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[Woodstock Report, March 1996, No. 45]
Copyright © 1996 Woodstock Theological Center
All rights reserved
The Woodstock Theological Center sponsored a forum on November 15, 1995, entitled "An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics." The forum discussed the need and feasibility of "forgiveness of enemies" in international peace negotiations. Donald W. Shriver, Jr., presented this position, as developed in his recent book, An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics (Oxford University Press, 1995). Responding to Dr. Shriver were Rev. J. Bryan Hehir, professor at Harvard Divinity School, and Rev. Drew Christiansen, S.J., director of the Office of International Justice and Peace at the U.S. Catholic Conference. Judith A. Dwyer, academic dean, Notre Dame College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. John's University, moderated the discussion. We present an edited and abridged version of the discussion.
Donald W. Shriver, Jr., is president emeritus and professor of applied Christianity at Union Theological Seminary. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Dr. Shriver is the author of Rich Man, Poor Man: Moral Issues in American Economic Life and Forgiveness and Politics: The Case of the American Black Civil Rights Movement and is co-author of Altered Landscapes: Churches in a Changing America.
Anyone who writes a book on "forgiveness in politics" must face the wry response that I have been facing since, years ago, I began to write on this subject. "It's an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, is it not? Something like 'business ethics.'"
Underneath this skepticism hide serious disagreements. Reviews of An Ethic for Enemies have been largely positive, but one reviewer dismisses the book by saying that it deserts real politics in order to discuss the morality of forgiveness. That reviewer probably reached his conclusion when he read the title of the book. A very different reaction to the title came from a certain Jewish survivor of Nazism who walked into the office of the American Jewish Committee in New York. Seeing a copy of my book on a desk, he exclaimed: "Any book with that title in the Nazi era would have been burned, and its author sent to a concentration camp."
For the sake of argument, it is important to start with some definitions. Webster's definition of "politic" and "politician" is popular with many Americans. To be "politic," says Webster, is to be "sagacious in devising policies . . . shrewdly contrived, expedient, with regard to self-interest." That dictionary goes on to pose, as a first definition of "politician": "a schemer, an intriguer," but adds the note, "Obsolete."
Alas, not so obsolete. For one whole school of political theory makes that manipulative side of politics into its empirical norm. For this side of the argument, politics is the art of imposing one will upon another, the process by which persons and groups mobilize power for that imposition. Such a definition slides easily into statements like the famous one of Carl von Clausewitz: "War is politics by other means."
Supporters of that school of thought must have their day; in fact, they have it every day any legislature or political party meets. This definition, however, neglects a second side of the political, which English historian George M. Trevelyan put succinctly when he observed: "History is made in the first instance by those who see one side of a question; but it requires those who see both sides to effect a settlement." I would add, those who see both sides of a question make history, too.
Please place that observation beside the words of a man in Los Angeles who experienced the manipulative power of politically legitimized violence in the form of police billy clubs: Rodney King. His words went the media rounds in the spring of l992: "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? . . . I mean, we're all stuck here a while. Let's try to work it out."
It would be hard to account for the poignancy of those words if we were not aware of that other side of the political game: the side that accentuates the potential of human beings for destroying each other and the interest we all have in not being destroyed. Call it the "integrative" side of the political process, in tension with the conflict side. Accent that integrative side, and you are close to the democratic notion of tolerable political conflict: that which destroys neither party and minimizes the damage which any party can impose on the other.
T.V. Smith said in his book, The Ethics of Compromise, "War always makes more necessary what for the time it renders impossible", i.e., peace, the "effecting of a settlement." The interests of the warring parties may still be mixed at the end of the war. The peace may collide with their unsatisfied high principles, but there finally comes something higher than colliding interest and principle: the choice of life over death called civil argument. And that is where forgiveness begins to enter into politics, however it may be labeled.
To forgive: Is it to forget and to abandon moral judgment? To the contrary! "Forgive and forget" is a great improper slogan. The most serious aspect of forgiveness is confronting the evil perpetrated by human agents. We do not forgive hurricanes and floods; we forgive human beings who could and should have acted differently. We hold them responsible, and we hold them under the judgment of memory, especially so long as the perpetrators do not repent their actions. Even after they repent, the evil we suffered may be too important to forget either personally or culturally. If your parents died in Auschwitz, your father on Iwo Jima, your sister at Hiroshima, or your grandfather at the end of a lynch-rope in Alabama, you are not going to forget. Ethically speaking, why should you? To be forgotten is the final indignity that one's neighbors can impose on you in your unjust suffering.
Forgiveness has a long association with religion. Its association with the teachings of Jesus was central; its association with the sacrament of penance in the long history of Christendom helped to define it as a personal, individual, secret and anything-but-political transaction. From Augustine down to contemporary liberation theologians, the term "justice" has found a home in theological and secular treatises on political ethics, but even the theologians have treated "forgiveness" as an orphan in the realm of politics.
Among modern political philosophers, Hannah Arendt, secular, Jewish, a refugee from the Nazis, acknowledged the religious limitation of the term forgiveness when she advanced her theory that, to effect change in their social relationships, humans can (l) make new agreements or covenants, and (2) reckon with the evils of the past through the releasing power of forgiveness. It was Jesus, she said, who seems to have discovered the healing power of forgiveness; but, said she, "the fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense." The thing is real, she said apologetically, even if it does sound religious! Her statement tells you something about modern assumptions about religion, does it not? To be religious is to be attached to the unreal. Implicitly, Arendt was saying that both religious and secular thinkers have underestimated the empirical importance of forgiveness in social and political life.
Emily Dickinson, with her usual pithiness, wrote:
Life is not so ample I
could finish enmity.
Robert Frost took up the same theme in his poem, "The Star-splitter:"
If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.
Granted, to be social is also to restrict, penalize, and otherwise to protect society against criminals. But here again the realism of theological tradition enters the picture. The New Testament puts it bluntly: "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God." How are wrongdoers, that is, all of us, to live together in spite of our records of wrongdoing? If there is a more practical question in politics, I have not met it.
In l940, in Gaston County, North Carolina, the last surviving Confederate veteran of that county died. In his obituary, it was written of him, "He was known to have said that he was glad that the North won the war, for it saved our union." This was a rare admission, one that remains largely unspoken by most white southerners, who seem to keep on remembering the Civil War as if it were still real. Why would Northerners find it much easier to forget that war? Because their side won.
Yet even among the winners the memories have power yet: Ken Burns' photographs and quotations from letters brought it all home to us. I remember viewing that series, "The Civil War," during a l992 sabbatical in Cape Town. I trembled inwardly as I watched, hoping that South Africans would find a way around any such tragedy. Apparently they are doing so, and among various locations where I have discussed the theories of my book, few people have listened so attentively as they did. For them and for Americans, William Faulkner spoke when he said, "The past is not dead and gone, it isn't even past." The past will be with South Africans for a long time to come. The question is what they will do with that past.
Forgiveness in politics has to do with how we manage our mutual relationships with the past without letting them manage us. For a negative illustration of what happens when nothing approaching forgiveness infects the political life of a people, we have only to think of the former Yugoslavia. Three years ago, when that bloody conflict was just beginning, an American TV reporter asked a Serbian soldier, "Why are you fighting this war?" Came the answer, "Because of what they did to us at Kosovo." Battle of Kosovo, 1389.
Another example of how long we humans can fuel present conflict with past ones: In Romania, ten years ago, I talked with an official of the Romanian Orthodox Church about the number of folk of German ancestry in Transylvania, many of whom were migrating back to West Germany. "Yes," he said, "I think they should all go back. They've been here only 500 years." As an American descended from Germans who arrived in Philadelphia 300 years ago, I thought he was joking. But he was deadly serious.
For real contemporary deadliness, there remains Yugoslavia. Roger Cohen, a New York Times reporter, writing in September l995, described the cultural undertow of it all, and the fuel of the war, when he wrote: ". . . this war, at its heart, has been fought through attempts to reinvent, change, and obscure history in order to justify killing and destruction. Each side, in varying degrees, has scoured and twisted the past in order to grab what it could . . . One way or another, these people are condemned to try to overcome the specters that now savagely divide them, in order to live together. They cannot be permanently divided because their history, beyond all its violence, ties them together. Indeed, the attempt to destroy history is an attempt to hide that basic fact."
Frankly, I am embarrassed as an American to confess that much the same words could be written about the recent debate over how many divergent views of history Americans entertain of the startup of the nuclear era. The fault lines in that Smithsonian controversy harmed the ongoing relations of Japan and the United States, just as Japan's sluggish progress toward admission of its crimes in World War II continues to harm its international relations.
How ironic that both Japan and the United States have cultural predispositions to hide from new awareness of old pasts. In his study of the American decision to use the atomic bomb, Gar Alperovitz had it exactly right when he wrote, echoing the U.S. Catholic bishops: "If we hope to change the future, we too are complicit to the extent we do not confront our common history and then speak what we know . . . There is no healing without forgiveness . . . and no new future."
Only those whose definitions exclude one from the other can think so! However, I concede that forgiveness is a more complex transaction than its public reputation usually allows. The complexity resides in the multiple elements of an act of forgiveness, and I attribute four elements to a genuine forgiveness process. To enumerate them is to open an inquiry into the role of forgiveness in political relations between peoples who have suffered much at the hands of each other.
When we embark on a road to peace between enemies, we entangle ourselves in a process which, like a four-strand cable, circles back upon itself. What is more, the four strands of a forgiveness process intertwine with complementary elements of repentance. The question, "Can political entities forgive?" is interdependent with the question, "Can political entities repent?"
First, basic and problematic to forgiveness is an intention, however fragile and threatened by despair, of one enemy to go on living alongside another. In l948, many separated Protestant churches came together in Amsterdam to found the World Council of Churches. The one sentence in their final declaration that they capitalized was: "WE INTEND TO STAY TOGETHER." This is the intention behind all constructive political work. Diplomats, legislators, heads of state, journalists, business leaders, military officers, and ordinary folk around this globe need to consider if this is not the most practical intention on earth for the 21st century. If World War II proved nothing else, it was this: From now on we live or die together.
The second step to forgiveness is to share memory of the past and to morally judge the past. Most of An Ethic for Enemies seeks, in three long case studies, to repossess certain memories of historic American political relations with Germany and Japan, and of our own internal problem of race. In 1985 we had a vivid example of the anxieties which spread through survivors of great evils when their neighbors seemed ready to forget many of its details. This was the controversy that beset the Reagan White House over the President's decision to visit the Bitburg Cemetery in Germany. From Elie Wiesel's courageous confrontation with the President, to the alarm that spread through the American Jewish community, to the fractious dialogue between politicians and citizens of the two countries, we saw just how divisive a mere ceremonial occasion can be in the politics of nations. American Jews, catalyzed by the words of Wiesel, found themselves deeply anxious at the thought: "Do other Americans think that it is only Jewish business to remember the facts about Nazism?"
Memory of great past evil, however, can lead any person and any group along either of two diverging roads. Along one, hurt memories fuel a lust for revenge. Over the other hangs a sign, "Abandon revenge all ye who enter here."
Forbearance from revenge is the third element in the process of forgiveness. In discussions of "justice" across the centuries, ethicists have perhaps not paid sufficient attention to the uses of a certain kind of revenge in rectifying damaged human relations. Forgiveness and some measure of penalty for wrongdoing are not incompatible. Truly incompatible, however, is revenge-in-kind, as the ancient Greeks learned to their grief, as their dramatists portrayed in unforgettable political poetry, and as Thucydides documented ad nauseam in his detailed history of the Peloponnesian War.
Forbearance from tit-for-tat revenge is no mere ideal. It is practical politics. We had that fact writ negatively in the Versailles Treaty, and writ positively in the wartime rejection of Henry Morgenthau's plan for reducing Germany to its agricultural origins and in the contrary policies of the Marshall Plan. Revenge destroys politics; forbearance is the refusal to repeat the enemy's crimes. It anticipates a new political history, as did Lincoln in his eloquent Second Inaugural.
The moral importance of this element is clear to all enemies of capital punishment. It is also clear to those who survive moral horror with their consciences sufficiently intact to resist total infection by that horror. As one survivor of a concentration camp put it: "When our liberation was at hand, we began to outnumber our guards. We could have killed them all with impunity. Instead we locked two hundred of them up and let the Allies decide what to do with them. They were all murderers, but this was a measure of the difference between them and us."
Finally, there is empathy for the enemy. Richard von Weizsäcker of Germany refers to my book in a speech he gave in August l995 in Tokyo. Especially significant to me was the German leader's choice of reference, namely, a page in which I attempted to feel my way toward empathy with the suffering of Japanese soldiers in World War II, and toward awareness of the enormity of the evil that all sides had some part in promoting. "The fragility of the moral integrity of each side," said von Weizsäcker, "comes to clear expression" on these pages. He went on to pay tribute to Francis Mitterand, then president of France, who expressed the same empathy for the German soldier in World War II when he visited Berlin last May.
Empathy for enemies is perhaps the most difficult element of all. Political conflict, and especially war, is fueled by dehumanization. A Serbian officer last summer, in the process of killing Muslim men, called them "rabbits." In the Pacific War we called the Japanese "monkeys" and they called us "demons." Better to define enemies as inhuman; then we can kill them more easily. But having once indulged in dehumanizing them, we will have to re-humanize them if we are to repair the damage we thus inflicted. To empathize is not necessarily to sympathize; but at the minimum, it is to appreciate something of the nature of an antagonist's suffering.
We have a long way to go before we all internalize the Native-American view of American history, the African-American view, and, indeed, the Japanese and American views. Doubtless, on their side, empathy with their enemies is equally difficult. Historians at work on the Smithsonian debacle of last winter fell afoul of our ordinary human resistance to the social-psychological maneuver of empathy. Curator Michael Neufeld said sadly of the media's coverage of it all: "They misread . . . or misinterpreted our mindset. It was an attempt to interpret what was in the minds of each side at the time. It's not what we thought the Japanese were all about. We were trying to explain what they thought they were all about."
This element in political reconciliations comes slowly. Out of the initiatives of a group of church leaders and the persistence of Chancellor Willy Brandt, German and Polish leaders in the late 60s and early 70s made tangible progress toward taking account of each other's experience of World War II. Mutual consultation in the writing of each other's history books was part of that process, as was Brandt's extraordinary gesture of kneeling before the Warsaw Ghetto monument. "Long as the road to reconciliation still is," commented German theologian Martin Stohr in l988 as he described this incident, "the process of alienation and violence was longer." No single group of Americans has consistently demonstrated this truth in word and deed more than African-Americans.
I began with questions of power in political life, and I end with a comment about the power of forgiveness. If the only purpose of political leadership and political participation is the mobilization of enough power to beat one's rivals, then forgiveness stands outside the realm of the political. An equally vital purpose of politics is the building of shared purpose and shared power between groups and persons who need each other even though they may wish they did not.
As Abba Eban said of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, "We are like mountain climbers tied together by a rope. We climb or fall together." Forgiveness, when mated to its twin repentance, is a means to power, to those win-win collaborations required for certain political achievements. Those who make their enemies their friends, as Lincoln said, finally are more politically successful than those who merely defeat their enemies.
The combination of moral memory, forbearance, empathy, and the relentless intent to nurture reconciliation is formidable. Those who manage to combine these actions have practiced something more than the art of the possible. They have practiced the art of turning enemies into fellow citizens.
Rev. Drew Christiansen, S.J., is director of the Office of International Peace and Justice, United States Catholic Conference. He is co-editor of Morals and Might: Ethics and the Use of Force in Modern International Affairs; and Peacemaking: Moral and Policy Challenges for a New World.
In the past weeks I have traveled to Croatia and Bosnia and Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, carrying Dr. Shriver's book with me. In my experience in interviewing people in all these places, I found that the business of forgiveness is in the first place still personal. Admittedly, the political conflicts that are ethnic have been produced in a way by the obstructions of politics. The same can be said of Rwanda, I think. It took two-and-a-half years of radio propaganda and organizing on the part of the dominant political party in Rwanda to produce the massacres there.
Similarly, it took five years or more of propaganda by the Serbians and Croatians to create the conflict there. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the healing that I witnessed and the healing which those of you who work in reconciliation programs have witnessed really does take place at a concrete personal level. The political settlement is one thing, but the forgiveness is something that takes place face-to-face, in communities, by people who will have to live side by side, work together, do business together. The political settlement is really going to be just icing on the cake for those personal reconciliations.
When I asked people about the possibility of reconciliation in these areas, they always said: "We don't need more words, we don't need the West preaching to us. You have to make it possible for us to live together and to make a life together." And when we asked whether people would move back into conflicted zones, much to the objections of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, we were always reassured in Bosnia that people would make a life together given the conditions to be able to do that. We need to keep in mind that the political process, the social process that you talk about as being part of politics, is much more than discourse, much more than symbolic acts. It is the concrete deeds of civilization that bring people together.
When businesses do develop, it will be very important that those businesses work across ethnic lines. One person said to us, "the most critical thing is that the Federation work." But the Federation between the Bosnian Muslims and the Bosnian Croats will not work unless people are willing to work across their ethnic groups and not just for their ethnic groups. And so there is the need to create the conditions where business will have to flow back and forth between people in different regions and from different backgrounds. It seems to me this is very important.
Political acts and symbolic acts can be very important. In Israel, the presence of so many world leaders at the funeral of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was one of those symbolic acts which can move the process of forgiveness and reconciliation still further in Israel and in Palestine. There is a sense there that there is a positive will on the part of the international community to see this process through.
Forgiveness is always an act of largesse, of generosity. It comes from a magnanimity of spirit. The generosity of God is one of the things that people are asked to imitate in their discipleship. That generosity creates a bounteousness out of which new possibilities arise. Although forgiveness is a theme in much of the scriptures, it is especially a theme in Luke's gospel. The metaphors caught in Luke 38 ("Give and it will be given to you, good measure pressed down, shaken together, running over, poured over into your lap") speak of the kind of generosity that God's grace gives to us. An excessive concern for security, an excessive concern for one's own interests, needs to be overcome in order to build a new future. One has to be willing to stake out new ground together and not just be reconciled over the past. I think that this is particularly important and relevant to the Israeli-Palestinian question right now.
It is important to think about the practicality and the personal interactions of people when you talk about forgiveness in politics because that is where the forgiveness will take place. The words set a seal to it, symbolic acts make the new initiatives and the grand gesture possible, but the concrete conditions of daily life which people share together and are willing to build together for one another really do establish the facts of forgiveness.
Rev. J. Bryan Hehir is professor of the practice in religion in society at the Harvard Divinity School, pastor of St. Paul Parish, and senior chaplain of the Harvard-Radcliffe Catholic Student Center. A MacArthur Fellow from 1984-89, Father Hehir has served as an advisor to U.S. Catholic bishops on issues of war and peace. He is a frequent contributor to books and journals on social justice issues.
In trying to think about an ethic for enemies, I see two large questions that undergird the project. Does the New Testament have a viable social ethic? Can you draw a viable social ethic, namely the question of forgiveness, from the New Testament? Then, can religiously based ideas be articulated in a way that they are politically relevant and usable in a society where there is not a common religious basis?
The answer to the question about the New Testament is yes, the New Testament does have a social ethic, but it is not presented simply. As Reinhold Niebuhr has indicated and John Courtney Murray and the Catholic tradition have argued, an attempt to draw a social ethic out of the New Testament in a simple linear, logical line runs the danger of doing violence to the New Testament and even more violence to the political order. There is, as Murray once said, the need to institutionalize the message of the scriptures if one is going to have a set of categories and ideas that can guide the political process, the legal process, and the economic order. That means that a theme like forgiveness, which is found in a rather straightforward fashion in the scriptures, must be woven into a wider pattern of other ideas, ideas that are also found in the scriptures but that must be consciously related to the theme.
I find in the Christian ethic of war and, specifically, the just war tradition, which Don criticizes fairly heavily in his book, a weighing and balancing of ideas that exemplify what I mean. Augustine weaves the idea, "Do not kill, do not resist evil, do no harm to your enemy," through a set of other themes in the scriptures, the role of sin in history, the possibility of aggression in history, the question about what Christians will do to resist aggression. He develops a much more complex fabric about how you can maintain a sense of the obligation to do no harm to your neighbor, even your enemy, and at the same time distinguish among neighbors at times, to resist some in order to protect some others. That weaving and balancing of several ideas drawn from the same scriptures into an overall framework guides you on the question of war and peace and is also necessary if forgiveness is to become a viable idea in the political order.
Dr. Shriver has written an over-arching framework for understanding forgiveness that draws on broad themes of the moral and political order. There is, for example, his insistence that as one remembers history and one remembers it morally, one must make judgments in terms of objective criteria with universal standards. So forgiveness is not purchased at the price of eroding the concept that people in different cultures and at different times can be held to the same standard of behavior. This obviously is pertinent to his discussion of U.S. policy in World War II. If we did not believe there is a difference between some killings in war and other killings in war and that the directly intended killing of civilians is always wrong, we could not make the judgment that dropping the atomic bomb violated essential moral precepts. We could not arrive at repentance as a step on the way to forgiveness. The weaving of claims of universal standards of behavior along with the possibility of forgiveness is a good example about how one can draw a social ethic out of the New Testament.
Similarly, Don's argument about the religiously based idea of forgiveness becomes usable in a secular context even though there have been periods in the Church's history where the idea of forgiveness seemed to be contained within the religious community itself and did not extend to the political order. But once again, the extension of religiously based ideas into the political order does not happen automatically. If you are going to use an idea drawn from a specific religious tradition and you seek to either "impose it" on a society or call a secular society to adhere to it, you must provide grounds for that idea which are not simply religiously based. In other words, you can take ideas from a religious tradition and make them usable in wider civil society, but this does not happen automatically.
A case that provides a great deal of hope for Don's notion of forgiveness is that of French-German relations after World War II and the role that religion played in the French-German reconciliation then. There were people, among them Father Bosc, a French Jesuit, whose vocation after World War II was to see that World War I's aftermath was not repeated. There was a conscious effort toward the healing of wounds and mutual forgiveness that extended across the French-German border.
There are cases that may test the ethic just a bit. There are societies that have in the past 25 years lived under authoritarian regimes in which heinous crimes were committed; Argentina and Chile and South Africa are good examples. We have seen in the last four to five years different strategies for dealing with the question of what such a society does. And in the examples of Chile and South Africa, there has been a conscious choice to put the past in the past and to move forward without standards of justice that were found in Nuremberg, for example. Now that was a conscious choice. The Chilean church said, "Everything must be known but not everything must be prosecuted." The idea was to make known everything that happened but not to follow through with prosecution. It seems to me Mandela has argued and acted in a very similar way.
The point is that we are also preparing war crimes trials in places like Bosnia and Rwanda, and the question about transitional justice and forgiving the past at least raises the question whether anybody will take seriously the threats of war crimes trials. If there is not prosecution, do you lose the sanction of the Nuremberg example?
We have two models at work in these cases of transitional justice, and there is a certain inner tension between them. The world may be big enough and complex enough to live with that tension without causing enormous problems, but I raise this question only to have Don Shriver think about it since he has thought so much about these other issues.
I agree with Drew's emphasis on the personal. As important as the personal element is in the process of reconciliation, however, it is very important that the local, national, and international context have a certain fit and offer a certain mutual encouragement. What national leaders say to their public helps set a context for local life in ways that can either impede or advance that very ongoing of life.
I think, for example, of the regret that many Southerners have for the death of Abraham Lincoln, because as the Second Inaugural suggested, Lincoln had an understanding of the dynamics of reconciliation that many leaders in the Congress after Lincoln's assassination did not have. I am quite sure that Lincoln's assassination hurt the South.
Churchill proved in World War II how rhetoric can be mobilized for war. It can also be mobilized for peace and for the ongoing struggle toward forgiveness. I think that occupants of that bully pulpit, the White House, do not use rhetoric enough for setting standards for facing the past and making new depths of reconciliation with former enemies possible.
Bryan is right when he says that I am deeply ambivalent about the just war theory. I never completely disown it, except in one respect. I confess myself a nuclear pacifist. I don't see how nuclear war meets the criteria of just war; Bryan and the bishops have written eloquently along the same lines. Among the values that we have to acknowledge there are the experiences we have had. If the experience of the 20th century with the killing of between 100 and 150 million people does not deeply perplex and drive us to think anew about what war is then that kind of blindness, it seems to me, is immoral.
Concerning Bryan's final examples, certainly the French-German reconciliation is important. In Germany there has been a national leadership in dealing with the Nazi past which is really astonishing. Regarding the touchy question of Argentina and Chile and South Africa and the notion of transitional justice, I have no definitive answer. For me, forbearance from revenge is important but that has to be coupled with an accurate remembrance of the past. And for some crimes of the past there is an important and indispensable penalty in the very fact of their becoming public. The final superficiality of anything that pretends to be forgiveness would be the forgetting of some ills. If the Holocaust does not become permanently printed down in the books of our history, then we shall have committed an intellectual sin.
The people that I know in South Africa would agree with those Chileans who say that everything must be known but not everything must be prosecuted. This is true, sometimes for the very practical reason that some of the people who may most deserve to be prosecuted are also people who, in spite of their sins, are worthy of life.
It is impossible to prosecute any of us sufficiently for our crimes and sins when you come right down to it. And that's both a blessing and a sign of our finitude, but it is also one of those facts that help strengthen the requirement that we learn to live with each other in spite of our sins. However, I would never minimize the importance of the public telling of a truth that is embarrassing to people who have committed great, great crimes.