We Are All Guilty (or not)

 A harrowing night's television last night, with My Family, The Holocaust and Me with Robert Rinder on BBC1, swiftly followed by Berlin 1945 on BBC4. Both programmes, unsurprisingly, got me thinking about questions of historical guilt... 
  At present the area of historical guilt that is being most vigorously agitated is slavery – by which is meant the relatively short-lived triangular trade that was suppressed a couple of centuries ago. It seems to me that whenever historical guilt for slavery is discussed, a small troop of elephants is milling about in the room. Chief among them – because it is the one form of slavery that we might conceivably be able to do something about – is present-day slavery in all its forms. This, it seems, may be safely ignored in favour of the perceived sins of the British and Americans of several centuries ago. Another large elephant is the long (and continuing) history of slavery in the Islamic world. And then there is Belgium, whose turn-of-the-(20th)-century wealth was built on slave labour in the Congo. And, in the 20th century, slave labour in Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union. Slave labour in Japan during World War II is perhaps a special case, as it was enslavement of prisoners of war (in total defiance of the Geneva conventions, etc.). The German use of slave labour in that war was another matter, involving the enslavement of its own (ex-)citizens, and it permeated the German economy to a quite extraordinary extent: there is barely a German brand you can name that doesn't have a history of using slave labour – from ThyssenKrupp right down to Dr Oetker. As for the Soviet Union, its economy was dependent on slave labour in the gulag system for decades – and that had nothing to do with the war. 
  Of course you could argue, quite reasonably, that present-day Belgians, Germans, Japanese, Russians etc. cannot be held accountable for what happened in the past, in different times and different circumstances and under different regimes. And yet this forgive-and-forget attitude does not, it seems, extend to the much more historically distant triangular trade. Present-day British and Americans, uniquely, must be held accountable for the sins of their great great great great great etc. grandfathers, in very different times and circumstances and under very different regimes. Maybe I'm missing something here, but this doesn't seem to me to make much sense (except perhaps as another episode in the long slow suicide of the West)...