Obama in Hiroshima: Why It's So Hard for Countries to Apologize - The Atlantic - 0 views
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When Barack Obama goes to Hiroshima on May 27, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to visit the site of the world’s first nuclear attack, he will not apologize on behalf of his country for carrying out that strike 71 years ago.
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But he will affirm America’s “moral responsibility,” as the only nation to have used nuclear weapons, to prevent their future use. He will recognize the painful past, but he won’t revisit it. When it’s all over, we still won’t know whether or not he thinks there’s something about the atomic bombings to be sorry for.
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This is especially true with the Hiroshima bombing, where the competing stories about what happened are so morally complex. Nevertheless, political apologies do occur.
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Lind compared Trudeau’s statement to President Bill Clinton’s apology for America’s failure to intervene in the Rwandan Genocide. Clinton was saying sorry for inaction rather than action, she said, and there was no American constituency to be offended by his expression of regret.
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Germany’s various apologies for the crimes of the Nazis, Lind added, are the shining exception in international affairs, not the rule: “The world we live in is one in which countries routinely whitewash their past violence. They routinely even lie about their past violence. They sometimes glorify their past violence.”
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ut Lind has found that apologies and reparations for those wrongs can be damaging as well, since such actions are likely to polarize people within those countries. The best approach, she says, is recognizing and remembering wrongs in ways that unify rather than divide—that emphasize shared suffering, not perpetrators and victims.
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“Liberals have this idea that the way to be a strong nation is to be transparent about the past, and to be self-critical, and to constantly question your leaders, and constantly ask, ‘Are we living up to our own values?’ And so this kind of historical reckoning with the past [that Obama is undertaking in Hiroshima]—they love that
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“For most Japanese, Obama’s visit actually fits with the Japanese story about the bomb—that the atomic bomb gave Japan its postwar mission for peace,”
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The vast majority of Japanese don’t think the atomic bombings were justified, and that belief has only become more widespread over time. But Japanese leaders have not demanded that the U.S. government apologize for the attacks, in part because they don’t want to jeopardize the flourishing U.S.-Japanese alliance or encourage calls for Japan to apologize for its own wartime aggression.
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This lack of a demand from the Japanese, Lind argues, has created the friendly space in which a visit like Obama’s can take place—and in which the two countries can adopt a common narrative about the atomic bombings.
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Lind compared the situation to the way in which American and European leaders, including German leaders, now gather in Normandy to commemorate the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France
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Conservatives, meanwhile, “say that national strength comes from national unity, and national unity is best served by instilling pride in people, and pride comes from remembering the really great things that we’ve done, and remembering what’s different and great about America. … And so they would say, ‘What are you doing talking about all the people we killed? Why aren’t you celebrating that we brought democracy to Japan?
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that the atomic bomb ended the war and saved American lives. So the Japanese bomb story begins in 1945 and goes forward in the mission for peace. The American bomb story ends in ’45. Those are two separate stories. They will not cross. And the president’s position that the lesson of the past is for a non-nuclear future, it’s almost like a third story.”