History

History. Ho hum. Osama bin Barack* now has to answer to some bozos who are asking,
'Did your family ever own slaves, careful now, we actually already know the answer and the answer is yes.'
Six generations ago - by my calculation 4 greats and a grand adds up to six - Barack's family had two slaves.
Well so freaking what? In those days, people owned slaves. It wasn't right, it got rectified, history moves on, if his family owned slaves now that would be worth a furore, but four greats and a grand ago, so what?

It's something that does bug me about Canada. There I've said it. Anywhere else, anything that happened in a country's history is just that, history. Here we have to pussy foot around and make amends.

Ok, say you think that's a reasonable thing to do, and presumably many people here that I love and or admire, do think that, then how far back is it reasonable to go? Last Tuesday? Ten years, a century, ten thousand years?

And then there's interpretation. An equivalent in Britain to some of the things that Canadians feel compelled to make up for would be the Roman invasion. Should Italy be recompensing Britain for taking Britons as slaves? OR should Italy be compensating for leaving Britain? After all, they gave us a great deal, they improved our food, enriched our language, lay down roads that are still used, they protected us, gave us systems of management, coins, trade, they connected us to a vast and successful empire. Then they left. Well, tough, Britain gained from the next wave of invaders eventually. It was a rough, tough history, but something was gained or learned from each horror.

The Hudson's Bay company's blankets is a case in point. The bare bones party line is that the evil white folk gave the Indians blankets infested with smallpox germs and wiped out a part of the local population.
But some historians say that this was not a deliberate strategy, that there were germs that the white population carried but were no longer susceptible to and therefore not aware of. After all, if it were a deliberate thing, and it was so successful, why didn't the evil bastards use it on the whole population?
And then another way of looking at it is the same as for the slavery question; so what? That may seem unacceptable to our liberal, modern sensibilities, but I'm fairly sure that no-one would have seen it as such in those days, even if it could be proven to have been deliberate.

Why are we so paranoid about any of this ? It's artificial. It's nonsense to think that people with degree level education can't work out some reasonable line, use common sense, or that there is no politician willing to just HOLD that line. No, it's purely for the sake of stirring things up, muddying the waters and making the good citizens of Springfield get their pitchforks out.

Quite disturbing really.

*While I'm not prepared to condemn Barack Obama because way back in the mists of time his family owned slaves, I do reserve the right to make fun of his name while he is a rival to Hillary.