Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's apology for his nation's wartime sex abuse in China, Korea and elsewhere will encourage those who are celebrating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery by demanding a formal apology. The sentiment is understandable and reparation should be made, wherever possible. But the assumption that a simple 'sorry' absolves past injustice makes light of slavery and exploits history to distract attention from today's wrongs.
The slavery debate is organised around two opposing narratives. On one side, the apology lobby argues that the Atlantic slave trade between Africa, Britain and America was a uniquely and absolutely immoral process whereby whites deliberately dehumanised blacks. The traffic's enormous profits paid for Britain's industrial revolution, created western financial systems and endowed European cultural institutions. Contemporary Africa's plight and the condition of blacks in the west are blamed on slavery. Europeans should expiate their guilt, runs the demand.
A contrary interpretation is advanced by the vindicators, who argue that slavery occurred in a different moral universe, where all but a lucky few suffered harsh and cruel lives. Africans who sold fellow Africans were equally complicit. Britain seized the high ground with the 1807 Abolition Act, withdrawing from the trade in spite of self-interest and the mores of the time.
This lobby further claims that two centuries is far too long for blacks to maintain a state of victimhood that prevents pragmatic treatment of the real problems that afflict black communities in Africa and elsewhere. An apology is ridiculous, they say. As for reparations: how would they be paid, and to whom?
US President George W. Bush adopted the apologist position when his fulsome retrospective condemnation denounced slavery as 'one of the greatest crimes of history', and he paid tribute to the descendants of slaves. 'The very people traded into slavery helped to set America free,' he declared. His piety glossed over the facts that segregation officially continued until the 1960s, that racism is a clear factor in American life, and that statistics show that blacks are the most underprivileged social group.
With just a few words, Mr Bush silenced the American 'sorry' industry without achieving anything. His words had no impact on social ills that can only be corrected if the ruling elite faces up to uncomfortable truths about our layered and oppressive world - by drafting policy that benefits the poor and invests in society's exploited sections. But the presidential apology made excellent political capital. At the same time, it deflected attention from the real problems that the underclass in the American and African continents suffer today.