Looks like it is - great! 
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Interesting follow-up letter in The Guardian today - again by somebody that actually went to Moscow and saw for themselves what was going wrong…
“ combination of compulsory deportation of troublesome indigenous peoples and their replacement through state-sponsored migration of a large population of ethnic……”
The same strategy by England is what has caused strife in the north of Ireland for four hundred years. Funny how little really changes and sad that Sean O’Grady (with a name like that 
) didn’t spot it.
It’s pretty much what happens in all colonialism - indeed Wikipedia points out the close relationship between Irish and Virginia ‘plantation’ going as far back as the 16th century.
Much of the strife we see throughout the world goes back to the ‘plantations’ of slavery and colonialism - including incidentally the arguments we often see here on SF about ‘political correctness’ and ‘wokism’: in former slave/colonial societies like the US wealth and power remain divided substantially along racial lines, so real oppression and exploitation which actually disadvantage all poor people appear not so much as class, but as identity politics.
Mauretania has just declared slavery illegal. No one hears of the modern slavery taking place in Africa and there are still Arab Slave masters taking Africans into bonded labour into the Middle East.
I can understand that Africans in the West do not want to talk about this, but it seems ingenuous that they still see Europeans as the only demons in this game.
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So true, in fact the vast majority of us don’t own slaves and never have, some of the people who lived here before us did. Why should any apology or reparation be made in my name?
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Plus apparently the slaves being sold were being sold by slavetraders from those very countries. We don’t hear much about British slaving ship arrivals going onto land, some of it quite inhospitable to search out, detain slaves and drag them back to the ship. It seems more of a pickup of a group of slaves and presumably some form of payment to local(s) at the port.
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A friend of mine has an unerring gift for saying exactly the wrong thing. In his youth he had a brief affair with an older married lady, whose husband was in the merchant navy. Unfortunately the husband somehow got to hear about what was going on, and home on leave confronted my friend in the local pub.
“You’ve been messing around with my wife!”
Unable to think how to respond to this blunt accusation, my friend blurted out:
“Yes - but I’m not the only one!”
An accused casting around to incriminate other possible guilty parties has never been a good look, has it?
In this case, also, it rather misses the point: the wealth plundered by slavers and colonisers, either by exploitation of forced, unpaid labour or by many other kinds of theft, still exists - it exists in accumulated private and public inheritance of the families and nations that enslaved and colonised, it exists in their built heritage, great collections, endowed schools and universities, it capitalised their companies - it permeates their societies - and is the principal reason some countries and families are relatively rich and others relatively poor in the world today.
In the face of this massive injustice, cries of ‘It wasn’t me’, or ‘I’m not the only one’ are unlikely to be seen as adequate. Moreover, the next logical step down that road is ‘Putin colonising Ukraine is OK, since he’s not the only one - other countries were slavers and colonisers too’.
I’m know many tribal leaders in Africa were complicit in the slave trade but their guilt is not comparable to the likes of the UK, France, Portugal, Spain and The Netherlands.
As for apologising and paying reparations, the first is easy but the second is fraught with difficulties and I don’t see that happening any time soon.
Sorry Geof, much of what you have said in the past I have agreed with but what you are saying here is wrong on so many levels. The 2 examples you choose are way out of line with actuality.
Your first flight of fancy instances someone who is guilty, and furthermore still guilty, trying to spread the blame elsewhere, and the fact that you use the phrase ‘other possibily guilty parties’ is very telling. We are not the guilty parties, we have never been the guilty parties and we are not in the slightest way liable for anything people who came before us might, or might not, have done. You’ll have us chasing Vikings next for compensation, or Romans, or Normans.
Your second comparison with the awful Putin is equally, if not more so, insulting. Do you really believe that people use such an excuse when saying ‘it wasn’t me’? Well now I’m saying ‘it wasn’t me’, because it really wasn’t. And it doesn’t make me an evil bastard for saying so.
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I don’t agree David. Other posters here have said, in so many words, ‘It wasn’t me’ (it was my ancestors,etc) and ‘I’m not the only one’ (as if others’ guilt mitigates their own). It’s a short step from there to say Putin’s guilt is mitigated because others have done similar things, isn’t it?
But you’re still missing the crucial point, which, to repeat, is that our societies in the so-called ‘developed’ world still benefit from past extreme and unacceptable exploitation. This is the truth. It doesn’t make you an evil bastard - I benefit (probably) as much as you from the wealth inherited in our societies.
Like Tim, I don’t know what the best way might be of addressing this - but I do know that simply, honestly acknowledging it is a good place to start.
There are many good studies in economic history of exactly how wealth was taken from colonised countries and enslaved people to build the businesses, institutions and wealthy families in ‘developed’ countries - and how indeed these continue to extract wealth from poor countries via unfair trade, ‘investment’, etc.
Thank goodness, that makes it so much better, doesn’t it.
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Thank you for making me laugh at the end of a very long day.
ps. I hope they were wearing stout boots to cope with the inhospitable terrain.
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There you go again, there is a world of difference between those 2 statements. One states the obvious and is true, it wasn’t me/us. The other says that was me/us but I/we are not to blame because someone else was doing it too. Total nonsense, because it isn’t true.
As to us benefitting from the actions of history, well that goes for everyone in the world in some way or form, but it is an interesting racial point that apparently you can only be guilty if you have a white face. There have been millions of slave traders throughout history and their faces were all the colours of the spectrum.
It is high time that we stopped beating our backs with birch twigs over something we didn’t do and can’t change. Perhaps for some it is a peculiar form of pleasure. Not for me, I pay my way in the world and I help where I can, not as some form of penance but because I want to help, but I am certainly not going to join this mass hysteria.
Not a question of things being excused or not. Just more parties were involved in all sorts of things, whether good or bad, than is often pointed out.
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Interesting the way you see it. For me it’s not a question of ‘beating myself up’ - I don’t feel any personal guilt at all. For me, it’s simply a question of squarely facing up to the truth, and acknowledging that if our societies continue to benefit from historical plunder they have a responsibility to try to put this right. I don’t see this as negative - for me it’s not linked with negative emotions like guilt at all - rather I feel it’s positive: helping make the world a better place for all our children.
So it’s the ‘and can’t change’ bit of your post I most disagree with. We can change things for the better. We can return plundered artifacts. We can make international trade fairer. We can change the terms of reference of the IMF and World Bank so that they actually help poor countries instead of further damaging them (as they did Ukraine, incidentally). There are in fact many proposals for compensating former colonies etc - many of which will not actually cost us anything! - eg…