrong,
made by people who have not been wronged. Long-established campaigns
calling on Britain to pay reparations for slavery are founded on this
strange premise, and the latest figure to join their ranks is Sir Lenny
Henry.

The comedian and actor makes his case in a new book, The Big Payback, co-authored with Marcus Ryder, a television executive and charity boss.
He argues for the UK to hand over -u18 trillion in compensatory payments.
As reported in the Telegraph this morning, Sir Lenny not only calls for
this huge transfer of money to Caribbean nations, but for cash to be
given to individual black British citizens, because rCyall black British peoplerCa personally deserve money for the effects of slaveryrCO.

He elaborates: rCyThe reason we have racism today and alsorCa why black British people are grossly over-represented in the prison population
[is] all because of the transatlantic slave traderCO.

Really? First of all, the assumption that Caribbean nations
underperformed since independence because of the economic and mental
legacy of slavery is highly debatable. Their post-independence fortunes
owed as much to the competence of their rulers as any putative ancestral memories: Barbados largely flourished, while others, such as Jamaica, didnrCOt, because the latter was governed badly. As for the popular
hypothesis that the descendants of slaves have, through mysterious
osmosis, rCyinheritedrCO the mental scars of that far-off experience, this merely echoes another fashionable yet highly contested theory prevalent
in our therapeutic age: that the rCytraumarCO of our own past and of our ancestors irrevocably determines our behaviour today.

Sir Lenny is on even flimsier ground in arguing that all black people in Britain deserve compensation because slavery and its folk memory has
condemned them to a life of underachievement, failure and incarceration.
This is refuted by the simple fact that most black people in Britain
arenrCOt of Caribbean heritage. The majority of black Britons today are of African descent, constituting 2.5 per cent of a total 4 per cent black population. Some, therefore, will be the descendants of those who were
active and complicit in that era of mass human trafficking.

During the transatlantic slave trade, West African states sold in
profusion their captured enemies to European and Arab traders. Among the
big players were the kingdoms of Dahomey and Whydah (both located in
modern day Benin). King Gezo of Dahomey, who reigned from 1818 to 1858,
even once boasted rCo in the face of British demands to end this practice
rCo how his kingdom owed its prestige to the business of selling humans: rCyThe slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source
and the glory of their wealth.rCO Those who cleave to the logic of
reparations based on ancestral crimes should also be asking modern
states in West Africa to make financial recompense.

Campaigning for the offspring to compensate for the sins of their
forefathers is an enterprise fraught with difficultly. Not only will
some black Britons today be the offspring of slave traders, but the very category rCyblackrCO has become ever more fluid and elusive, considering the generations of intermarrying and mixing that have taken place since the
1940s. rCyMixed racerCO may be an imperfect-sounding category, but it does increasingly represent a more accurate description of a large
demographic in Britain today.

In the long run, also, we are all descendants of sinners and the sinned against. To crudely bracket people living in Britain today as belonging
to either camp makes no sense. My mother is Irish and my father was
English. So should I demand compensation for the Potato Famine, or
should I be required to atone for it? Am I a victim or a villain? I
would be grateful if Sir Lenny could answer that one. Activists, actors
and governments who make noisy demands for reparations, motivated often
by grievance and resentment, and sometimes by greed and opportunism,
never seem to move beyond emotive language and simplistic arguments
riddled with holes. Their solutions only beg more questions.


Patrick West
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