Reparations for slavery?
Activists demanding ‘reparations’ for slavery must read this polemic:
Group-think has replaced serious history, and some facts have become unsayable, as Nigel Biggar eloquently shows in his new book
The death, in May 2020, of George Floyd, at the hands of the Minneapolis police, prompted an international spasm of outrage, often among well-to-do white people, about the treatment of less well-to-do black people.
These events underpin Nigel Biggar’s book Reparations, which is, quite simply, one of the most important of our times. It is so for two reasons. First, it is a rare blend of well-researched history, well-reasoned philosophy and well-argued polemic, with a coating of theology typical of a writer who is also emeritus Regius Professor of moral theology at Oxford (and an ordained priest in the Church of England). Second, it addresses a question now morally cancerous in our discourse: not racism, but the idea that the historical enslavement of black people by white people was an expression of racism so profound and so embedded in our culture that contemporary society must flagellate itself economically to achieve some degree of repentance.
In Reparations, Biggar exposes the false basis upon which demands for Britain to pay compensation to the descendants of slaves are constructed. He examines the philosophical implications of slavery and, while naturally accepting its iniquity, argues that it is not uniquely wicked. He shows that it was a practice universal before the modern era, not confined to white people exploiting those from different ethnicities. In ancient Europe, white people enslaved other white people, both for economic purposes and as a punishment by victors of the losers of wars and victims of conquests.
Simon Heffer -- The Telegraph.