The Latest Bizzare Offering From the "Where There's Blame, There's A Claim," Mongers
Tory Heaven
03/21/2007
Tory Heaven has not been so entertained in months than by discovering, through the receipt of illegally sent spam from the website described hereafter, of the existence of a most amusing book called "The Evil Empire". This delightfully silly book, penned by an American called Stephen Grasse, details how terribly wicked the British Empire has been over the centuries, and how all its victims ought to seek reparations for the shocking crimes visited upon them from we modern day Brits.
Presumably these victims would include the descendants of slaves transported by British slaving vessels until the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807, but probably not the descendants of those enslaved by Mr Grasse's own nation until they were reluctantly freed by Abraham Lincoln (and then only in the Confederate States which the United States waged war upon) in his Emancipation Declaration of 1863 (took his sweet time, didn't he Mr Grasse?).
It is always amusing to witness those, like Mr Grasse, who enjoy pointing out the mote in their brother's eye rather than the plank in their own. Evidently the United States of America, with its proud tradition of rebelling against the tyrant King George while aggressively putting down its own Southern neighbours in the War of Northern Aggression, is immune from criticism by the morally pure chaps at his British Reparations organisation. Or perhaps it is rather that Mr Grasse, like so many others these days, is keen to rake up any imaginable claim, however fanciful, in the hope that it will support the growing community of people who seek to pin responsibility for the world's failings on anyone but themselves.
The Grasse brigade typifies the view that human beings are not adults who must accept responsibility for their own failings and successes, but are generational victims who must ever be in search for persons from the distant past upon whom to blame their ills in this vale of tears and sorrows. Dear Reader of this blog, hearken unto Mr Grasse's philosophy: Are you in dire straits, dependent on welfare benefits, racked by alcoholism or drug addiction, a single parent struggling against the evils of the world? Don't despair, none of it is your fault: it's because your great, great, great, great grandfather was evicted from his farm by a wicked British squire in the seventeenth century. Everything since then is that squire's fault, not yours, so you better make damn sure that you sue his descendants' ass right away so you can live of the fat of a big compensation payment for the rest of your self righteous days.
The Grasse philosophy is a brilliant one for the feckless and lazy. It provides an easy route to ensure income for those who need cash but don't have the ability to earn it, but more importantly for those who need to blame anyone for their lack of success in this world rather than themselves. It's a philosophy that neatly turns on its head the Gospel parable that the man born blind was not being punished for the transgressions of previous generations: in the Grasse world view we are all held captive by the sins of our human forbears, condemned, like Marley's ghost, to carry the chains of sin forged by previous generations in perpetuity.
Tory Heaven, come to think of it, might profit from the philosophy of the Reparations industry. After all, as a Scot, the author of these pages has suffered at the hands of successive generations of evil doers. First it was the neighbouring warring Caledonian tribes who pillaged and raped his ancestors; then it was the dashed Romans who subjugated and enslaved them; this was followed up by a healthy dose of the unwanted and violent attention of other Scottish clans; and to top it all, the swines of Southern neighbours, the English, have been generally murdering, harassing and robbing his family down to the present age.
That should provide a pretty good list to begin with. That's without even adding Mr Grasse's own countrymen, the Americans, who murdered his ancestors who were forced to travel across the cold, forbidding North Atlantic Ocean to put down Mr Grasse's rebellious, traitorous ancestors during the American Rebellion (referred to in weasel terms as "the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812" by Mr Grasse's website which apparently doesn't understand the concept of treasonous rebellion). Well, all of the foregoing generational harms should provide your author with a pretty decent personal claim against a number of parties, the English, the current day inhabitants of Rome, and Americans, amongst them. $100,000 ought to do it for the personal, crippling agony which your author feels every day given the scar which the murderous behaviour of all these nasty types from a bygone age has left indelibly etched upon his psyche.
Poor old British Reparations lobby. One should really feel sorry for these emotional cripples. And yet, one can't help feeling that the victims brigade deserve a very present day intellectual thrashing at the hands of decent people everywhere who believe that their manufactured, money grabbing, fake emotional pleas about perceived crimes committed in the dim and distant past is an insult to those injured by very modern realities, like the people of Zimbabwe, the Sudan, and Iraq. Anyone fancy starting a reparations group to claim against the perpetrators of these crimes? Better start saving up to settle our claim, Mr Grasse. (Oh and while your at it, I want some damages for the unsolicited spam you sent me).
