An Epidemic of Apologies

Vinay Lal

[First published as "An Epidemic of Apologies." Humanscape 6, no. 4 (April 1999):38-41.]

Scarcely a month goes by these days before one reads in the press of an apology, usually by one nation-state to another, or from one-nation state to one of its minority communities, for grievous harm committed in the past. The most recent such apology was issued by the new Japanese Prime Minister, Keizo Obuchi, to the visiting President of Korea, Kim Dae Jung, as an apparent expression of contrition for the Japanese occupation of Korea in the first half of this century. The Japanese have doubtless much work to do by way of appeasing their former enemies and victims: over 200,000 women in territories through much of Asia that were occupied by Japanese troops were compelled to service their sexual needs (thus the designation "comfort women"), and the Japanese concentration camps were dens of brutality. In 1995, the then Japanese Prime Minister had tendered, in measured tones, an apology for Japan’s conduct during World War II: "I would like to say that Japan is deeply remorseful for its past and strives for world peace." Earlier this summer, the Japanese Prime Minister apologized to the British Government for the inhumane treatment of British Prisoners of War in World War II, though his statement appears not to have been warmly received by British veterans. The recent statement of regret appears likely to be followed in the near future by an apology to the Chinese, who have also had the bitter experience of living under Japanese occupation.

No one should infer from these instances that the Japanese have acquired a bizarre habit, or that they are somehow peculiarly inclined to be contrite, for there has been a huge epidemic of apologies over the last few years. The trend of the 1990s can be said to have begun with the passage of Public Law 103-150 in the United States in 1993, which acknowledged the 100^th anniversary of the January 17, 1893 of the Kingdom of Hawaii, and tendered an "apology to Native Hawaiians on behalf of the United States for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii." This appears to have been a signal to other Western powers and institutions to act likewise: soon Germany was to follow suit, appearing contrite for its invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, while the Czechs reciprocated for having, in the aftermath of World War II, expelled Germans from what was then Czechoslovakia and contributed to the suffering of innocent people. President Chirac of Japan apologized to the Jewish community for the war-time French Government’s complicity in sending Jews to their graves. Even Canada, which many people are (wrongly) accustomed to thinking of as a benign nation, has expressed remorse for oppressing its native people, suppressing their languages and culture, and rendering nearly extinct their modes of religious worship. Responding to the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Minister for Indian Affairs stated: "The government of Canada today [7 January 1998] formally expresses to all aboriginal people in Canada our profound regret for past actions of the federal government."

Last year, shortly after gaining the office of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair offered, on behalf of the English, an apology to the Irish people for the cruel potato famine of 1845-49 that decimated the population of Ireland and drove it eventually, as William Butler Yeats was to suggest, into madness and poetry -- and more immediately into exodus and migration. The population of Ireland fell from 8.2 million in the early 1840s to less than 6 million in 1851, and the curse would linger on: by 1911, the population had shrunk to 4.4 million. This much at least is clear, since no one knows how many people were killed in the years of the famine, and estimates vary from 750,000 to 1.5 million. A great deal of research has, however, established the part played in this story by the failure and inadequacy of ‘relief’ programs, the callousness of the Protestant ascendancy, and the sheer indifference of some English administrators. Well should the English have apologized for their oppression of the Irish, though the business of ascertaining the truth about Ireland, as William Thackeray surmised in 1842, has always been a difficult one. "‘To have an opinion about Ireland’", he was to write, "one must begin by getting at the truth; and where is it to be had in the country? Or rather, there are two truths, the Catholic truth and the Protestant truth . . . Belief is made a party business."

The Great Potato Famine of 1845-49 is scarcely the only one to which the English lent their rapacity: as it has become increasingly clear over the years, the Bengal famine of 1943, which led to the deaths of 3 million Indians, and during the height of which the British administration of India was exporting foodstuffs to its allies, was entirely man-made. Indeed, the entire period of British rule in India appears to be framed by famines, when we consider that only a few years after the British triumph of arms at Plassey, as many as 10 million Indians succumbed to starvation in the possessions under the Company’s rule. That at nearly the end of their rule, which was heralded with the pompous declaration that they were engaged in a ‘civilizing mission’, the British should have again been crucially instrumental in creating conditions of mass death in India while they were purportedly saving the world for democracy has not generally been considered worthy of comment in Britain. No apology has ever been tendered to the Indians by the English for the 1943 Bengal famine, though it led to an appreciably greater loss of life than the Irish famine: perhaps the English are still inclined to consider the Irish, even the popish Irish, as more worthy of an apology than the infernal Indians. The dark-skinned people of the sub-continent die much too easily anyway, and in droves: ‘thousands’ have been killed in riots, the gas leak at the Union Carbide in Bhopal accounted for perhaps as many, and a great many more thousands had their lives snuffed out in an instant when an earthquake descended upon Latour in Maharashtra, almost around the same time that an earthquake of greater magnitude (on the Richter scale) killed a mere few dozens in the Los Angeles area. One is accustomed to thinking of life in India as cheap, worth little more than a farthing, and famines and earthquakes do the prophylactic work to which thick-skinned Indians will not give their easy assent. If Indians seem unperturbed by the shortness and quirkiness of life, and if they are habituated, as is sometimes commonly believed in the West and among India’s own modernizers, to resigning themselves to their fate, then no apology need be offered for errors committed at a time when Britain was facing the most determined assault upon its very survival. Perhaps, by a perverse twist of logic, Indians even ought to be grateful to the English for having relieved some of them of the onerous burden of life.

That some Indians, in any case, are desirous of receiving an apology for British colonialism, or for some particular episode of oppression, is suggested by the events surrounding the visit to India last April of Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. It is on 13 April 1919 that, in what has since been remembered as one of the more notorious chapters from British rule in India, a regiment of troops under the command of General Reginald Dyer fired for ten continuous minutes at an unarmed crowd, numbering nearly 20,000, gathered at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. On the official count itself, which was stated by some Indian nationalists to have been a gross underestimate, 379 Indians were killed, and as many as 1,000 suffered injuries. This year, when the Queen and Prince Philip on a state visit to India decided to lay a wreath at the memorial erected at the Jallianwala Bagh, a few hundred Indians waged a demonstration outside the Bagh, demanding that the British government issue an apology for the massacre. Significantly, one of the demonstrators, a "freedom fighter", is reported as having said: "If Japan can apologize to Korea for excesses against Korean women who were used as sex slaves for the pleasure of the soldiers, why should Britain not apologize to India?" While the Queen was to go no farther than describing the massacre as a "distressing example" of "difficult episodes" in Indian-British relations in the past, her husband’s sole response seems to have been to declare that the unofficial estimate of 2,000 dead, mentioned on a plaque besides the memorial, was undoubtedly an exaggeration — as indeed it was. That on a state visit to India, a member of the British monarchy should have had no better manners than to enter into a dispute regarding the number of Indians massacred on a particular occasion points not only to the obsessive stupidity of British empiricism and the continuing contempt among the British upper classes for India, but to the utter gracelessness of an atavistic British institution that, in a country now reduced to near third-world status, must rely on the ridiculous rituals associated with ‘royal blood’ for the greater part of its tourist revenues.

Considering the trends of the last few years, nonetheless, one can reasonably hazard the speculation that the day may not be too far away when imperialist nations, and some of their hallowed institutions (such as the Red Cross, or missionary organizations), will daily be issuing apologies for the gross exploitation of people in the Third World over the last five hundred years. But to suppose that the West has now somehow become more civilized, or genuinely repentant, may well be a mistake, as the American experience with issuing apologies suggests. It was in the reign of the bandit president, Ronald Reagan, that America offered a formal apology to the descendants of the Japanese-Americans, many of them citizens, who were incarcerated in concentration camps without ceremony, and with little regard to the freedoms promised to them under the document that has supposedly given more freedoms to men (and some would say women) than any other scrap of paper, on the presumption that they could not be trusted while America was at war with Japan. Reagan’s apology came nearly forty-five years after the conclusion of the war, at a time when the Japanese economy was as its strongest. The Japanese have long been recognized as ‘honorary whites’; the yen was then poised to become almost as widely accepted as the dollar, the very currency of demand in Asia; and America’s treatment of Japanese-Americans has always rankled the Japanese, in and out of America. Since relations with Japan, the world’s second largest economy, and the bulwark of the capitalist order in the vast Asian markets, have always been perceived as critical to American interests, an apology to Japansese-Americans seemed in order.

An apology to the Japanese-Americans, which should not be confused with an apology to Japan, is no embarrassment to the Americans; if anything, it offers a demonstration of America’s generosity, its guilt over its sins, and its willingness to atone for the wrongs it has committed in the past. The apology to the Japanese-Americans is easily summoned as an instance of the narrative of Western exceptionalism: in this narrative, what is distinct and unique about America and the West as a whole is the fact that the West alone has had the courage to atone for the wrongs committed by Western powers. No nation or civilization has a monopoly over evil; and if it was a Western power, Britain, that first came up with the idea of concentration camps when it meted out punishment to the Boers, leaving it to another Western power to develop these concentrations camps into mass factories of death, it is in an Asian country, Cambodia, that concentration camps were turned into killing fields as a way of perpetuating the world’s first auto-genocide. Though, on the terms of the narrative of the Western exceptionalism, it can even be conceded that the West has been just as brutally oppressive as any other civilization, it must not be forgotten that only in the West was an effort made to undo the wrongs of the past. This narrative seeks to place in juxtaposition Germany, which has repeatedly apologized to the Jews and the world for the horrors of the war and the holocaust, and Japan, which has only very recently, and barely, been contrite for prosecuting a barbarous war and committing crimes against humanity contrary to all conventions of warfare. German children are taught that Nazism was an unmitigated evil; by way of contrast, it is argued, Japanese school textbooks resolutely fail to mention Japanese war crimes, the history of "comfort women", and the role of the Emperor in keeping Japan at war.

One might expect, then, given the apology issued to Japanese-Americans, that a similar proposal to offer an apology to African-Americans, whose descendants were brought to this country as slaves and kept in slavery until after the end of the civil war in 1865, and thereafter in near-slavery until the modern era of civil rights campaigns, would not have so summarily been dismissed as a meaningless and unnecessary concession no longer warranted by the circumstances. No such apology has ever been issued. The office of Tony Hall, a Democratic Senator from Ohio who sponsored the bill that calls for the U.S. Congress to issue a formal apology to African-Americans for the institution of slavery, has reported that two out of every three letters received express disagreement with Senator’s Hall proposal; many of these express outrage that the white man should be seen as appearing contrite. One man from the American ‘heartland’, describing Hall as a "stupid" man, wrote: "I should like to see our nation return to slavery." Another letter-writer expressed the opinion that members of the "Negro race" should be thankful to "us", white Americans, "for having brought them here"; and speaking of four well-dressed African-American professional women he had seen on television making such a demand, he added: "If we had not brought their ancestors here, they would still be running around over there in loin-cloths with their breasts hanging out." Describing himself as altogether unprepared for this response, Hall conceded in an interview that "It’s very much alive, the hate, the division, the wounds."

It is the same document of freedom which failed to provide any immunity to Japanese-Americans from wrongful incarceration which, at the moment of its conception, conferred upon the system of slavery its blessings. The Constitution recognized the Negro as 3/5ths of a human being, and only the thirteenth amendment to the constitution outlawed slavery at the conclusion of the civil war, nearly 100 years after the declaration of American independence. Most Americans have supposed that the civil war was fought over slavery, and that the triumph of the north over the slave-holding states of the south, and the subsequent emancipation of the slaves, stands in lieu of an apology. However, as one scholar of American history put it in a nutshell, "The objective of the North was not to end slavery but to preserve the Union. What the South sought was not to end the Union but to preserve slavery." Indeed the South sought to protect in every manner what Kenneth Stamp described as the ‘peculiar institution’: those chivalrous gentlemen from the South were quite keen on preserving the right to own human beings as chattel. But historians of the United States, who have never had much of a roving eye for the rest of the world, and certainly have rarely allowed happenings elsewhere in the world to plough their infertile fields, are scarcely reliable witnesses about anything. Otherwise they may have recognized numerous analogues in other delectable practices pursued by Western powers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. That aside, even the so-called ‘Great Emancipator’, Abraham Lincoln, who is celebrated as the champion without peer of human rights, was quite firm in his mind that the emancipation of the slaves was necessary only as a means of preserving the Union. As he himself told an audience in 1858, "I am not, or ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social or political equality of the white and black races." Lincoln, as his contemporary Frederick Douglass was to note, was as prepared to "protect, defend and perpetuate slavery" as any American president, and he "was ready to execute all the supposed Constitutional guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states." One other, similarly less hagiographic, biographer of Lincoln has noted that in 1862 he suspended the writ of habeas corpus, which remains the most fundamental right of a citizen under any system that even remotely gives its adherence to the rule of law, without even consulting his cabinet.

That fount of American wisdom, Newt Gingrich, has given it as his considered opinion that any apology to African-Americans would be merely "emotional symbolism" and a "dead-end." Though the country thrives on "emotional symbolism", and no American newscast is complete without a heart-wrenching (but nonetheless inane) story of the triumph of the American spirit over adversity, of the little girl saved by the dog Lassie and the goodness of the burger-eating American, in this matter America is declared as being unhappy with mere palliatives of "emotional symbolism". Even Jesse Jackson is described as not being not reconciled to the idea of an apology, as it would have "no substantial value to it . . . There must be some program of substance beyond just the apology." The descendants of the Japanese-Americans were given something of "substance" beyond a mere apology: in America nothing but money has ever been "substance", but such a possibility cannot be contemplated in the case of African-Americans. For one thing, any reparations would leave the country bankrupt, and so its financial condition would echo its moral state. The greater part of the problem is that many white Americans believe, though they do not always have the gumption to state so in public, that money is wasted on an African-American.

An apology to African-Americans would be meaningless, though emphatically not for the reasons stated by the opponents of the proposal. We must not forget the meaning of the word ‘apology’ in the English language, and its relation to the idea of ‘penitence’, which makes a far greater demand upon those who would seek to apologize. To utter an apology is not only to say sorry, to beg forgiveness, and to express contrition at one’s actions or words, but to express a willingness to forbear from such action or words in the future. An apology carries with it the declared intention to repudiate such action, language, or behavior as has been offensive or caused hurt, injury, or death to someone or their kin, friends, or descendants. One does not have to be a Christian to understand that an apology signifies an intent to walk a different road: in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, "Ye who do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbors, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God, and walking from henceforth in his holy ways: Draw near with faith, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort; and make your humble confession to Almighty God, devoutly kneeling."

It is very doubtful, indeed, that Americans, or for that matter all those who have been so busy issuing apologies, are truly penitent. The brutal truth remains that the American leadership, comprised predominantly of whites (and males at that), and a very sizable number of the American ‘people’, in whose name undertakings are commenced, legitimised, and sanctified, are far from being reconciled to the ‘free’ condition of African-Americans today, and certainly are not inclined to express remorse for the wretched deeds perpetrated by their ancestors. Were not the moral opprobrium of the world to descend upon those who may desire to perpetrate slavery today, it is not certain that some Americans might not welcome slavery, if on no other grounds than the frequently proffered one that equality between the white and black races is inconceivable, not to mention undesirable. Moreover, as Americans are aware, capital can flourish in circumstances other than those of slavery; indeed, whatever the American South’s interest in preserving the ‘peculiar institution’, slavery was proving to be a rather expensive proposition. If Coca-Cola, Nike, Nestle, and Benetton can almost effortlessly penetrate the remotest markets, what is the need for a system of slavery?

An apology remains, with respect to spiritual and material considerations alike, a cheap and inexpensive way to gain the high moral ground. Very few of the apologies issued have ever entailed any monetary compensation, and though billions of dollars for stealth fighters are readily approved, in such matters expenditures are seen as draining valuable national resources. An apology, in the political circumstances of the late twentieth-century, necessitates little or no introspection, and certainly does not require one to confront those parts of one’s own self that, being incapable of conciliation, one expels outward or projects on to the other. It is instructive that three years ago, when the controversy surrounding the planned exhibition of the Enola Gray, the plane that carried the atomic bomb used over Hiroshima, was at its height, President Clinton did not merely decline to issue an apology to Japan, but stated publicly and with astonishing arrogance that an apology to Japan would be quite inappropriate. Clinton certainly was not to be moved by either the findings of revisionist histories, or even recently declassified official documents, which establish with some authority the view that the old canard of the bomb having averted millions of Americans and Japanese deaths cannot reasonably withstand scrutiny. Yet, to move to the bolder proposition, Clinton was unable to apologize because the United States is unwilling to renounce the use of nuclear weapons; and a genuine apology is none other than a statement of intent that one repudiates one’s conduct, and promises never to engage in a similar undertaking again. The genocidal mentality is indubitably at the very heart of the American psyche.

While apologies are being bandied around, one might strive to remember that a virtual genocide is being perpetrated against the Iraqi people, and that no two powers have more aggressively striven for this outcome than the United States and its satellite state, "Great" Britain. An American official has been quoted recently in the New York Times as saying that the United States is prepared, if necessary, to "obliterate Iraq". So long as the vast disparities of power that characterize the world system today remain, and Western powers, and their emulators among the military and business elites around the world, continue to exhibit the genocidal tendencies that have marked the interaction between the West and the world that it formerly colonized, it is inconceivable that apologies of the kind that are proliferating today should be viewed as anything other than a more insidious manifestation of Western hegemony. There is, as I have argued earlier, an ominous discourse of "Western exceptionalism", by the terms of which the West is rendered exceptional precisely because, whatever its flaws, it has shown the power to redeem itself and its former victims. The latest multiculturalists on the block, while admitting that European colonial powers perpetrated regimes of oppression and terror, nonetheless would have us believe that they have now owned up to their past, and that this — the capacity to admit one’s flaws, and to make sufficient moral reparations — forever distinguishes the West from the world that it once colonized. Rather, we should be wary of these developments, since we are yet to discover that the poisoned kindness of the West may yet kill us all. Such cynicism may well be undeserved, and yet one has no recourse but to say: Sorry.

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