Blaming the past: Apologizing for ancestral misdeeds

Dr. David Lowenthal, Professor Emeritus, University College, London, is the author of many works, including the well-known The Past is a Foreign Country.
Dr. Lowenthal also be available to meet with graduate students and faculty, hosted by our public history program, from 4-5 in HSSB 3008.

As recommended reading before the talk Prof. Lowenthal suggests his TLS review “Beyond Repair: Apologies for the past replace our Hopes for the Future,” Times Literary Supplement (Nov. 24, 2006), pp. 3-4, which reviews:
John Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (Harvard University Press, 2006), and
Pablo de Greiff, ed., The Handbook of Reparations (Oxford University Press, 2006).

The full text follows below:

“Beyond Repair: apologies for the past replace our hopes for the future”
[review of John Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (Harvard University Press, 2006), and Pablo de Greiff, ed., The Handbook of Reparations (Oxford University Press, 2006)], Times Literary Supplement Nov. 24, 2006, pp. 3–4

The Age of Apology peaked with 1990s’ contrition chic: Bill Clinton apologized for slavery, Tony Blair for the Irish Famine, the pope for the Crusades. Australia declared a “National Sorry Day” for past mistreatment of Aborigines, with little to show by way of present improvement. Posthumous mea culpas dispense cheap cheer. They show how venial are our own sins next to forebears’ crimes. Past sinners are excoriated for not thinking and acting as right-minded people do today. Censorious tracts name and shame perpetrators of history’s atrocities, demanding remorse and redress for victims’ heirs. A descendant of Sir John Hawkins, his T-shirt inscribed “So Sorry” and “Pardon”, marked the bicentenary of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade by kneeling in chains before 25,000 Gambians, asking forgiveness for his ancestor’s crimes. Hawkins was the second slave-trader thus chastised: the National Maritime Museum 1988 Armada show demoted Sir Francis Drake to a minor slot to “dissolve old myths and prejudices” (really a ploy, fumed an aggrieved Plymouth worthy, to mollify Spain in impending EC talks). And the habit persists: John Betjeman’s daughter has recently apologized to Slough

History is written by the winners, it is commonly said. But heritage—history shaped to present purposes—is increasingly fashioned by the losers. Ex-colonial peoples, minorities, tribal indigenes everywhere demand reparations—atonement for the suffering of those deprived of autonomy and agency, repatriation of treasures purloined or pillaged or purchased, compensation for past injustices. These claims carry much moral weight. Sacred writ in UN and UNESCO protocols, restitution diktats feature archaeologists’, art historians’, and museums’ codes of ethics .

Historical wrongs, however, are more rectified in rhetoric than in reality. When the Afro-Caribbean MP Bernie Grant harangued parliament to return the Crown Jewels to Africa, he specified neither which jewels nor to what country they should go. And reparations for recent injustices spawn perplexing and divisive issues. Should amends be personal or collective or conjoined, as in the symbolic imagery of Washington’s Vietnam Memorial? Should compensation be allocated in line with injury or need or faith or ancestry? Most reparations come from states; should firms and individuals also pay compensation? What about German and Swiss banks, French railways, global art and antiquity dealers found complicit in the Holocaust? What of ancient injuries that wound the pride, shrink the purse, cripple the power, or constrain the will of remote and perhaps putative descendants? How can reparations for lost land or houses, money or mementoes, be weighed against repatriation claims for human remains or against redress for slaughter or torture or incarceration? What recompense can succour children of Argentinean “disappeareds” told in their teens that their “parents” are in fact their parents’ murderers? Among millions maltreated by history, John Torpey notes, an unseemly contest for the status of worst-victimized often ensues.

Torpey’s short and scintillating book, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed, explores reparation demands ranging from official apologies and admissions of wrong-doing to memorials, cash payments, health and welfare aid, and property return to groups and individuals. Chapters on post-apartheid Namibia and South Africa, on Japanese-American and Japanese-Canadian Second World War internees, and on legacies of slavery that still disable African-Americans suggest his topical scope. But the book’s greatest merit is its profound and lucid critique of the causes and political, legal, economic, and symbolic implications of reparation claims . Compassionate erudition, deft demolition of holier-than-thou posturing, and clarity of expression make this a minor classic reminiscent of Paul Bator’s 1983 The International Trade in Art. Torpey rightly links current campaigns to redress wrongs with the broader trend, consequent on widespread public pessimism, refocusing attention from the future to the past. “The shift from the millenarian striving for a utopian future to the struggle to repair past wrong-doing” reflects convictions “that the transformative projects of the century just past have left little but brutality and dashed dreams in their wake.” This rude awakening began, in my view, with the existential angst of the Bomb and nuclear fallout. It culminated with 1970s’ collapse of confidence in vaunted technocratic cures for hunger, disease, racism, inequality, illiteracy; growing suspicion that environmental degradation and social dysfunction were incurable; and attendant misgivings about the sagacity or probity of statesmen, corporate leaders, and scientists. Torpey, in contrast, stresses the failed promises of socialism in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet dissolution.

Coming to terms with past became an obsessive preoccupation, first in postwar Germany, then worldwide. Increasingly, nations and minorities dwelt not on past triumphs and achievements but on defeats and traumas, not sagas of progress but litanies of infamy and suffering. And post-colonial dogma (multicultural, feminist, indigenist) elevates blame for any imagined injustice into a call for restitution. Some fear, following the recent Armed Forces Act granting pardons to over 300 soldiers executed for military offences in the First World War, that compensation claims will swiftly follow.

The moral merit (if patchy fulfilment) accorded such claims would astound our forebears, just as their benighted views now appall those ignorant of history. Many today find it incredible that racism and genocide and gross inequality are the usual human condition; until recently most civilized people condemned not slave but free labour. Few recall that in the 1830s, when enlightened Britain ended slavery in its West Indian colonies, compensation went not to ex-slaves for deprivation of liberty but to slave owners for deprivation of property. We may well lament past misdeeds, but current morality cannot justify anachronistic defamation of their perpetrators, acting by the moral climate of their own day.

Reparations programmes leave much grief unresolved, sometimes exacerbated. Bitterly resented are disparities among claimants that stem from unequal social and political clout, access to media and legal aid public sympathy, and, not least, distance in time from the injustices complained of. Many jailed and tortured in South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile are still alive or leave children to plead their cause; fewer Holocaust victims remain; none survive from the Armenian massacre of 1911, no child of an American slave could now claim her 1865 promise of 40 acres and a mule. Endemic racism and accrued inequities impoverish slave descendants to this day, but since most African Americans have ancestors who were slave owners as well as slaves, even symbolic atonement seems unfeasible. This has not prevented fearful Brown University alumni from stipulating that their gifts not be used for reparations. No wonder pain persists. That it might now be hard to identify deserving victims of the Crusades does little to assuage Muslim feelings of victimhood, though what is sought is less reparations than revenge.

The global spread of reparations and restitution brings together victims and advocates the world over. Holocaust survivors, First Nations Canadian tribes, South African apartheid sufferers, Australian Aborigines, and American slave descendants deploy similar arguments and strategies. Some discomfiting ironies result. African Americans equate their historic wrongs with those of Holocaust victims’, whose reparations they eye with unrequited envy. Afrikaners in post-apartheid South Africa press for a British apology for forebears’ Boer War incarceration in “inaugural” concentration camps. Hereros in Namibia contend that German massacres there from 1904 to 1907 were a Holocaust dress rehearsal.

Five times longer than Torpey and weighing over four pounds, The Handbook of Reparations emanates from Pablo De Grieff’s International Center for Transitional Justice in New York. Its twenty chapters and appended primary documents deal only with recent and current issues. Strong essays on reparations psychology, mental health issues, and gender justice follow exhaustive regional chapters, most on Latin America. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and failed truth commissions in El Salvador and Haiti exemplify global reparations’ difficulties, notably victims’ conflicted feelings about monetary compensation: accursed consolation prizes for irretrievable losses? Attempts to “shut our mouths” by buying amnesty for perpetrators? But many case studies, laden with details of legislative history, legal cases, lists of grievances, categories of claims and claimants, are short on analysis. Useful insights are buried in a mass of miscellanea.

Payments discussed go beyond reparations strictly speaking. The UN Compensation Commission for 1990–1991 Gulf War damages in Kuwait settled three million claims with rare speed. But without apologies or cash from Iraq, UNCC payouts represent victors’ largesse, not retributive justice. Lavish US government payments to 9/11 victims’ families accompanied no finding of fault, let alone finding the perpetrators. Moreover, Congress set up the Compensation Fund not to succour the kin of victims, but rather to prevent economic collapse; aiding the bereaved was an afterthought appended to a fund “created out of fear that recourse to the courts would threaten the precarious financial health of the airline industry.”

The few overlaps are revealing. On Japanese-American reparations the Handbook stresses the mechanics of redress along with judicial and federal action following the 1988 Civil Liberties Act. Acknowledging accomplishment, the authors cite the danger of “enabling people to feel good about each other for the moment, while leaving undisturbed the attendant social realities.” Torpey is more subtle and incisive. He shows how, as with Jews who only “after they had become assimilated into and prosperous in post-war American society [sought] to call attention to the Holocaust,” post-internment success enabled Japanese-Americans to claim reparations as Americans. Furthermore, “precisely by speaking up about the injustices done them…the Japanese-Americans became more genuinely American.” On South Africa, Christopher Colvin’s Handbook overview and Torpey both highlight the paramount conflict between the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s overriding aim, enabling perpetrators to tell their stories without fear of reprisal, and victims’ needs for apology and frustrations when amnesty barred claims against perpetrators.. But while Colvin dwells on the constitutional dilemmas posed by amnesty, Torpey illumines local events in broader context. The widely publicized anti-apartheid movement alike drew on and energized world-wide crusades against racial injustice, and legal advocacy nurtured in the American civil rights’ movement shaped reparations’ strategies. Looking behind apartheid to native land claims that hark back to 17th-century European colonization, South African reparations claimants converged with tribal restitution crusades in the Americas and the Antipodes.

Reparations politics reflect two related fetishes. One is a quixotic yearning, amidst recent atrocities and present calamities, to restore a seemlier past. “In the absence of a plausible overarching vision of a more humane future society,” concludes Torpey, “the significance…of people’s recollections…become[s] magnified: righting past wrongs” supplants visions of tomorrow. The second fad is narcissistic therapy. We blame not only our forebears but our former selves; “people eager to be praised as the salt of the earth,” Russell Baker once wrote, “are apologizing for the low-lifers they used to be.” Reparation parlays confession into collective therapy. We innately long to make whole what has been smashed. Young children exhibit faith in restorative powers that rejoin things broken and bring the dead back to life. To restore something or someone to the state it was before harm was done is not only achievable, it is obligatory. As Brandon Hamber’s psychological essay in The Hanbdook notes, the child in us also feels responsible for causing the injury and must make amends—reparation—to relieve the guilt.

For society at large, therapy dwells on the past to secure future well-being. To heal social fractures, to assuage past wounds, to reunify citizens of nations requires Truth and Reconciliation, as South Africans saw. But “making good again” requires both repentance and recompense. Generosity to Israel and Jews in the biggest reparations programme ever implemented was essential, Adenauer saw, not only as atonement but to rehabilitate Germany in the global community. As Torpey writes, “the reckoning with abominable pasts becomes the idiom in which the future is sought.”

hm 2/22/10; 2/24