Well, first, I’m not sure that they do have a right to exist, and certainly not without some serious steps in acknowledging the issue and making meaningful reparations.
But more specifically, Churchill is saying that he doesn’t even see that a “great wrong has been done” in the first place. Whether the benefits outweigh the harms or whether it’s too late to fix historic wrongs are very different debates from “do you think it is wrong to genocide a people to colonise their land?”.
And the reason it’s important to acknowledge that historic wrongs were wrong, even if you can’t do anything to change them, is because you are less likely to argue in favor of repeating the exact wrong again, as Big C is doing in that speech.
Well, first, I’m not sure that they do have a right to exist, and certainly not without some serious steps in acknowledging the issue and making meaningful reparations.
But more specifically, Churchill is saying that he doesn’t even see that a “great wrong has been done” in the first place. Whether the benefits outweigh the harms or whether it’s too late to fix historic wrongs are very different debates from “do you think it is wrong to genocide a people to colonise their land?”.
And the reason it’s important to acknowledge that historic wrongs were wrong, even if you can’t do anything to change them, is because you are less likely to argue in favor of repeating the exact wrong again, as Big C is doing in that speech.