Imagine that I physically beat you up for 100 years, arrest you, drag you behind a moving car, set you on fire, and one day, I wake up and admit that I am wrong and apologize. Does that atone for everything i have done to you? Is the apology supposed to be the end and we can just start over? I am not talking about vengeance, all I am saying is that there should be justice. The sentence/punishment must equally match the crime.
I have realised people are not bothered when they are making historically unjust decisions, they don’t care when the crimes they are perpetrating against other people will only be eminent in the future because then they will just wake-up and say “we are sorry”. The mining industry denied knowing that their employees where suffering from lung related diseases owing to the unsafe conditions they were working under. This wasn’t true then, the mine bosses were aware that exposure to certain materials was harmful but it was easy to deny that. Today they got away with a sorry and a couple of millions in compensations.
The apartheid government was aware that their system of governance was unjust but that didn’t stop them from killing black people who fought it, arresting them, and torturing them. Then in 1994 they didn’t even say “sorry” and guess what? They got away with it. This means that, given a chance they would do the same thing again because they have absolutely no remorse for their actions. If it was wrong then there should have been justice addressing all the crimes perpetrated against humanity during the apartheid regime. But now they got away without even a slap on the wrist.
The government of today is doing the exact same thing. It is arresting students, shooting at them and years from now, it is going to surface that the government was wrong and they are just going to say “sorry” and get away with it, like saying sorry is atonement. They did the same thing in Marikana and today they spent millions of Rands trying to dodge the day they will have to apologize to the nation.
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