[Inspired by two
recent events about which I’ll write on Monday, a series on the complex
question of whether and how America should apologize for historic wrongs. Leading
up to a special weekend post where I’ll share some broader thoughts and for
which I’m not at all sorry to ask for your contributions as well!]
On a key
difference between the U.S. and our northern neighbor, and what we could learn
from it.
Last month,
Canadian Prime Minster Justin
Trudeau gave a speech in the House of Commons in which he directly and
without qualification apologized for one of his nation’s darkest historical
moments. “Today I rise in this House to offer an apology,” he began his remarks,
“on behalf of the government of Canada, for our role in the Komagata Maru incident.” As
detailed at length in the wonderful website available at the latter hyperlink,
that 1914 Komagata Maru incident offers a concise illustration of the early 20th
century, longstanding, exclusionary and bigoted policies of both Canada and the
United States toward Asian arrivals and communities. In this excellent
piece for The Nation, historian
and public scholar Deepa
Iyer explicitly frames Trudeau’s speech and apology as a potential
teachable moment for the United States, an opportunity for us to contemplate
whether and how we could better make amends for our own historic wrongs.
As Iyer notes in
her piece, and as my next few posts in this series will analyze, the U.S. has
at times in recent decades offered official apologies for such wrongs. Yet those
apologies have tended to come in the form of cautiously worded Congressional
edicts, rather than overt statements by the chief executive along the lines of
Trudeau’s blunt remarks; and I believe the difference reflects collective
American narratives and fears of appearing weak or conciliatory on a global
stage. Later in May we saw precisely those narratives re-emerge once more, this
time on the occasion of President
Obama’s historic visit to Hiroshima. Ahead of his remarks in that city,
Obama and his team went out of their way to clarify that, even though his
speech would call for a world without nuclear weapons, he would not
be offering an apology for America’s 1945 nuclear bombing of the city (nor
the subsequent and even more controversial
bombing of Nagasaki). Given Mitt
Romney’s 2012 critiques of Obama as a president who had too often “apologized
for America,” this current emphasis can be read as a political strategy—but it’s
nonetheless also in keeping with these broader national fears of a conciliatory
chief executive.
Hiroshima and
its contexts are quite distinct from those surrounding the Komagata Maru, to be
sure. Yet there is an American incident that’s strikingly similar to Canada’s,
and one for which we have certainly never offered a formal apology: the 1939 voyage of the
German steamship St. Louis. That
Holocaust Museum piece describes in great detail just how fully the U.S.
government (and the American people more broadly) met that community of Jewish
refugees with
indifference and inaction, and the results of those responses: most
horrifically, the subsequent deaths in the Holocaust of 254 of the ship’s 937
passengers. Were Obama, or any American president, to stand up and offer a
blunt and unqualified apology for this historic wrong, it wouldn’t change those
horrific results in the slightest—but it would represent a step toward both better
remembering this history and considering
its echoes in the present. Given the contrast between Canada’s
and America’s responses to Syrian refugees, that’s one more lesson we could
stand to learn from our northern neighbor.
Next ApologyStudying
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Responses to this topic and/or broader thoughts on American apologies
for the weekend post are very welcome!
No comments:
Post a Comment