The notion that countries should apologize for their wartime behavior is a peculiarly modern one. In the old days, the losers of a war paid a terrible price: territory was lost, populations uprooted, leaders deposed or executed, reparations exacted. But they were not required to say they were sorry. Since World War II, commend-ably, there’s been more of an effort to set the losers back on their feet (or sometimes the winners, as in Vietnam). In return-it almost seems a transaction–they are expected to apologize.
Well, why not? Dreadful deeds are done in war, and why shouldn’t the nation that did them be asked to apologize? Here are three reasons:
First, there’s the problem of what might be called moral scale. There are some horrors so vast that they dwarf the act of apology. “I’m so sorry that we wiped out Dresden.” “We apologize for exterminating millions of Jews.” Apology is not adequate or even relevant to events like these. To make the point it is only necessary to ask a question: who could possibly accept such an apology?
The second reason flows out of the first: apologizing is something that people do, and nations are different from people. It is a modern fallacy, and largely a Western one, to expect governments to behave like people. They can’t. Governments do not have emotions, governments cannot take the risks that people do, governments have no spiritual life. This is not to say that we cannot make moral judgments about the way that governments be-have–we can and do, all the time. But we should not measure governments and people by the same moral standards. That is why the word “compassion,” so often used in modern politics, is essentially misplaced, because it refers to a feeling that only individuals have. The same is true of “remorse” and “forgiveness.” And without remorse and forgiveness, what does an apology mean?
Finally, there is a practical point: nations (and here they are rather like people) need to get on with life and not dwell too much upon the past. This is not a plea for ignoring history or covering up its less pleasant features. Young Japanese should be taught the truth about how their country behaved in World War II, just as young Germans are taught the ugly truths of the Nazi regime and young Americans (belatedly) are taught about their country’s mistreatment of Indians and blacks. It is certainly proper to examine the moral issues involved in the decision to drop the atomic bomb, as this issue of NEWSWEEK does, though it’s probably not a good idea for a government institution to do it, as the Smithsonian discovered when a storm of denunciation forced it to cancel its original plans for a show featuring the Enola Gay. But it is one thing to learn about the past, it is another to wallow in it. Some Frenchmen refought the Revolution for 200 years of their politics, and some Americans refought the Civil War for a century–neither with good results. The past is a foreign country, as L. P. Hartley wrote, and surely after 50 years the statute of limitations on apologies has run out.
For some people, the very notion of putting the past behind us is morally repellent. History, for them, teems with scores to be settled and nations that have failed to “come to terms” with events of long ago. It isn’t exactly clear what “coming to terms” means, but the phrase seems to echo the language of psychoanalysis, which tells us that to confront nasty episodes from the past has a liberating effect. This may or may not be good advice for individuals. For nations, it can be dangerous. Consider the case of Raul Alfonsin, president of Argentina in the years following the army’s “dirty war” against the left and the fiasco in the Falklands. He briefly won much praise abroad for putting scores of military men on trial-until it became clear that he was tearing the country apart in the process. Abraham Lincoln memorably exhorted Americans to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” Sometimes that means not looking back.
