A usable past cannot be created out of collective guilt or even collective responsibility, however. It's memories of resistance to oppression and exploitation inside and outside the United States that give leftists a usable past. It's erasure of those memories that breeds acquiescence: if no one resisted in the past, why should we now? And it's erasure of the same memories of resistance that sows contempt for the oppressed -- notwithstanding the Christian maxim, no one respects the meek.
On 6/1/06, Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I think the US gov't did
> acknowledge most of its past crimes and apologized for
> some (e.g. slavery or internment of Japanese
> Americans).
Japanese internees and their surviving spouses, children, and parents were the only ones who actually received financial compensation (paltry as it is, it being $20,000 each -- surely the price of liberty cannot be so low?) from the American government for the damage it caused them. That is probably because the American government saw the Japanese government, its economically powerful ally, behind the Japanese here, whereas behind Blacks, American Indians, Mexicans, Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese, and others no comparable power has stood. The treatments of non-white minorities often track the relative powers of the countries they or their ancestors are from. The destinies of non-white minorities here are tied up with the economic fortunes of the countries of their or their ancestors' origins, whether or not they are aware of that.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>