Friday night’s edition of Amanpour & Co. on PBS made a full-throated call for reparations for slavery in America, with host Christiane Amanpour interviewing Ruti Teitel, law school professor and author of Presidential Visions of Transitional Justice, and Aria Florant, the CEO of Liberation Ventures, which advocates for slavery reparations in America.
The ideologically harmonious trio even put the USA on the level of Syria, two nations in need of overdue reckoning over the sins of the past. Amanpour's introduction:
AMANPOUR: From Syria to the United States, reckoning with the past, a discussion about transitional justice and reparations.
The host underlined the atrocious comparison of the USA and the failed terror state of Syria, calling reparations “transitional justice”: “It's something that links Syria to the United States, to South Africa, and many countries in between, with dark pasts which have to be reckoned with. In America, some argue that reparations are the best way to repair the devastating harm inflicted by slavery and racial discrimination. But it's a proposal that's faced so much opposition....”
Amanpour demanded an American reckoning of its past slavery (as if over half a million dead in the Civil War wasn’t enough): “And now, we're well into the 21st century, Aria, and there appears to be a complete backlash against even, you know, even now. I mean, all these decades, centuries since the Civil War, it's happening again. So, what is it about the culture in the United States that has not been conditioned or whatever? It hasn't been accepted yet. Why has there been no Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for instance, at the very least?”
Amanpour and her guests placed former President Barack Obama, “the first black president in the United States,” upon a moral pedestal and lectured critics of his presidential “apology tour” of nations supposedly hurt by “America's historical wrongdoings.”
TEITEL: ....I don't call them apologies --
AMANPOUR: No, you don't, but the political right did.
TEITEL: Yes. No, no. I understand. It's a thin line. And I think Obama walked that thin line very well because he knew how much he needed to do to reset foreign relations. If you think about bearing the Cold War, as he said, a reset in Latin America. He talked about the importance of respectful dialogue in both the Americas and in Asia. He went to Vietnam. You know, he went to places that were, you know, just sites, burial sites. Laos, the most bombed city in the world. Went to Hiroshima as a standing president and stood side by side with the leaders there. And he said, you know, we need to acknowledge the past and we need to move forward. He never said we shouldn't have, you know, he didn't fully say an apology for Hiroshima....
Amanpour, whose political positions are unilaterally Euro-left, had clearly pre-chosen a side in this ideological debate and seemingly had to catch herself from going even further in her advocacy.
AMANPOUR: ….a very disappointing Pew [poll], or maybe it's not disappointing, maybe it's a normal, you know, percentage: 2021 Research Center poll says 68 percent of Americans say the descendants of enslaved people in the United States should not be repaid. So, that's one thing. My other question on that is, isn't storytelling one of the most important ways of getting, you know, culture to change? Has enough storytelling been done?
It's not as if PBS hasn’t worked the evils of slavery into its programming, including Ken Burns’ latest epic documentary on the American Revolution.
