Honor vs Decency
According to a story by Martin Fackler and Choe Sang-Hun in the Times, "Japanese researchers" - name, please - have finally challenged the conservative government's denial that military officers, during World War II, had played any role in the "comfort women" system, in which the residents of occupied territory were forced into prostitution.
However, Japanese political analysts said the documents would not sway conservatives, who had stepped up efforts to deny the war tribunal's conclusions, calling them victors' justice.
This, to my mind, is one of the biggest problems that democracy faces. It happens everywhere. Elected officials take on a personal responsibility for the sovereignty that inhibits reform, because to press for reform is to acknowledge the unworthiness of the nation one heads. Or so it must seem to leaders who can't, for the life of them, apologize for wrongdoings that date back decades, that, in the case of Turkey's denial of Armenian genocide, occurred long before today's leaders were born. Canada has not apologized for shanghaiing an Inuit tribe on Ellesmere Island. Israel pretends that the very concept of apology does not exist, or, that if it does, it, Israel, is by definition on the receiving end. The Vatican has the chutzpah to protest the claim that Pius XII accommodated the Nazis.
It's tempting to say that "nations" don't say that they're sorry. But in each case, even that of the Vatican, it is an elected human being who is doing the denying. Clearly, democracy lacks a mechanism for protecting itself from a nasty human weakness.
