YOU CALL THIS JUSTICE?

((I think that I promised you all this rant a couple of days ago... I’m not entirely sure that it makes any sense today, either, but in the absence of anything else, let’s just run with it and see what happens, eh...?))

Christmas Eve brought along with it a long overdue posthumous pardon for Alan Turing which should, I suppose, only be seen as a good thing. I do, however, still feel a qualm or twelve about the fact that he's only been granted this because he was someone who is recognised as having "done something" historically speaking, and anyone else who was prosecuted under those laws at that time remains as guilty as hell in the eyes of the law.

However laudable this decision is, should we pardon one "well known" individual whilst leaving the other forty-nine thousand convictions under the 1885 Criminal Law Amendement Act to stand...? It's a tricky call, and one to which there are no easy answers, but by putting one name "above the law" does this landmark decision already seem tainted?

Then again, you might just think "About bloody time" or "Too little, too late" with regard to the life of this one remarkable man, and not be bothered with the question it raises about whether or not the others ought to be taken into consideration.

Or, perhaps we just should see it as a step in the right direction towards a society that promotes understanding and tolerance and, God knows, the world could use some of that right now, especially where changes in the statutes of some other countries are concerned.

But that's the problem with the law when we view it retrospectively, we can always see what was once wrong with it despite remaining blind to the shortcomings of the law as it is right now. Sometimes it is better to "let it lie" although, thankfully, now that capital punishment is off the table in this country, at least the grossest of miscarriages have a slight chance of being rectified, even if an injustice done can seldom be undone.

As to the mistakes of history, well, we can't unburn the witches, unhang the petty thieves, or sew all those hands back on, and restore the lives lost or damaged by such errors of judgement or justice, nor can we "un-transport" all of those convicts back from the former colonies (and I'm not sure they'd thank us if we tried to...)

Mentioning "colonies" reminds me that recently there has been much talk of reparations for the bad things that the British Empire got up to whilst glossing over the fact that quite a lot of good came out of it too, and many countries can only thank that wicked Empire for the fact that they have been able to afford to build a modern infrastructure at all.

Dreadful crimes were of course committed in the name of Empire, but then, if reparations are to be made, can't we pass the buck onto the Hanovarians who were running the country when we did those very bad things to Scotland, or blame the invading French for all of our troubles, or the Danes, or the Romans...? If we can all trace our roots back to the Great Rift Valley, then perhaps everything is the fault of Africa anyway...

There needs, I believe, to be an understanding that a line needs to be drawn and we can't all be tainted forever by the sins of our forefathers who, quite frankly, knew no better. It was always wrong that there was a slave trade, it was always wrong that slaves would be allowed to drown whilst the crew would be rescued and very few civilised people alive today would think otherwise, or have ever contemplated doing something similar, and yet there are still people who believe that somehow it is the duty of people living today to be responsible for the idiuocies and injustices of the distant past.

Perhaps all of our problems can be laid firmly at the door of Ug, the caveman from another tribe, who turned up sometime in the stone age and got everyone all riled up about those bloody asylum seekers

But this is the problem of putting our modern, liberal values on the pages of history. We can only view the world from the standpoint of our current knowledge, and so could they.

Society progresses.

Civilisation builds.

Victorian justice might seem a savage and brutal thing, but it was a lot more civilised than Georgian justice, and Georgian justice was a whole lot better than Elizabethan justice, and that was generally an improvement upon Medieval justice, which did, at least have certain boundaries upon it that the rule of the mob seldom did...

And as for what the Romans got up to...

Retribution has always been the grubbiest of stains upon a nation's history, but we can only hope that we've learned from our mistakes and become better people because of it. Sometimes, looking around me, I doubt it, but we can only live in hope...