Rael categorizes London Mayor's apology for city's role in transatlantic slave trade as woefully inadequate. Rael, founder and leader of the International Raelian Movement, classified as inadequate the recent apology given by London's Mayor Ken Livingstone for the city's role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

In speaking of the city's role in the slave trade, an emotional Mayor Livingstone said, "The city of London was still tainted by it."  The contrite mayor added as he pointed to the skyscrapers of the financial district, "You can look across there to see the institutions that still have the benefit of the wealth created out of slavery. As mayor, I offer an apology on behalf of London and its institutions for their role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade." 

Rael categorized the Mayor's comments as being "good … but not enough! … all countries which took part and benefited from the slave trade should pay a heavy compensation to Africans….Forgiveness is possible only if there is a reparation as painful as the crime was to the victims, even if non-violent and merely financial".
 

Many moons ago, when I was a medical student, I remember having to do a physiology experiment along with my hundred or so fellow students. The doctor supervising the lab was a middle aged woman, eminently respected in her field, with degrees from prestigious universities on both sides of the Atlantic.

She was a cold blooded creature, softly spoken and with pale blue eyes that stared expressionlessly at you as though you were a not very interesting growth in a Petri dish. She calmly demonstrated the experiment we all had to repeat. A trusting little white bunny rabbit was strapped to a bench and wired up to a machine that measured its blood pressure. The great scientist calmly sliced through one of the rabbit’s veins and softly asked us to observe how its blood pressure fell, and how soon death followed.

We were all medical students, for Christ’s sake, supposed to be moderately intelligent. What were the chances of a single person in that room not being able to work out that if an animal loses its blood, its blood pressure will fall and it will die? Could the slower ones amongst us not have learnt it from a book?

In the final year of my graduation, during banter among our friends, I asked a law student Musarrat to define Justice.

‘You want to know about Justice,’ said he, ‘then it’d be most helpful to remember that there is no such thing as Justice.’ Certainly, I did not agree with him on this, for I had always been an advocate of humanism and moral uprightness.  Both these are inseparable from the concept of justice.  However, an incident soon followed that put a serious puzzle to my scanty understanding of the concept of Justice.

It was at the end of May 2001 when my friend (and Musarrat’s classmate) Altamash was murdered for holding atheistic beliefs at the hands of his younger brother, a religious fanatic, in his very own house. 

The sole witness to this murder (which was committed by stabbing Altamash in his back) was Altamash’s mother, a widow who had worked hard to bring up her children.  She was taken over by both grief and rage.
 

Carl Jung’s Theory on Collective Unconsciousness and formation of archetypes, ‘natural attitudes’ (in phenomenology) or in layman’s term, ‘notion’ of things concrete or abstract, living or non-living, presents itself as a ‘nativist’ theory. He says Collective Unconsciousness is a theoretical pool of memories or reservoir of experiences that we are born with as species but we are not directly conscious of it.

However, I think by mention of ‘experiences’ his theory then leans on its ‘cognitivist’ side. Because even if we are born with what I will call (in Chomsky’s mold) as AAD or ‘archetype acquisition device’ there is still a need for meaningful human experiences for one’s consciousness to flow into the sphere of Collective Unconsciousness.

Cross-cultural analysis of myths, epics and legends will reveal evidences of these archetypes. But I think the great Carl Jung should have read an unusual archetype in Oryol, a cunning and deceptive nymph from the Ibalong epic fragment. She knew how to project naïveté only to lure unsuspecting macho guys like Handyong. And the latter would end up in a compromise partnership with her in fighting unattractive and devilish monsters (and crocodiles) in Bicolandia.