Mea Culpa Follies

When former colonial empires, repressive nations, genocidal regimes or even ecclesiastic "top management" apologize for their historical transgressions, what does it matter? Does it mean anything?

Is it more than a calculated public relations gesture to tidy up their historical record?

Do they use ploys of penitence or reparations to wipe clean the slate of their often many-generational atrocities? When doing so, are they following the advice of focus groups or the dictation of their conscience?

Is there even such a thing as a national, cultural or religious conscience?

The ruse of remorse is often a set-up to escape responsibility and fuel revisionism. Once they have said they're sorry, does the injunction against double jeopardy let them off the hook for reparations?

Whether it's ceding territory, or disbursing payments to the aggrieved, no recoupment or indemnification is possible for victims of wars, repression and subjugation.

There are some sins for which there can be no compensation package.

Did the U.S. set things right by apologizing to Japanese Americans for their internment in World War II? Sincere words through diplomatic channels cannot turn the clock back.

Has the luster of Japan's current stellar reputation as a democracy lost its shine because that country never apologized for the blood-soaked ignominy of its former imperialism? No, because that was then, and this is now, and Japan is dear to the hearts of Lexus owners and of key consequence to economists and geopoliticians.

And China is too geopolitically important to press them about their harsh mistreatment of the minority Uyghur population, and the United Nations and ICC are too feckless and preoccupied with Israel to care.

More than 70 nations, most of them so-called liberal democracies, have apologized for past wrongdoings, but few of them for the crime of enslavement.

There is enslavement right now in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, but none of the guilty parties are even being asked by the international community to pay any price, and amicable relations are unimpeded. Some serve on United Nations human rights committees.

Being "non-aligned" has its privileges.

Aeon magazine notes "the transformative power of apologies, both individual and collective, lies in their ability to alter identity and re-direct time... Nations, after all, are not people. Regret and sorrow imply internality, emotional depth and capacities to feel and reflect that, critics argue, are only mistakenly attributed to nations... These arguments overlook both the nature of large-scale wrongdoing and the nature of national identity. When societies collude in acts of racist, homophobic or religious violence, there is almost inevitably a social infrastructure of implicit approval enabling the individual perpetrators..."

Very rarely are there is no liability for countries that go through the motions of begging the world's pardon. They have nothing to lose by using stilted diplomatic language as they confess their capital sins.

Nonetheless, some never bother anyway. The modern remnant of the Ottoman Empire has never owned up to the Armenian genocide and remains in the good graces of the world community.

Time doesn't heal all wounds, but a nation's importance in a military alliance can turn the evisceration of its victims into a flesh wounds, in carefully engineered historical retrospect.

Let's consider a handful of examples of countries who said "sorry 'bout that" to the innocents it martyred.

It was not until 2009 that the U.S. Congress apologized for the "original sin" of slavery and Jim Crow. White former South African President Frederik de Klerk's 1992 apology for apartheid expressed public regret over past governmental policies.

There was no unadorned moral condemnation, but at least it was construed as a renunciation of past tyranny.

Churches, whose doctrines were considered compatible with apartheid, also atoned, perhaps not accepting that this is not tantamount to being absolved. Belgium apologized for its rape of Congo, but there is no salve for the haunting injuries it caused.

When nations confess their past sins, they craft it with finesse and nuance that nullifies its intent. Forty years after Japan's World War II merciless savagery of Korea ended, its Emperor eked out a most asymmetrical mea culpa: " it is regrettable that there was an unfortunate period in this century."

Rarely are political confessions unequivocal, although Germany has excoriated its Nazi period, when it committed the most massive and brutal crime in world history. Unlike in many of the Western nations that were allied against them, there is little tolerance of rabid antisemitism there today.

Australia apologized to its Aborigines around 15 years ago yet, continues to treat the indigenous population unequally, and Ireland at last deplored, but could never retract the "Magdalene laundries," the institutions where unwed mothers and unfit women were, for almost 200 years, involuntarily sent to hard labor. The French National Railway apologized for its deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps, but complicit France itself, deeming itself above the fray, never did.

Apologies made to long dead individuals are particularly poignant and fruitless. In 1415, Jan Hus was burned at the stake for heresy, for which the Catholic Church finally apologized in 1999.

And in 2009, the British government apologized to the ghost of Alan Turing, the father of computer science, who cracked the German cypher Enigma Machine, and probably shortened the war by many months and saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

Turing was gay, and homosexuality was prosecuted as a crime in early postwar Britain. He was given a choice between imprisonment and chemical castration.

He chose suicide. There's a grateful nation for you.

A listing of the apologies made by leaders on behalf of their nations is so long, that it could hardly be accommodated in one of those old Manhattan telephone directories that the younger generations have never seen. But looking at our world today, it's clear that these national and sometimes cultural tears were crocodilian, perfunctory and ceremonial.

But recyclable for future generations who will have their own reasons to bemoan and feign remorse.

Almost every nation on earth today is itself guilty of either their own indelible sins, still unfolding or memorialized in chronicles, or of condoning ignorance, acquiescence or sympathy, the wickedness of other nations with whom they have a bond of convenience or spirit.

Most industrialized or "developing" countries would not raise a finger to a new holocaust, especially is the target is repetitious. Political apologies can never be as lethal to the reputational stain of nations as their outrages, often in the name of religion, were to those they persecuted.

For all intents and purposes, death erases the footprints of our former presence on earth. Despite loitering memories and our survivors' wishful thinking that our legacies still live, and the fact that DNA samples can confirm that we once existed, we revert to pre-birth and it is not even as though we were expunged but rather were never conceived.

In the storage cells of the brains of people whose paths we crossed in life, we go through stages of evaporation.

We are forgotten, except by our creditors.

The connection between political apologies tendered by contrite nations and religions, and our miraculously sentient bodies, is that both return to dust, the only remaining argument being whether they bite it or kiss it.

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