Apologizing Again

 It was announced last week that next month Prime Minister Trudeau will apologize again, this time to Italian-Canadians. In case you missed it and wondered what you  did (since I assume he is apologizing for all of us), here is the announcement from the Canadian Press on 15 April:

"Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Will Issue a Formal Apology Next Month for the Treatment of Italian Canadians During the Second World War."
The government said in a news release that 600 Italian-Canadian men were interned in camps in Canada after Italy allied with Germany and joined the war in 1940.
Some 31,000 other Italian Canadians were declared enemy aliens.
Mr. Trudeau told the House of Commons Wednesday that his government "will right these wrongs" by issuing a formal apology in May.
In 1988, Canada formally apologized and offered $300-million in compensation to Japanese Canadians, 22,000 of whom were interned in camps during the Second World War.

Mr. Trudeau did not say whether there will be compensation for Italian Canadians.

   He has already apologized to the many Sikh, Muslim and Hindu passengers who were not allowed to come ashore in Canada over a 100 years ago. Former Prime Minister Harper apologized for the head tax used to restrict Chinese immigrants and for the residential schools program. Prime Minister Trudeau extended that apology to those in residential schools in Newfoundland and Labrador and more recently he apologized to those public servants caught up in the "gay purge."

   I apologize for questioning what is accomplished by all of these apologies, but I do have some questions: How much should one apologize for things one didn't do? How guilty is one for acts committed by others and how responsible is one for things done long ago? What does it mean, when a nation apologizes? Should I feel ashamed to be a Canadian because of all the apologies we have had to offer? Are the wrongs righted? And, more crassly, should Italian-Canadians be compensated and for what exactly?

   I was going to title this post - Apologia Needed For Historical Apologies - since I feel that a defence of  all of this historical apologizing needs to be offered, at least to those of us who regret that bad things happened, but can't or don't feel guilty about them. It is the case, however, that there may be one in the form of the book: A Guilted Age: Apologies for the Past, by Ashraf H.A. Rushday.  There is a copy in the stacks up at King's College, ordered perhaps by someone feeling guilty about the Crusades. Unfortunately, the stacks are closed during the pandemic. If anyone reads this and selects this book for their book club, let me know what is decided about the necessity and effectiveness of all this apologizing for the behaviour of others done long ago.

   The publisher of the book is the Temple University Press, from which this synopsis is taken:

Public apologies have become increasingly common scenes and representative moments in what appears to be a global process of forgiveness. The apology-forgiveness dynamic is familiar to all of us, but what do these rituals of atonement mean when they are applied to political and historical events?

In his timely, topical, and incisive book A Guilted Age, Ashraf Rushdy argues that the proliferation of apologies by politicians, nations, and churches for past events—such as American slavery or the Holocaust—can be understood as a historical phenomenon. In our post–World War II world, Rushdy claims that we live in a “guilted age.”

A Guilted Age identifies the two major forms of apologies—political and historical—and Rushdy defines the dynamics and strategies of each, showing how the evolution of one led to the other. In doing so, he reveals what apology and forgiveness do to the past events they respectively apologize for and forgive—and what happens when they fail.

The Bonus:
Another book for book club consideration that I have mentioned before:
In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memories and Its Ironies, David Rieff.

 “In Praise of Forgetting is about our collective memories: how we remember our national histories and argue about our shared past. Rieff contends that these collective remembrances are self-serving, often fraudulent and frequently dangerous. Sometimes, he thinks, we would be better off simply forgetting the grudge-filled chronicles and getting on with living our lives. He admires the suggestion of a Northern Irish writer that the next memorial to Irish history should be “raising a monument to Amnesia, and forgetting where we put it.”