Wrong assumptions

re: "The opposite effect" (BP, PostBag, December 24, 2022) 

Dear editor,

Jason A Jellison is correct that "there is nobody alive today who had anything to do with decisions made centuries ago" concerning the Netherland's solidly attested historical involvement in slavery. It is equally certain that no one alive today was involved in any way with America's War of Independence from England. It would therefore follow, according to Mr Jellisons's argument, that no living American should be celebrating the Fourth of July as though it mattered today. And as for that event that some allege to have happened in Bethlehem more than 2,000 years ago, that is so far beyond living memory that it can't be deemed, on Mr Jellison's reasoning, to have any particular connection to anyone now living.

Mr Jellison's mistake is twofold. First, he fails to understand that nations are entities, typically recognized as juristic persons by the law, whose life times are not limited to the life spans of any particular generation. What Americans celebrate with due pride on July 4 is of central importance to their nation, which is in essence the same nation that has existed since July 4, 1776. The Netherlands also has a historical continuity that means it can and should admit the mistakes that it made as a nation, as well as celebrating what it did right. Christmas is a similarly enduring celebration that inarguably remains central to the lives of many, even though neither they nor a single traceable ancestor was ever involved in the events that some sources uncritically report as having occurred around the time of the birth of a carpenter's son 2,000 years ago who went on to become the most famous street activist and political radical of them all.  

The second, and more substantive mistake Mr Jellison's popularly specious argument overlooks is that historical events have consequences today. African Americans are worse off than white Americans for historical reasons that at least in part trace back to two hundred years of slavery in what was to become the United States. The ancestors of white Americans accrued wealth, education, and other advantages unjustly, and they passed those advantages on to their descendants, whilst bequeathing to the descendants of slaves and Native American Indians lower education and material means. Those facts from 300 or 200 years ago, and also the more recent Jim Crow and later eras, have real world consequences today. Distributive justice requires that those suffering the depredations of past wrongs and those enjoying the fruits of a comfortable life based on historical wrongs, which were not recognized as at all wrong at the time, do require corrections today.

The Netherlands, in the person of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, is right to begin by admitting it (not any individual, but the nation) committed grievous wrongs for which it should apologize. And after apologizing, it should look to ways to make substantive amends for the wrong it previously committed against some groups.

You cannot reasonably celebrate your nation's good unless you are also willing to honestly face its bad, however many venerated generations ago that good and evil was perpetrated or by which condemned or revered figures. 

 Felix Qui 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post. In an earlier draft, I had followed Mr. Jellison in mistakenly writing "Denmark" rather than the correct "the Netherlands". 

The text as edited was published in PostBag on MonthDate, 2022, under the title "Wrong assumptions" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2468900/wrong-assumptions