The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has just been holding forth about
"how profoundly shameful the slave trade was", in the run-up to the
200th anniversary next year of the outlawing of the practice on British
ships. He didn't just praise those who fought for its abolition, but
also expressed "our deep sorrow that it ever happened".
That's not exactly an apology
No, it's more an expression of regret. These historical/political
apologies often are. Part of the problem is that, philosophically
speaking, you can only properly apologise for something you have done.
And these public statements are often on behalf of people other than the
speaker, or even those he - and it's usually a bloke - represents. Mr
Blair's last big public expression of regret was for English
indifference to the plight of the Irish people during the potato famine
of the 1840s.
No saying sorry over Iraq, then?
You're missing the point. Look at Bill Clinton. When he went to
Africa he apologised for the world's inaction during the genocide in
Rwanda. Not just his inaction, or Washington's, but that of the whole
world. Sorry is not that hard to say when you're apologising for
something someone else did. It's when we're to blame ourselves that the
words tend to stick. "I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that
was not appropriate" and it was "a personal failure on my part". Indeed.
Where does this fashion for apology come from?
The last Pope was the real trendsetter. John Paul II apologised for
no fewer than 94 things - from the Crusades, to the Inquisition, to the
church's scientific obscurantism over Galileo, its oppression of women
and the Holocaust. He did it throughout the 1980s and 1990s as a
preparation for the new millennium. You can't heal the present, he
insisted, without making amends for the past.
Everyone caught the bug. F W de Klerk apologised to the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission for apartheid, or at least for the "many
unacceptable things that occurred during the government of the National
Party". Jacques Chirac apologised for the help the Vichy government gave
the Nazis in deporting French Jews to death camps. The Japanese Prime
Minister has apologised for the whole of the Second World War. And Boris
Yeltsin apologised for the mistakes of the Bolshevik Revolution on its
80th anniversary in 1997.
Aren't they all just weasel words?
There is undoubtedly, shall we say, a wide range of motivation at
work here. Some, such as George Bush's statements on the torture of
Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib - "what took place in that prison does not
represent the America that I know" - may sound like an apology but they
are actually a defence dressed up as condolences.
Others, like Mr Blair's latest on slavery, may well be a pre-emtive
strike. By offering empathy rather than any suggestion of inherited
guilt, the Prime Minister gets his retaliation in first against any
attempt to suggest that Britain ought next year to be paying
compensation to some group. "When we blame ourselves," as Oscar Wilde
noted, "we feel that no one else has the right to blame us." Less
cynically, one might observe, strategic apologies may be motivated by
the speaker's attempt to change how others perceive them, or keep
relationships intact.
So political apologies are just exercises in damage limitation?
They certainly risk being perceived as that. When Pope John Paul II
in 1998 formally apologised for centuries of Catholic anti-Semitism and
its failure to combat Nazi persecution of the Jews, many people felt he
had not said enough. He made no mention of the silence of the 1940s
pope, Pius XII, on the Holocaust.
Others are more forgiving. When John Paul II visited Judaism's
holiest site, the Western Wall, he placed a piece of paper between the
stones of the temple, as devout Jews do, which stated: "We are deeply
saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have
caused these children of yours to suffer." No actual apology, some noted
grumpily. But to many Jews, the symbolic power of the Pope's presence
in that place was a more effective apology than words could ever be.
Have there been any other good apologies?
Yes, even when they didn't sound much. Often you find they are part
of a process. The early apologies to the Aborigines by figures of in the
Australian establishment began weakly but increased in strength over
the years, and have been accompanied by some reparative actions.
You have to allow people time. In 1984 Japan's Emperor Hirohito
alluded to the Second World War as "an unfortunate period in this
century". It was the first step. In 1991, on the 50th anniversary of
Pearl Harbour, the Japanese parliament considered apologising for the
attack (but then decided not to do so).
But two years later the country's prime minister, Morihiro Hosokawa,
declared the war had been "a mistake" and spoke of "a feeling of deep
remorse and apologies for the fact that our country's past acts of
aggression and colonial rule caused unbearable suffering and sorrow for
so many people".
In Britain, too, Tony Blair's much-derided remarks on the Irish
potato famine were followed, a year later, by him apologising for Bloody
Sunday, in which 19 civilians were massacred in 1972 by the British
Army. Not long after, the IRA made an unprecedented apology for the
civilians killed in its 30 year "armed struggle". Peace dropping slowly.
How can you say sorry for something someone else did?
Many people think you can't. A lot of people in the Vatican didn't
like Pope John Paul II's excessive breast-beating. One group lobbied the
man who was then Rome's doctrinal watchdog, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger,
declaring that "you cannot apply a modern mentality to the actions of
past centuries". Many historians agree; judging the past by the
standards of the present is intellectually dishonest. We are all
children of our time.
But a reluctance to square up to the wrongs of the past is often
political. Many of John Paul II's critics feared that all his admissions
that the church had been wrong in the past would give ammunition to
critics who think it is wrong about a lot today. "As regards the sins of
history," said Cardinal "Barmy" Biffi of Bologna, "would it not be
better for all of us to wait for the Last Judgement?" Most people think
that is a little too long a wait.
Are politicians' apologies a waste of time?
Yes...
* They never apologise for things they've actually got wrong, only the mistakes of dead people, who can't answer back
* You can't judge the moral culpability of the past by the very different standards of the present
* Many politicians use apologies about the past as an excuse for inaction in the present
No...
* They are part of a long, slow process of public healing that may begin with words and end with actions
* Change in the real world can be a long journey and the apologies can be the milestones
* Sometimes even politicians tell the truth, and from time to time
they may feel genuinely sorry for the mistakes of their predecessors
See link...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-big-question-are-apologies-for-historical-events-worthwhile-or-just-empty-gestures-426138.html
Peta (via Juan)
