Honest Patriots

Abstract The book records attempts in three countries — Germany, South Africa, and the United States — to educate patriots who are neither loveless critics nor uncritical lovers of their nation, but rather loving critics. How does a national public learn to acknowledge the “dark side” of their country’s history? In the post-1945 years, Germans slowly but surely came to pay public attention to the evils of the Nazi era. In an astonishing accumulation of memorials, museums, films, anniversaries, and high school history books, the country has put its future generations on notice: “Never again”. Post-apartheid South Africa has seen comparable developments, especially in its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, new Constitution, memorials, and radically revised school text books. The United States, with a culture more focused on the future than the past, is undergoing a similar but slower public process. Two great crimes mark its national past: slavery and the fate of the people called Indians. The US is beginning to confront these collective crimes with new realism in new laws, museums, films, memorials, and history books. A political culture grows in its capacity for justice by remembering injustice. For a people not to remember the misdeeds of their past is to risk repeating them. Public memory requires concrete public signs, rituals, memorials, and education. This book seeks to record the attempts of these three countries to give public expression to justice by remembering injustice.