Once again both perpetrators and victims are dead and there are few if any ways to alleviate such sentiments. Although one option is, as in Australia, to play into those agrarian myths and romances that feature around the world but have such a niche in Western post-industrial societies. These see the establishment of modern civilisation as having not merely wrecked once-beautiful landscapes but as having filled hitherto unsullied human beings with the deadliest sins of human greed. It is a vision that was encapsulated, though not invented, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but has taken on a particular popularity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. According to this reckoning, it is Europeans who, when they travelled and colonised around the world, became the Eden-destroying species.

Among the sins that Europeans are now accused of having spread around the world is the sin that constitutes the founding sin of America: slavery, and through slavery, racism. To say that American presidents have been apologising for these for decades is an understatement. The country fought and won a civil war over the issue nearly two centuries ago. Nevertheless, on a visit to Uganda in 1998 President Clinton made yet another fulsome apology for the slave trade. If he or anyone among his advisors thought that this would put the matter to rest, they could not have been more wrong. Despite slavery having involved at least as many people at the Ugandan end of the chain as at the American end, the idea that people of European descent alone should feel continuous guilt for the actions of their forebears is now embedded, and helpful to everyone other than those of the guilty nation. In the last couple of decades, as the situation for American blacks has slowly improved, the rhetoric of shame has only increased. America has had black Secretaries of State of both parties, black Supreme Court Justices and a black President, but even in Barack Obama’s second term there were ever louder demands for ‘reparations’ to be paid to all black Americans. Indeed, the argument got more mainstream than it had in generations.15 As though to prove that nothing can ever truly be done to alleviate the sins of the past, during the sixth year of Obama’s presidency it became mainstream thinking to believe that the actions of the ancestors of many white Americans should cause their descendants to give most black Americans a cash settlement for acts carried out centuries earlier. The question of reparations to other ethnic groups who had suffered historic wrongs did not become part of the ensuing debate. Only Europeans and their descendants remember guilt. So only Europeans and their descendants have continuously to atone for it.