Past wrongs can’t always be undone – The Globe and Mail

Tom Flanagan on historical recognition:

Three practical conclusions …..

First, financial compensation should only be offered when the laws of the past as they then existed were broken. Sexual abuse is and always was a crime, but persuading unwed mothers to surrender their babies for adoption was a widely accepted social policy.

Second, financial compensation may be owed to victims of personal injury, but not to their heirs. Pain and suffering are terrible things, but they end with the victims’ death. Paying money to ethnic kinfolk does nothing for the victims’ suffering. It is part of the tragic legacy of history from which we can learn but which we cannot erase.

Third, recognition of what we now see as past wrongs can be in order, but apologies ring false unless they are made by those who actually committed the injustice. You apologize to people when you’ve been mean or thoughtless, but what good does it do for those who run contemporary governments to apologize for the actions of people in past centuries who acted in good faith under the law as it then was?

Past wrongs can’t always be undone – The Globe and Mail.