Hello CCI Friends,
A most unusual article has been written by one of America’s top PhD Academics, Stephen Kinzer of Brown University. It seems that our NATO partners are beginning to feel responsible for the malevolent abuse their countrymen have done to natives in many countries of the world.
Isn’t it time we in America started looking at ourselves with the same scrutiny, since no doubt we have been, and still are, the world leaders in these kinds of immoral and tragic behaviors. How long can we look at our own “woke” mentality in the U.S. without taking it outside of our borders to places of torture, mass murder, and disadvantaging whole populations for generations in order to get bananas, coffee and many other products for a nickel a pound. We’ve now overturned legitimate elections in some 80 countries. Have we ever said we are sorry to any of them?
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
Hey, America, how about an apology?
Some countries are making amends for things they’ve done to other countries. But the United States is never sorry.
July 4, 2021
By Stephen Kinzer
I’m so sorry. I now realize that we did something awful to you. For a long time, we minimized and even denied it. Today, finally, we accept responsibility. On my own behalf and on behalf of my people, I offer a heartfelt apology.
World leaders do not easily pronounce words like those. Most countries, like most individuals, wrap themselves in a comfortable myth of innocence. That makes it difficult to admit any kind of guilt. Americans are especially assertive in refusing to acknowledge that we’ve committed crimes abroad. “I will never apologize for the United States, I don’t care what the facts are,” President George H.W. Bush declared after a missile from a US Navy cruiser shot down a civilian Iranian airliner in 1988, killing all 290 people aboard.
“I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy,” Bush liked to say. Neither, it seems, is President Biden. During Biden’s first months in office, he and his senior aides have strongly resisted acknowledging that the United States has ever sinned against other nations. Yet during these same months, three other world leaders have acknowledged their countries’ participation in bloody crimes. They admitted painful truths while Biden remained securely in his cocoon of denial.
In May, President Emmanuel Macron of France traveled to Rwanda and acknowledged “the extent of our responsibilities” for collaborating with perpetrators of the 1994 genocide. Around the same time, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico apologized for a 1911 massacre of 303 Chinese civilians by revolutionary soldiers. Then Germany formally accepted “historical and moral responsibility” for the slaughter of tens of thousands of Africans in the early 20th century and agreed to provide $1.3 billion in aid to Namibia, a former German colony.