Paying For The Sins Of Our Forefathers

Are you prepared to pay for perceived injustices that occurred during the lifetime of your forefathers......I'm not!

Reality abandoned in fervour to apologize
By Ted Byfield

One of the more remarkable qualities of the New Canada is its zeal to apologize for the deeds of the Old Canada.

I'm referring, of course, to what might be called the Apology Parade.

Consider the line-up:

Ukrainian-Canadians want an apology for the fact some were interned during the First World War and want a compensation package of $12.5 million.

Italian-Canadians want an apology and the same compensation because 700 of them were interned during the Second.

German-Canadians would like the same amount and the same apology for both world wars.

The Sikhs feel they deserve more -- actually $4 million - for past immigration restrictions and Croatian-Canadians feel they should get an apology because they were interned at the same time as the Ukrainians, but they want $300,000 more.

Meanwhile, African-Canadians and Doukhobor-Canadians have joined the lineup, along with several other groups, all with claims totalling $7 million.

The justice of all this is somewhat obscured by the fact that the people actually affected are nearly all long dead, survived in most cases by descendants of very mixed ancestry, some of whose forebears actually committed the ostensible offences for which the complainants will now, in theory at least, be compensated.

"My grandpa helped put my wife's grandpa in jail, but I share in the compensation anyway."

One would have thought the Tories might have been a little hesitant to reinforce this penitential impulse.

But no.

Last week we learned even Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself had joined the lineup at the national confessional.

He wants an apology and compensation for the Punjabis, whose ship, the Komagata Maru, was refused dockage in Canada in 1914.

Now, some of these deeds are certainly regrettable from the viewpoint of today is unquestionable.

But what is almost always forgotten and neglected in the accompanying description of them is the dire circumstances in which they occurred.

The unstated but underlying assumption in every one of them is the Canadians involved at the time were as confident of the outcome of events as we are today.

They surely knew they would win these wars, so they were utterly unjustified in doing what they did.

Similarly with the cultural sins.

Surely, they knew full well that Canada would preserve the traditions of equality before the law, and government only with the assent of the governed, inherited as they were from what was once known as "the British tradition."

So how could they possibly be justified in establishing racial and national limits on peoples from countries whose cultures and traditions were very different?

But, of course, our supposedly wicked ancestors knew none of this.

Any objective assessment, made before 1942 would have deemed the Allied cause in the Second World War close to hopeless. The people who ordered the Japanese removal from the Pacific Coast after Pearl Harbor did so because they envisioned Vancouver as about to become another Nanking, where the Japanese Imperial Army murdered some 200,000 civilians, and raped every female they could find.

Canadians of that day saw Britain as about to become another Russia, paying the penalty for resisting the German war machine through virtual enslavement of its civilian population.

Were they justified in these fears?

From every account of German and Japanese treatment of conquered peoples who resisted, they certainly were.

To which the modern might reply: But it didn't turn out that way, did it?

No, it did not.

But the chief reason was the determination of that generation to resist.

It was this harsh resolve that won those wars -- the same harsh resolve that resulted in the deeds we are now apologizing for.

By these apologies, a modern generation wants it to be known they would never have done such a thing.

It is quite possible they would not.

But it is equally possible that, given their unreality and historical ignorance, they also would have lost those wars, not won them.

Had that happened, the horror and darkness in which we would now be living -- if we were living at all -- is beyond imagination.

But we hear and see none of this in our fervour to apologize for our forebears, enabling us to feel so very superior to them.