Apologies Forthcoming is a collection of short stories about the Chinese Cultural revolution - circa 1966 - 1976. There were a lot of rather horrible things that occurred during this period.
I guess most cultures do their own versions of horrible of things. And then down the road they try and come to grips with what they have done. There is a spectrum of responses to misdeeds of the past both at the individual and the group / culture level.
- denial - Turkey and the armenian holocaust, Japan and the rape of Nanking and China
- justification - China and the repression and genocide of Tibetan people and culture
- repress / ignore - seems like Apologies Forthcoming was describing this response.
- guilt - Germany and the holocaust
- confusion - the treatment of the native people in the US - there is a combination of responses in the culture - denial, ignore, guilt, reparation, ... It is unclear to me that there is a general cultural coming to grips with the past.
- acceptance - South Africa and apartheid with their truth and reconciliation
- transcendence - acknowledgment, acceptance, reparation / integration, forgiveness, redirection. Do we have any examples of this?
There are probably other colors in the spectrum of responses. Seeing where in a spectrum of behaviors any action fits is something we have been talking about more and more. We are talking about a more complex (?) form of thinking that doesn't take a phenomenon by itself, but tries to understand it in the larger context in which it exists. That seems to help us understand things a little bit better. It is so easy to get caught up in a particular event(s) and get flooded with emotions about that. Then it becomes more difficult to think clearly about what is going on and what other possibilities are there.
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