On Apologies, Authentic and Otherwise

By Charles Krauthammer

The first and fatal charm of national repentance," writes I C.S. Lewis, "is the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing--but, first, of denouncing--the conduct of others." The trap, he explains, is that the collective confession contains a dangerous figure of speech that permits a confusion of "we" and "they." One says "we sinned" and means "they sinned": the military-industrial complex, liberals, capitalist-readers.

The collective confession can turn false. It can serve as convenient camouflage for bitter accusation. But Lewis is too pessimistic. There are authentic expressions of national contrition. And they are as moving as they are rare. This year has seen several remarkable examples: the American apology to France for having shielded Klaus Barbie; the U.S. congressional commission's acknowledgment of guilt for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; the finding of the Israeli commission on the killings at Sabra and Shatila that, though others had committed the crime, Israel bore a national responsibility for not having prevented them from happening.

What distinguishes the authentic national confession from the counterfeit? For one thing, there is no confusion of we and they. We remain responsible, even if the crime was in fact committed by them. As when Japan's Foreign Minister apologized on behalf of the entire nation for the 1972 massacre carried out at Tel Aviv's Lod Airport by Japanese Red Army terrorists: fathers atoning for sons. And as when the U.S. makes affirmative action a national policy (at least in part) as reparation for past injustice: sons atoning for fathers.

There is also no confusion of crime and error. True contrition does not permit the phrase "Stalin's errors." Such a formulation implies that a tendency to mass murder constitutes not a moral but an intellectual failing. Hence the companion formulation that attributes crimes to choosing an "incorrect line," the moral equivalent of taking a wrong turn on a highway.

There is a wisdom beyond sentimentality in the authentic apology. It has a purpose. Disraeli once said, "Apologies only account for that which they do not alter." That still accounts for much, and the accounting is indispensable. Perhaps not within a nation, where the law presumably does the accounting among individuals: the law pronounces judgment to mark an end to the cycle of vengeance that would otherwise follow a crime. But between nations there is no comparable agency to prevent historical wounds from festering endlessly. Nothing, except the apology. In an almost miraculous way, it seems capable of binding the wounds. Compare the legacies of the Holocaust and the Armenian massacres of 1915. The postwar German government accepted responsibility for the nation's actions, and offered acknowledgment and reparations to the survivors. The Nazi crime was more vast, more methodical, more successful than the Turks'. Yet it is Armenian terrorists who attack diplomats, embassies and airlines, sometimes demanding no more than official Turkish acknowledgment of what was done to their grandfathers.

This is what makes the case of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, and the apology that never was, so puzzling. The Soviets are not naive. They value public opinion and know how to manipulate it. After an initial stonewall, they (unlike the Turks) could not dispute the basic facts of the case. And they quickly became aware that they were suffering even more political damage from their lack of remorse than from shooting down the plane in the first place. As the cover of The Economist somewhat plaintively pointed out to Yuri Andropov, "You had nothing to lose by saying sorry." Yet he would not.

"I never apologize," says Sergius in Arms and the Man. Neither, apparently, does Mr. Andropov. Why? It will not do to pin it on "Communist morality," or the lack of it. The People's Republic of China shot down a British airliner on July 23, 1954, killing ten of the 18 passengers. The Chinese took responsibility for the incident, explained that they had mistaken the airliner for a Taiwanese military aircraft, and offered compensation. Why couldn't the Soviets do the same?

The truculence of the official Soviet response (Andrei Gromyko assured the world that the Soviet Union was quite prepared to shoot down the next violator of its airspace) led to a rounding up of the usual suspects: Soviet feelings of inferiority, hypersensitivity, paranoia, suspiciousness, what have you. These explanations do not satisfy. For what was so stunning about the Soviet reponse was its lack of feeling. What sent a chill through the world (as even more ruthless Soviet behavior like the invasion of Afghanistan had not) was the undertone of stony incomprehension in the Soviet response to pleas for some acknowledgment of responsibility. One sensed the absence of a certain faculty: a heart grown so cold that it had lost the capacity for remorse.

For an individual or a society, that capacity is a sign of life, of vitality, of a soul that can still be moved. Some societies have too much such life. A convulsed revolutionary society (like Mao's China) lives by mass mobilization, mass emotion and mass confession. Continual revolution requires the daily remaking of the past: rewriting history, renouncing friends, repenting crimes. These may be only pseudo confessions, the facsimiles that Lewis warned against, but they are a sign of life.

At the other extreme are societies without life. The vital signs are missing. When they are confronted with the need for contrition, they can manage only a growl and a blank stare. Such is the case in the petrified remains of the burned-out revolutionary states, in what Philosopher Michael Walzer calls the "failed totalitarianism" that is descended from the classic, frenzied model of Hitler and Stalin and Mao. Such is the case in the Kremlin, which had already put its frozen heart on display with its stunningly barren funeral for Leonid Brezhnev, and now showed the world that it is no more able to mourn others than to mourn its own.

Between the extremes lies the society capable of authentic feeling. It possesses a vitality that dead societies have lost and a discipline that mobilized societies have forfeited. Korean Air Lines took out newspaper ads to apologize to the families and the nation for the tragedy that befell Flight 007. And after the crash of a Japan Air Lines jet last year, the president of the airline visited the families of the victims and knelt before them to ask their forgiveness. Such acts not only move us, they remind us that the authentic apology is indeed possible.

But not everywhere. When God commanded the prophet Jonah to go to Nineveh and order the city to repent, Jonah found the prospect so daunting that he tried to run away. God found him and sent him back. (Nineveh repented.) After KAL 007, one suspects that today even He would hesitate before dispatching Jonah on a similar mission to Moscow. --By Charles Krauthammer This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.