When Will They Ever Learn?

The film Amazing Grace received mixed reviews when it was released, but I'm a sucker for British period pieces so I decided to give it a look on the last day before it disappeared from my local art house cinema.

As it turned out the movie had a profound impact on me in a way that was totally unexpected. It wasn't the acting, the script the cinematography or even the moral correctness of the fight of William Wilberforce and the Clapham Set to achieve the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire at the turn of the eighteenth century. No, the most poignant, and indeed alarming, message for me was how little our mainstream politicians have changed in the last 200 years.

Wilberforce and his motley band of evangelical supporters campaigned tirelessly for a couple of decades to publicize the horrors of the slave trade. The victims were shackled head, hands and feet to a slab of board so awkwardly that it was not unusual for a shoulder or hip to become dislocated.

The journey from the coast of Africa to the West Indies could take as little as three weeks but more often took two or three months depending on conditions at sea. Alexander Falconbridge, a surgeon aboard the slave ships, provided one of the best accounts of the terrible conditions:

"...the excessive heat was not the only thing that rendered their situation intolerable. The deck, that is the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughterhouse."

Contemporary observers used to say that you could smell a slave ship approaching port before you could even see it.

Wilberforce and his group amassed a wealth of evidence to support their case and show how the trade was an affront to Christian values and common humanity.

An abolitionist bill was introduced year after year and every time it was roundly defeated by MP's voting to preserve either their personal vested interests or those of the moneyed class they represented.

As one of Wilberforce's bills is voted down for the umpteenth time, and then an abolitionist meeting, to which all MP's are invited, attracts only a couple of attendees, I found myself thinking how little has changed.

Human rights activists move heaven and earth to try and get their message across, whether it be the Darfur genocide carried out with Chinese made weapons and financed by Chinese Communist Party money, or the genocide of Falun Gong practitioners within the People's Republic itself.

Some backbenchers of conscience try to say and do the right thing, but even among those ranks there is generally more saying than doing. Falun Gong has held a number of press conferences and forums at Parliament House in Canberra, but you can generally count the number of MP's and Senators in attendance on the fingers of one hand.

As for the frontbenchers: economics seems to win out over human rights every time just like in England two centuries ago. Last Thursday evening Sky News Australia showed pictures of a Falun Gong rally in Sydney including people made-up to look like torture victims. The reporter then declared: "but that won't worry John Howard though" and cut to shots of the Prime Minister fawning over Chinese leader Hu Jintao and signing another billion dollar gas deal. Around the same time Sky UK ran a story exposing the scandal of a remote village in Russia polluted with radiation from a nuclear reprocessing plant. A medical facility there features rows of jars displaying preserved deformed foetuses.

One in three of the population dies of cancer and most children have some kind of radiation related health problem and will be lucky to reach adulthood.

If this was not bad enough, the Putin government has refused to re-settle the people to an area that is not contaminated. Russian human rights activists believe the reason for this is that the medical authorities are using the people as a large-scale experiment to monitor the effects of long-term radiation on human beings.

Nonetheless, the Australian government has seen fit to broker a deal to sell uranium to a government that many commentators believe is showing itself to be increasingly ruthless and totalitarian with each day that passes.

The song "Amazing Grace," after which the aforementioned film is named, was written by John Newton in 1772 and published seven years later. A former slave ship captain who became a preacher, Newton was a mentor for William Wilberforce and the source of much of the latter's inspiration.

However, like many others of my generation, I first heard the song when it became a favourite of 'sixties folk singers and civil rights activists. Yet it was a line from another song of that era-Pete Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (a big hit for Peter, Paul & Mary)- that started to play in my head as I watched those eighteenth century MP's vote time after time to preserve the slave trade and continue to line their own pockets.

I thought of the western democracies and their indifference to the horrors endured by imprisoned prisoners of conscience in China and elsewhere. The line from that song echoing through my brain was:

"Oh, when will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?" Will they ever learn? We can only live in hope.