Guardian owner apologises for founders’ links to transatlantic slavery | Hacker News Reader

Guardian owner apologises for founders’ links to transatlantic slavery

theguardian.com

27 pointslisasays25 comments

So... they weren't even slavers, they just bought cotton?

This is like California trying to pay reparations. A state where slavery was never legal, taxing people who never owned slaves to give money to people who were never slaves.

I would personally like to see the records of who got paid for indigenous scalps in California

I bet we will see some familiar last names from currently prominent families, like from the militias deputized in the Mendocino war

I bet there are records in Sacramento

Could spark a relevant reckoning

Apologize for what someone did 200 years ago? That’s ridiculous.

I apologize adastra22 ran a stop sign in 2015.

IDK - given organisations can have longer lifespans than individual humans, it's not unreasonable for them to apologise for things they actually did. Also, 200 years seeming like a long time to you is not 'true', it's just one cultural taste among many. 200 years isn't long to mainstream Chinese culture, for example, nor to the British Aristocracy, nor to many individuals who read a lot of history. My sense of 'the present' is a window of about 400 years.

The Guardian should though perhaps consider apologising for its thin news coverage and superabundance of trite opinion columns.

I strongly disagree with it’s your point about 200 years being a long time. That’s entirely missing the point. It’s a strong principle of both western morality and our system of laws that “the sin of the father does not fall upon the son.”

If you traffic in slaves you have some explaining to do. If your father trafficked in slaves, that by itself has nothing to do with you as long as you weren’t involved. If your great-great-great-great-grandfather trafficked in slaves, well that’s purely of historical interest.

What if your father's slave trading generated a huge fortune, which is bequeathed to you?

Statute of limitations exist for a reason.

With your characteristic ignorance of .. anything at all related to the case, you neglect to notice England has no such statute. You're presumably thinking of the USA. The Guardian is not American. Your mushy notion of 'Western Culture' is no more than your own personal local set of prejudices and ill-informed opinions.

Not sharing your values is not ipso facto "missing the point". Whether or not something is a strong principle of some historically mushy and faux-reified "western morality" is of only pop-anthropological value and of no interest to me (chauvanism just isn't my thing). And neither is any of this related to "our" 'system of laws' (whose and which - US? UK? English? Scottish? European? Common law? Napoleonic?), as no legal question has been raised.

What is however true of all human societies is that people associate in, and identify with, groups. Most nations, including the UK where The Guardian is based, institute a variety of laws and mores to cover various categories of organisations' behaviour. Amongst the mores is that company or organisation representatives can speak for the group, without there being any confusion amongst initiates of the culture that they are speaking for themselves as individuals. There's nothing in the statement to suggest that the people speaking for the Scott Trust have any individual or family connections with the events cited. They are not personally apologising. But The Guardian, qua centuries-old organisation, did, so it is. But "The Guardian", being a group rather than a mammal, doesn't have a mouth with which to speak. Hence the statement from a representative.

People who get hysterical about perfectly reasonable (and oh so nearly universally understandable) expressions of sorrow or shame about a group's past behaviour from representatives, for some reason always seem remarkably relaxed about similar expressions of pride. Especially when it's a group the red-faced critic has some sympathy with. You'd almost think some people want the reflected glory (ah we have Western Culture which makes us all very ethical and we did the Industrial Revolution and we invented Science so I am great!), but without the shame (but slavery was nothing to do with me, how dare you!). Good-oh. Nice work if you can get it.

What I mean by "missing the point" is that you were addressing something completely out of left field and had nothing to do with what I wrote. Now you are doing it again.

No, your point is pretty clear, and manifestly false to anyone with any understanding either of history or of what The Guardian (an organisation, not an individual) is trying to do.

I have to agree with you. This sets a pretty bad precedent, but funnily enough, it only does so in front of the people who read The Guardian. So no harm done, since the people most likely to be influenced by mental gymnastics like this are actually the ones reading the paper anyway.

Why? It's not like a vague apology for all of slavery, it's apologizing to specific people harmed by specific actions taken by the newspaper's founder. It seems similar to government apologies for historic injustices, like the US apologizing for the Tuskegee Experiment or conducting a coup in Hawaii, or the UK apologizing for its treatment of Turing. Obviously it sucks that it always seems to take them 50-100 years to make these apologies, but you know, the best time to start is always today.

Especially in this case, presumably John Taylor and his funders might not have had the money to found a successful newspaper if they weren't enslaving other people, so this is a very straightforward "our founder did very bad things, we as an organization have benefited a lot from it, so let's try to make it right a bit". Ethical and logical.

This is the first (and probably the last) Guardian post I will upvote. Eat yourself, go ahead! Eventually the Guardian will realize who ran the slave trade, not report on it, and keep shooting themselves in the proverbial foot.

> not report on it

I wonder who will be getting reparations 200 years from now for this? What form will those reparations take? Will they be perhaps... in-kind?

Who ran the slave trade?

Black Africans, unless he's implying that it was run by the Jews. It was not, but White Nationalists don't care about that part.

Here's a somewhat decent summary of the history--not the most intelligible or accurate, but it at least hits upon the various facets: https://newafricanmagazine.com/16616/

You won't find any simple narratives or histories in earnest company as 1) there is no simple narrative to be had, and 2) the culture wars makes it incredibly difficult to discuss objectively.

To understand how twisted the discourse has become, here's a scholarly paper I stumbled across that seems to claim that the continuance of the Arab and Indian Ocean Slave Trades was beneficial by providing competition with the burgeoning Atlantic Slave Trade: https://www.persee.fr/doc/outre_1631-0438_2002_num_89_336_39... It's from 2002--culture war debates in academia typically long preceded the explosion in populist debates. Though that paper also has some solid quantitative analysis, and I'm tempted to think the framing was designed to make swallowing the proposed numbers more palatable--the range of estimates of the number of African slaves in the Arab and Indian Ocean Slave Trades is significant and people seem to get quite vitriolic about it, seemingly out of the belief one number or another has the effect of shifting culpability.

I think he is alluding to the fact that the actual slavers operating in Africa were all black Africans. The white slave ships showed up on the west African coast, bought slaves at auction at a vibrant slave market, and shipped them to the Caribbean. They didn’t actually do the enslaving.

Whether that is a relevant distinction I leave up to you.

Buying stolen merchandise, and continuing to keep it once you realise it's stolen, and from whom it's stolen, while definitely not as bad as doing the stealing, is still...fairly morally low.

Also in terms of impact, the money and guns the European slave buyers brought to the table completely changed the slave trade. It went from the sort of low key slave markets that existed everywhere, to arming and bankrolling civil war in the interior of the continent just to produce slaves as spoils of war to be sold at these markets. It completely destroyed inner Africa, creating conditions of warlords and ethnic strife that still exist today.

There are maybe more recent things they should apologize for.

The Guardian is simply pandering to their audience. I highly doubt the Economist or the Wall Street Journal would apologize by judging actions that were permissible in the past by today’s moral standards.

Nowhere near enough.

The Guardian needs to be shut down permanently and all its employees cancelled.

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