The other day a Politics Thread discussion (inspired by Godzilla Minus One‘s treatment of nuclear weapons) triggered about countries facing up to their history. This is a debate the United States constantly has over its legacies of slavery and colonization, but it’s certainly not restricted to them. Germany and Japan still grapple (in very different ways) with their legacy of wartime atrocities, the UK has endless arguments about its imperial history, France took decades to acknowledge torture in Algeria, while Canada and Australia have been forced to acknowledge their historically terrible treatment of indigenous peoples. Which is better than countries like Turkey, where it is illegal to discuss or even publicly acknowledge the Armenian genocide for fear of “offending the Turkish state.” The question is: how important is it for a country to acknowledge its past misdeeds, and what is the proper way of addressing or redressing them?
The History Thread Ponders Accountability
