On Apologies...

From Russia with Love

Two articles on apologies in the press today. One's a hilarious one from The Moscow Times, which has Putin sharpening his tongue on recent Western and Baltic pushes for Russia to explicitly condemn its domination over the Eastern Bloc from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1941) until the fall of the Berlin Wall. (amusing names we've given our history) (is "bloc" block in German or something?) The story can be read at
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/05/11/010.html

President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday ruled out any new renunciation of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, saying the Congress of People's Deputies had condemned it as illegal in 1989.

"What more is needed? What, should we renounce it every year?" Putin said at a news conference. "We consider this issue closed and will not return to it. We pronounced it once, and that is enough."

So, the question is, is once enough?

The Germans have really focused on the issue of their wartime guilt (and mind you, I am talking of very different abuses and guilts here, of course). But are they doing that because they're German, and there's something in the German culture that demands retrospection, intellectualization and coming to terms with ... what? identity? guilt? roles? truth? And if so, where does this come from?

Or perhaps the Germans are going through this because their crimes were predominantly against people in other countries, so there's no way to hide the stain as one might within "a family." That said, the Soviet exploitation and repression of the Bloc countries and the "periphery" (a million pardons) republics could also be considered foreign. Or could it? Is that the issue?

Is it that the Germans didn't have an actual ideology which subverted the individual to the state, as the Russians pushed through every facet of their social structure? Am I overstating? Did the Germans just have a leader and a vitriolic campaign, whereas the Russians had a leader and a dehumanizing legal code, and that's what makes the difference?

Or perhaps it's an issue of time. Maybe the longer one colludes with a reality, the more the reality becomes a fragment that is a part of us, and us a part of that reality. (What a strong word, to collude. Every moment of acceptance is collusion, though. In ever fact of life. But we don't often judge ourselves so harshly. As Montaigne, I think--watch me be wrong--said, "Experience is what men call their mistakes.")

Maybe I lean toward the last two "explanations." Two-to-three generations of life can't be shunted as a total loss, a total mistake, a complete sham, a travesty of justice...

U.S. President George W. Bush also took aim at the pact a day before he arrived in Moscow, telling a gathering in Riga on Saturday that the Soviet domination of Central and Eastern Europe after World War II will be remembered as "one of the greatest wrongs of history."

What exactly did Bush say? Did he explicitly say that one of the greatest presidents (some argue the greatest) of the United States sold off Eastern Europe as chatel to Stalin? Did he say "I'm sorry, that was a travesty of justice and a misuse of power and completely denigrated the flag of freedom that we've waved ever since that hypocritical decision." I think not. And then US legislators (Congressman Jack Kingston) demand that: "the Russian Federation must state clearly and unambiguously that the Soviet Union's five-decade-long occupation of the Baltics was wrong," Of course the Russians find the Americans duplicitous and sanctimonious. Brilliant beacon we are.

I'm still waiting for a real and proper apology for Abu Ghraib, and where is our soul-searching as a nation about that? Or maybe that's just a German thing.

OH, but to get to the lighter stuff, I do love Putin's rejoinder to the Baltic issue. Although he notes that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (of 1941) was renounced in '89 and therefore does not need to be renounced again on legal grounds, he adds:

"If the Baltic countries became part of the U.S.S.R. in 1939, then there is no way we could occupy them in 1941, since they were already part of the Soviet Union," Putin said in reply to a question from an Estonian journalist. "Maybe I did not study very well at the university because I drank a lot of beer in Soviet times, but I have something left in my head because the history professors were good."

Another good line:
Putin urged the Baltics to make peace with the past. "What, are we going to allow the dead to grab us by the sleeves and prevent us from moving forward?" he said.

From Germany, with ...

And another article that's not funny at all. It's about how we absolve ourselves, judge ourselves, condemn ourselves, and find a shade of gray which sits easy with us. An SS bookkeeper at Auschwitz, who counted up the lira, zlotys and other wealth of "exterminated" and imprisoned Jews, discusses his point of view. Reported by Der Spiegel and included in the online version of the New York Times, the article can be read at
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,355188,00.html
It's an article worthy of reading...

He's not guilty; he's not an accomplice; he's a witness, he says. Individual's crimes were "barbaric" but mass genocide was policy, he says... But he hasn't been able to really take part in the German reinvestigation into the past as he doesn't want to go there. He doesn't deny it, though, and has written a memoir which he's sent to his friends and sons.

Life. So... huge and small. And heavy.