It’s Not You, It’s Definitely Me
There are few things modern liberals enjoy more than unsolicited self-flagellation. This incessant historical masochism of the political left is always on the lookout for people they may have hurt and then get on their knees, full of shame and remorse, to repent for their sins against others.
Even when their victims don’t really care because elaborate apologies don’t really do anything apart from absolving the perpetrator from something he didn’t do himself but makes him look like a good person. This is a conclusion that you might draw from The Guardian’s recent article about the newspaper’s ties to slavery in the past. Their editor-in-chief, Katherine Viner, wrote a lengthy article that’s about apologizing for the fact that their first editor earned his wealth through slavery:
It is a deeply uneasy feeling to know that one of my predecessors, the Guardian’s founding editor, John Edward Taylor, derived much of his wealth from Manchester’s cotton industry, an industry that relied on firms such as Taylor’s trading with cotton plantations in the Americas that had enslaved millions of Black people forcibly transported from Africa.
We can all agree slavery is a bad thing. That’s not even a debate anymore on both sides of the political spectrum. One of the few common grounds in a field that’s full of ideological trenches. Only a fool could find an excuse for trafficking, abusing and treating people like private property. That’s why most of us unilaterally condemn it.
Yet there’s a long way to go and lots to deal with. Unlike the plague, human trafficking is still out there. Children from Eastern Europe have been trafficked throughout Western Europe to adoptive parents who didn’t want to deal with endless bureaucratic hurdles back home. This still a sort of an open secret, yet not as politically attractive as slavery in America because white victims of trafficking, even if they’re children, don’t make for a good cover story.
Acknowledging our mistakes is a good thing. Germans have been apologizing since the end of World War II for the gruesome heritage of the Holocaust, trying to educate all of us how to avoid succumbing to an ideology like that. They transformed their country into a cautionary tale that Germans are slowly getting tired of. This propelled far-right parties like AFD to power.
Reparations have been paid, tears of shame are perpetually shed and Willy Brandt kneeled down in Warszaw. That’s the problem of left-wing politics: too often is it about gestures instead something real. Germany is a good example of how education is the best way to cure people of their biases, prejudices and grudges. On one hand, no one can deal with your own issues better than you. On the other, if you do turn into a neo-Nazi, your teachers won’t blame themselves. They tried their best and sometimes it’s just not good enough.
You can’t go back to the past and fix things that went wrong. It can teach you a lesson that will help you to avoid making mistakes in the present. A bit like finding out my mom’s uncle worked for the notorious Yugoslavian secret service. What to do about it? My relatives vehemently denied it, even though it was backed by evidence.
The secret service spied on people and persecuted them if they didn’t follow the rules. But that’s what a secret service is supposed to do: they spy. They’re supposed to be undercover, otherwise they’re not doing their job the way it’s supposed to be done. It would be like MI5 agents walking around with their badge on lapel all the time, for everyone to see.
Hollywood has helped to spread the message about racism a lot, with films like Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave for which Lupita Nyong’o won an Oscar, playing Patsey, a slave at a plantation owned by Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender). When you push this mission to right all wrongs too far we lose our sensitivity for the sufferings of our ancestors.
It’s used as a tool of tribalism meant to keep our focus on perpetual patterns of political revenge and historic revisionism. And it’s revealed as nothing but a ploy for someone else’s advances. This fight for memory paves the way to supremacy that grooms people into abandoning their own sanity to replace it with conspiracy theories and scapegoating. Something we witnessed many times throughout history and a lesson we never learned.
People get rich in all kinds of ways. It’s impossible to become a billionaire without illegalities behind the scenes. In the post-Communist era of transition, countries that belonged to the bloc were turned into a giant buffet where the whole economy and its giants were available for those who didn’t have a moral gag reflex when it comes to fraud, bribery and nepotism. They’re the new aristocracy, the famous “200 families” that live their best life while others linger somewhere between poverty and middle class. Their kids have a prosperous life handed to them on a silver platter from when they get to school, all the way to a good job and comfy housing.
But they don’t apologize for their past. In fact, they hide it, unless they can monetize it. When I put it into perspective, they rather behave like the woke left in America. Their identity revolves around victimhood and historical injustices they were subjected to. I don’t believe The Guardian is trying to cash in on their discovery or look for absolution.
If it’s supposed to make it easier for them to digest it, it makes no sense because it’s a self-centered mea culpa that re-affirms their mission to lead the way to an enlightened, brighter future free of the shackles of prejudice. If you believe any of this you’re even more gullible than the conservatives that are as loyal to their demagogues as a captain to a sinking ship.
Apologizing for things won’t get us anywhere. Words mean nothing if they’re not backed by actions. There’s a perverted dimension to all of this. Insisting on equities and quotes to prove you’re on the right side of history makes a mockery of those you think you’re endorsing. They’re reduced to tokens meant to tick all the boxes of empowerment. And we know what empowerment is: power.
Conservatives can get away with shit because they rarely preach about ideas that progressives are so proud of. This puts the latter in a vulnerable position because human beings are imperfect and you can’t always practice what you preach. I have the experience of numerous projects and collaborations where the main criteria wasn’t exclusively your competence, but your bracket: your gender, confession, sexual orientation. And that’s really frustrating.
Diversity is about acceptance, but this was about business and profit. Those people didn’t care what you think. Well, maybe they did but the focus was somewhere else. They just needed a gay guy or a woman at the table for their evaluation report in the end. If you were a woman of color, that would be even better. And they’d teach you about issues that you’ll hardly ever have to deal with because there are very few people of color anywhere near you. Not because of racism but due to geography and history. Some reasons behind certain facts are so simple that you need to dress them up into some sort of theory to make it less obvious that you’re overthinking things.
If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you’re probably unqualified for it. Even the most complex problems can be reduced to simple roots. It’s important to be fully aware of our roots and the baggage that comes with it. The Guardian is a great example. But balance is crucial: it marks the difference between virtue and virtue-signalling. That’s a lesson that many need to learn and the media landscape that surrounds us is the living proof of it.
We don’t need a moral meltdown to know what it takes to be a good person and that mistakes contribute to our strength and evolution. Without evolution there’s no solution. We need to find a common ground because there’s enough space for everbody if we’re ready to share. If you dare to look what’s on the other side of the fence, you may regret you didn’t dare to do it sooner. Friends are sometimes found in the most unlikely places. That’s the beauty of life. An opportunity too good to waste.
