There are a fair few things I’d like to see King Charles apologise for. Those meddlesome ‘spidery letters’ he wrote to government ministers. His green doom and gloom. Prince Harry. But slavery? The British Empire? No. Never. Charles should utter not one word of contrition for those historical events. For if even he, the literal king, were to cave to the woke insistence that ‘the privileged’ must self-flagellate for the crimes of their forefathers, it would set a terrible precedent. It would represent the final victory of that jealous god of identity politics, with disastrous consequences for democracy.
The latest cry for Charles to beat himself up for the actions of his ancestors comes from Indigenous leaders. Ahead of the coronation, politicians and campaigners from 12 Commonwealth nations penned an open letter in which they ‘call on the British monarch, King Charles III’, to ‘immediately start the conversation’ about the imperial misdeeds of monarchs of old. Apparently, what Indigenous people need from His Majesty is ‘apology, reparation, and [the] repatriation of artefacts and remains’. In short: enjoy your day out being crowned and anointed, and then crack on with repenting, forever, for things done centuries before your birth.
The first weird thing about the recent explosion of angst over Charles’ shady ancestors is how surprised everyone sounds. Magazines publish breathless pieces on how Charles ‘descends from rulers who waged wars, built empires and extracted wealth from colonies’. Yes, we know – he’s the king. Kings and queens were bastards. They chopped off heads, imprisoned princes, taxed people to within an inch of their lives, conquered countries, put down rebellions. That Charles’s family tree is pock-marked with iffy people is literally the least startling thing about him.
But he still shouldn’t apologise for any of that stuff. For one simple reason: he didn’t do it. Charles has never owned a slave, sent ships in search of booty, put a wife on the chopping block. It is nearly 3,000 years since Ezekiel said, ‘The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father’. Now the noisy identitarians of the 21st century want to reverse all that. They far prefer God’s implacable rage in the Book of Exodus, in which He seethed: ‘[I] am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me.’ That the woke are so infused with Old Testament fury, with such a severe urge to punish even the descendants of wrongdoers, confirms what a menacing and regressive movement theirs is.
The letter calling on Charles to make reparations for historical wrongs sums up everything that’s rotten in the cult of contrition. There’s the self-infantilisation of the apology-seekers, for one. There is a distinctly therapeutic feel to the letter. The signatories are essentially entreating the king to recognise their pain – and to alleviate it, in all his graciousness, with words and maybe money. They want His Majesty to ‘acknowledge the horrific impacts’ and ‘legacy’ of the crimes of yesteryear. That is, soothe our historic hurt with your kingly validation.
This is one of the twisted ironies of the politics of apology: it can boost the moral authority of the person who’s being pressured to say sorry. The Indigenous campaigners are not only dragging the king – they’re also imbuing him with an almost godly power to lift them from the pit of generational despair. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if Charles took them up on their offer and uttered the s-word. Indeed, last year, in Canada, he gave a speech in which he said ‘we must listen to the truth of the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples’. (He’s been reading the Guardian, hasn’t he?) We must ‘understand better their pain and suffering’, he said. He seems instinctively to recognise that the fashion for contrition can benefit the elite. It expands his dominion, granting him jurisdiction not only in the concrete worlds of pomp and constitution, but also in the emotional world of easing the little people’s traumas.
We all laughed – well, I did, sorry – when Princess Diana said: ‘I’d like to be a queen of people’s hearts.’ Yet now her husband, so long depicted as the yin to Di’s yang, might just embrace such a role. Charles is king, but it’s Diana’s world. I can envision a future royal tour in which Charles and Camilla sail the Earth validating the ‘pain and suffering’ of once-colonised peoples. It would be of a piece with the campaigning of the new Prince and Princess of Wales, Will and Kate, who are obsessed with the mental health of the plebs. If royal authority at home is increasingly justified in the Oprah-ite language of relieving the anguish of one’s subjects, why not overseas too? The identitarians don’t seem to realise that the thing they want – the king weeping for old wrongs – would be a new form of colonialism. Emotional colonialism. Where once monarchs sought to deliver foreigners from ignorance, now they’d deliver them from PTSD.
Elite empowerment is a key part of the showy penitence of the modern era. This is why so many political actors, from Tony Blair to the Vatican, enthusiastically seize every opportunity to let their lip wobble. Blair expressed remorse for the Irish Famine. Pope Francis begged for forgiveness for ‘the offences of the church’ in the colonial era. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was essentially institutionalised contrition. Australia holds an annual National Sorry Day in which everyone’s expected to quietly atone for the mistreatment of Aboriginal peoples. All of these things are best understood not as genuine expressions of sorrow, but as arrogant displays of emotional literacy; as declarations that one has ascended to the plane of therapeutic correctness, and is thus fit to rule in the era of emotion.
Yet while the cult of contrition might be helpful to elites looking for new ways to justify their rule, it’s a disaster for the rest of us. It is divisive and anti-democratic. The woke rehabilitation of God’s jealous visitation of the crimes of the father on to the son is utterly destructive of public life. It is a form of racial collective guilt – and racial collective pain. All whites come to be seen as the morally stained sons and daughters of ancient crime, and all black, brown and Indigenous people are reduced to the morally scarred sons and daughters of those crimes. This depressing, deterministic creed turns us from equal citizens into either ‘the privileged’ or ‘the oppressed’, where the former must forever repent to the latter.
As a republican, I know I’m expected to welcome the demand that King Charles publicly acknowledge the wrongs of monarchy. After all, I’m someone who wants to remove the king’s crown, titles and ‘divine rights’, so surely I’ll enjoy seeing him say sorry, too. Not a bit of it. Such a debased spectacle would not be a challenge to monarchy at all. On the contrary, it would represent a kind of Battle of the Bloodlines, where two different versions of historically determined authority would be fighting it out for control of society – the historically determined divine right of King Charles vs the historically determined divine pain of the woke. My turn to apologise: sorry, but I prefer equality and democracy to the rule of any given identity.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer. This article was first published HERE
The first weird thing about the recent explosion of angst over Charles’ shady ancestors is how surprised everyone sounds. Magazines publish breathless pieces on how Charles ‘descends from rulers who waged wars, built empires and extracted wealth from colonies’. Yes, we know – he’s the king. Kings and queens were bastards. They chopped off heads, imprisoned princes, taxed people to within an inch of their lives, conquered countries, put down rebellions. That Charles’s family tree is pock-marked with iffy people is literally the least startling thing about him.
But he still shouldn’t apologise for any of that stuff. For one simple reason: he didn’t do it. Charles has never owned a slave, sent ships in search of booty, put a wife on the chopping block. It is nearly 3,000 years since Ezekiel said, ‘The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father’. Now the noisy identitarians of the 21st century want to reverse all that. They far prefer God’s implacable rage in the Book of Exodus, in which He seethed: ‘[I] am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me.’ That the woke are so infused with Old Testament fury, with such a severe urge to punish even the descendants of wrongdoers, confirms what a menacing and regressive movement theirs is.
The letter calling on Charles to make reparations for historical wrongs sums up everything that’s rotten in the cult of contrition. There’s the self-infantilisation of the apology-seekers, for one. There is a distinctly therapeutic feel to the letter. The signatories are essentially entreating the king to recognise their pain – and to alleviate it, in all his graciousness, with words and maybe money. They want His Majesty to ‘acknowledge the horrific impacts’ and ‘legacy’ of the crimes of yesteryear. That is, soothe our historic hurt with your kingly validation.
This is one of the twisted ironies of the politics of apology: it can boost the moral authority of the person who’s being pressured to say sorry. The Indigenous campaigners are not only dragging the king – they’re also imbuing him with an almost godly power to lift them from the pit of generational despair. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if Charles took them up on their offer and uttered the s-word. Indeed, last year, in Canada, he gave a speech in which he said ‘we must listen to the truth of the lived experiences of Indigenous peoples’. (He’s been reading the Guardian, hasn’t he?) We must ‘understand better their pain and suffering’, he said. He seems instinctively to recognise that the fashion for contrition can benefit the elite. It expands his dominion, granting him jurisdiction not only in the concrete worlds of pomp and constitution, but also in the emotional world of easing the little people’s traumas.
We all laughed – well, I did, sorry – when Princess Diana said: ‘I’d like to be a queen of people’s hearts.’ Yet now her husband, so long depicted as the yin to Di’s yang, might just embrace such a role. Charles is king, but it’s Diana’s world. I can envision a future royal tour in which Charles and Camilla sail the Earth validating the ‘pain and suffering’ of once-colonised peoples. It would be of a piece with the campaigning of the new Prince and Princess of Wales, Will and Kate, who are obsessed with the mental health of the plebs. If royal authority at home is increasingly justified in the Oprah-ite language of relieving the anguish of one’s subjects, why not overseas too? The identitarians don’t seem to realise that the thing they want – the king weeping for old wrongs – would be a new form of colonialism. Emotional colonialism. Where once monarchs sought to deliver foreigners from ignorance, now they’d deliver them from PTSD.
Elite empowerment is a key part of the showy penitence of the modern era. This is why so many political actors, from Tony Blair to the Vatican, enthusiastically seize every opportunity to let their lip wobble. Blair expressed remorse for the Irish Famine. Pope Francis begged for forgiveness for ‘the offences of the church’ in the colonial era. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was essentially institutionalised contrition. Australia holds an annual National Sorry Day in which everyone’s expected to quietly atone for the mistreatment of Aboriginal peoples. All of these things are best understood not as genuine expressions of sorrow, but as arrogant displays of emotional literacy; as declarations that one has ascended to the plane of therapeutic correctness, and is thus fit to rule in the era of emotion.
Yet while the cult of contrition might be helpful to elites looking for new ways to justify their rule, it’s a disaster for the rest of us. It is divisive and anti-democratic. The woke rehabilitation of God’s jealous visitation of the crimes of the father on to the son is utterly destructive of public life. It is a form of racial collective guilt – and racial collective pain. All whites come to be seen as the morally stained sons and daughters of ancient crime, and all black, brown and Indigenous people are reduced to the morally scarred sons and daughters of those crimes. This depressing, deterministic creed turns us from equal citizens into either ‘the privileged’ or ‘the oppressed’, where the former must forever repent to the latter.
As a republican, I know I’m expected to welcome the demand that King Charles publicly acknowledge the wrongs of monarchy. After all, I’m someone who wants to remove the king’s crown, titles and ‘divine rights’, so surely I’ll enjoy seeing him say sorry, too. Not a bit of it. Such a debased spectacle would not be a challenge to monarchy at all. On the contrary, it would represent a kind of Battle of the Bloodlines, where two different versions of historically determined authority would be fighting it out for control of society – the historically determined divine right of King Charles vs the historically determined divine pain of the woke. My turn to apologise: sorry, but I prefer equality and democracy to the rule of any given identity.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer. This article was first published HERE
9 comments:
Absolutely agree! If he apologises for something that nevetr happened, it will make life for white nzers very difficult. He should offer uk passports for those of us who want to leave, as the end of democracy looms. Co-governance will be a complete disaster even without an apology.
'Reparation' is probably the key term in the list of demands - a great gravytrain to be on it is too!
The approach taken by the woke brigade is that of collective, intergenerational culpability. Not to mention moral absolutism: X is wrong for all time regardless of context. I don't buy moral absolutism from either that crowd or fundamentalist Christians. Slave traders and owners of the 17th century were doing nothing wrong by engaging in a universal practice. Indeed the 'victims' were often themselves slave traders and owners - big tribe enslaves little tribe.
It was the British Empire that first outlawed slave trading. Charles can take no credit for that as it was over 200 years ago but neither does he need to be tarred with the slavery brush before that.
Still, no doubt some corrupt Third World elite will pocket 'reparations'..... mission accomplished for them at least.
Colonisation is an inherent human trait. It was once called another name and that was conquering.
At no point in history has it never existed and any self styled indigenous group that suggests they somehow deserve some form of apology or reparation should look back upon their own history before they have their hands out.
Having 'another' invade your space is no different to having anyone invade your space.
What it brings, is what is important and as humans we exist in a modern world because of that 'expansion'.
We should not forget that inside that human progress came suffering, but in that too came humanity and this is why colonialism brought about the end of slavery, cannibalism, trbal warfare and ushered in poltical freedom, law and economic freedom.
To apologise for any historic 'wrong' makes a much sense to any reasoned critical thinker as to apologise to your toenails for cutting them because they were too long or in-grown.
The reality of historical events cannot be changed by apology or money. Only forward accountability from humans allows us to be better at creating better historical stories.
Humans do not 'live' in the 'yesterday' nor do they live in the 'tomorrow'.
Humans live in the 'today' to make tomorrow a better place if they are in a position where they can.
Yes - the royal response is critical to our democracy.
Soon - in October - the attitude of voters to the woke manta will be known: support or rejection.
Not long to wait.
The ancestors of King Charles were the people who destroyed global slavery.
After millennia of slave culture and practice in virtually every country in the world, one country stood up in 1807 and declared that the practice must stop. That was Britain, in the reign of Queen Anne.
Three decades later, in the reign of William 1V, Britain determined to use its incomparable navy to put an end to all slave-trading in the Atlantic Ocean. Britain harassed and captured slave ships throughout the length of the West African coast – and established a colony of freed slaves in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Grimly determined, Gt Britain (under the rule of Charles' ancestors) led the abolition of slavery throughout Europe, the Americas and eventually Asia.
This was one of the greatest achievements of Western civilisation and we should all play homage to the leading role played by the ancestors of King Charles 111.
The Māori party were a signatory. Clearly they have forgotten they are where they are because of colonisation.
What should be a concern to all New Zealanders if they are part of a coalition Government, we as a nation will stagnate and on the international stage regarded with suspicion.
Brendan has really thrown in a knotty ethical issue here and biblical verses add
subtlety.
I see it as the difference between responsibility and consequences.We all suffer the consequences for the actions of others,but we take responsibility for our own
actions(and not others).
While ideally a God has mercy and forgiveness, he does not leave the guilty unpunished. The justice may not be seen in the first generation or the next but if the evil, with knowledge, continues in subsequent generations the punishment will come. The curse will be broken if the succeeding generations do good.
England as a nation was very fortunate in being the first nation to pass laws against slavery, thanks to Wilberforce.
But forgetting all I have said above I believe the motivation for all this colonization guilt is actually cancel culture, which is driven by vengeance, unforgiveness and being judgemental.Back to tribal warfare and utu ?
William Wilberforce was a devout christian.
The Maori Party performance in Parliament today makes a mockery of this. They, slavers of old, destroying democracy, making Parliament into a farce, all to establish their ethnocracy of a tribal elite identified by a portion of their genetic make up.
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