Can the current regime apologize? Is it even within their power to do anything more than recognize the past?
Let me give an example:
Jim, the father, kills a man. He kills him in cold blood and without remorse. To the day of his death, he absolutely refuses to acknowledge he did anything wrong. He viewed his actions as having been just and moral and unimpeachably correct.
Carl, the son, is left to face the community. The lynch mob that strung up his father and, not incidentally, razed his family’s home to the ground helped him rebuild his life and erected new buildings and outbuildings on the foundations of the old. Carl, now a man in a man’s estate, has gotten on fairly well in the new place. Not always spectacularly well, but better than many. Carl was, of course, too young to have affected the homicide at all. It’s a painful memory, but it wasn’t his to stop. Carl hasn’t done anything close to what his father did.
Is it Carl’s place to apologize for his father’s actions?
I find this fascinating. It’s the same argument against reparations for descendants of slaves. We didn’t own slaves, none of them were actually slaves, nobody owes nobody nuthin.
And yet loads of folks under the age of sixty are more than willing to take credit for America kicking the Nazis out of France, and accuse the French, in their currently obstreperous political incarnation, of being ungrateful for our previous assistance.
I’m pretty sure that they have issued a formal apology about the treatment of prisoners of war and civilians who were interned in concentration camps.
My Grandfather was a high-ranking member of the colonial Malayan Civil Service and was captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore. He spent the rest of the war in a Japanese concentration camp, where conditions were apalling and witnessed many of the other internees die, mainly through starvation and illness. My Grandmother did receive a few years ago a lump sum of something like £20,000 from the Japanese government.