Paul Vallely: The Big Question: Are apologies for historical events worthwhile or just empty gestures?
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....
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
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....