Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History Read Online Free PDF Page A

the nineteenthcentury did not mean that she was accepting blame; rather, New Zealand society and the New Zealand government were moving toward settling outstanding issues with the Maori and trying to redress the disadvantages they had suffered. In 2004, three American senators introduced a bill for an official apology to all Native peoples for the “long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the United States.” Cynics noted that in an election year, the bill’s sponsors may have been moved by the fact that the Native vote was key in several states. The bill ultimately failed to pass.
    The acceptance of responsibility and the act of repentance can be healthy for societies struggling to deal with past horrors. In South Africa, with the ending of apartheid, public figures, both black and white, began to talk about how to move on without allowing the past to tear society apart. At the end of the 1980s, as President Frederik Willem de Klerk and his white Nationalist Party negotiated the end of apartheid with Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, their common challenge was to ensure a peaceful transition to black majority rule. The difficulty was both to reassure the former oppressors—the police and security forces, for example—that they would not be punished for obeying orders and to appease the understandable longing for revenge and retribution of the blacks whom they had oppressed. The deal, and it was a difficult one to make, was that a commission to examine the past would have the power to grant amnesty to its witnesses and to make recommendations about reparations to the victims of apartheid. In 1995, less than two years after the first multiracial elections, the South African parliament passed the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission started hearings in the spring of 1996 and produced its final report two years later. It was an extraordinary and moving experience which brought the evilsof apartheid into the open. The commission held 140 hearings, in all parts of South Africa, and collected some twenty-two thousand statements from the victims of apartheid. Seven thousand members of the old regime applied for amnesties. Former secret policemen came forward to admit torture and killing. Black witnesses wept and prayed as they relived what had happened to them and their families. Of course the commission did not heal all wounds. The granting of amnesties remains unpopular especially with blacks, and the payment of reparations has been fitful and slow. Nevertheless, by the time the commission finished its hearings in 1998, South Africans of all colors and classes had examined and dealt with the record of apartheid and begun to move forward into a shared future.
    Is it healthy, though, for societies to apologize for things that were done in different centuries and under different sets of beliefs? Politicians and others have been quick to make all sorts of apologies, even when it is difficult to see why they need feel any responsibility—or what good an apology would do. The pope apologized for the Crusades. The daughter of the British poet John Betjeman apologized to a town near London for a line in one of his poems which read, “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough / It isn’t fit for humans now.” In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton apologized for slavery and Tony Blair for the Irish potato famine. A descendant of the famous Elizabethan freebooter and slaver Sir John Hawkins wore a T-shirt reading “So Sorry” while he knelt in front of a crowd of locals in Gambia.
    In Canada, successive federal governments have been apologizing and in some cases paying compensation for policies carried out—however distasteful they may be to us now—by their properly constituted predecessors. The practice leads to some interesting questions. Canada used to charge a head tax on immigrants coming from China. Its intent was undoubtedly