Essay: On Apologies, Authentic and Otherwise

The first and fatal charm of national repentance," writes I C.S. Lewis, "is the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing—but, first, of denouncing—the conduct of others." The trap, he explains, is that the collective confession contains a dangerous figure of speech that permits a confusion of "we" and "they." One says "we sinned" and means "they sinned": the military-industrial complex, liberals, capitalist-readers.

The collective confession can turn false. It can serve as convenient camouflage for bitter accusation. But Lewis is too pessimistic. There are authentic expressions of national contrition. And they are as moving as they are rare. This year has seen several remarkable examples: the American apology to France for having shielded Klaus Barbie; the U.S. congressional commission's acknowledgment of guilt for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; the finding of the Israeli commission on the killings at Sabra and Shatila that, though others had committed the crime, Israel bore a national responsibility for not having prevented them from happening.

What distinguishes the authentic national confession from the counterfeit? For one thing, there is no confusion of we and they. We remain responsible, even if the crime was in fact committed by them. As when Japan's Foreign Minister apologized on behalf of the entire nation for the 1972 massacre carried out at Tel Aviv's Lod Airport by Japanese Red Army terrorists: fathers atoning for sons. And as when the U.S. makes affirmative action a national policy (at least in part) as reparation for past injustice: sons atoning for fathers.

There is also no confusion of crime and error. True contrition does not permit the phrase "Stalin's errors." Such a formulation implies that a tendency to mass murder constitutes not a moral but an intellectual failing. Hence the companion formulation that attributes crimes to choosing an "incorrect line," the moral equivalent of taking a wrong turn on a highway.

There is a wisdom beyond sentimentality in the authentic apology. It has a purpose. Disraeli once said, "Apologies only account for that which they do not alter." That still accounts for much, and the accounting is indispensable. Perhaps not within a nation, where the law presumably does the accounting among individuals: the law pronounces judgment to mark an end to the cycle of vengeance that would otherwise follow a crime. But between nations there is no comparable agency to prevent historical wounds from festering endlessly. Nothing, except the apology. In an almost miraculous way, it seems capable of binding the wounds. Compare the legacies of the Holocaust and the Armenian massacres of 1915. The postwar German government accepted responsibility for the nation's actions, and offered acknowledgment and reparations to the survivors. The Nazi crime was more vast, more methodical, more successful than the Turks'. Yet it is Armenian terrorists who attack diplomats, embassies and airlines, sometimes demanding no more than official Turkish acknowledgment of what was done to their grandfathers.