OPINION:
Most Americans can’t quite understand how events of previous centuries still have the power to stir anger and resentments, and make an appreciation of their common interests difficult. Well, some Americans can recall a certain anger late on a summer night after a third or even fourth bourbon and branch water, but the feeling quickly goes away. Nations, after all, do not have permanent friends, in Lord Palmerston’s famous explanation to Queen Victoria, but nations do have permanent interests and memories of a civil war no longer poisons those interests on these shores.
Closer to our own day, only a few years after vanquishing the Axis powers in World War II, Americans were eager not just to forgive former enemies, but to stand with them and help them rebuild their ruined cities and restore deeply scarred countrysides. Germany and Japan are counted as now among America’s closest friends and allies, valued by those whose fathers and grandfathers risked their lives fighting evil tyrannies that threatened to consume Europe and Asia. The sacrifices of the past are redeemed by friends for the future.
This redemption is almost unique among nations. Many of the problems of Europe, Asia and the Middle East are rooted in the horrors of a world that no longer exists. Old scores wait to be settled. The Koreans and the Chinese often seem as outraged by the war crimes of the Japanese as when they were inflicted in a world at war moving close to a century ago. Divisions in the Balkans go back centuries beyond those, and the trials and tribulations in the Middle East date from Bible days, and may be intractable.
A hundred years ago millions were at war, spilling blood and spending lives in what was known, before a bright Sunday morning at Pearl Harbor, as a war without a proper name. The veterans of that conflict and the flags under which many of them died are furled now, but the scars remain. This is particularly true for the Turks and the Armenians, and the bitter feelings that have poisoned relations between modern Turkey and the Armenians are traced to what President Obama describes as the Ottoman massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915. The Armenians call it “genocide,” a term the Turks loathe. Anger and resentments persist.
The Turks and the Armenians face common enemies today, and they’re both friends of the United States, but they have never been able to move on. Remembering what happened a century ago is important; forgiving does not mean forgetting, and moving on would be in the interests of all. Enabling differences of past generations to control the present and throw a shadow over the future is foolish. The dead must bury the dead.
Nelson Mandela set a remarkable example in South Africa, and left an important reminder that real leaders must look to the future, putting aside if not forgetting the past. He endured much as his people were humiliated and often brutalized by a white minority government. He was imprisoned by his country’s apartheid regime for nearly three decades. He has a right to be bitter, but on his release he sat down with the very regime responsible for his troubles, and put aside the bitterness and lust for revenge that might have ignited a civil war and the destruction of his country. He knew that looking to the future is what leadership is all about.
If leaders with the wisdom and forgiving heart of Nelson Mandela were available to step up in Armenia, Turkey, Ukraine, the Korean peninsula or anywhere in the Middle East, the world might not know peace only in its dreams. If there’s a Nelson Mandela out there, now’s the time to stand up and shout the good news.
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