Pros: I learned of injustices and shameful instances that should rightly conjure up national guilt.
Cons: The author is a college professor. This reads like the history textbook that it is.
The Bottom Line: Barkan rightly surfaces weighty questions. Unfortunately, his rhetoric served to undermine the moral high ground. Rather than a call to action, he had me yearning to turn the final page.
gungian's Full Review: Elazar Barkan - The Guilt of Nations: Restitution ...
Man’s inhumanity to man is well documented. While acknowledging this, Elazar Barkan, still managed to introduce me to instances with which I was totally unfamiliar. The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices is an ambitious narrative that details horrendous tales of appalling conduct. Many of these illustrate government-sanctioned actions taken against their land’s indigenous peoples and sometimes their own citizens. But the crux of the work is a frank discussion of how reparations – or atonement – can “restore a sense of morality and enhance prospects for world peace” [book jacket].
The core twelve chapters are divided into two parts. The first, Residues of World War II, concentrates on those incidents that took root in the war or its aftermath. The protagonists here are many of the countries most affected by that global conflagration. These cases include:
1. The Faustian Predicament: German Reparation to Jews
2. American Memory: Japanese Americans Remember the Camps
3. Sex Slaves: Comfort Women and Japanese Guilt
4. Plunder as Justice: Russian Victims and Glorious Museums
5. Nazi Gold and Swiss Solidarity: A New Mechanism for Rewriting Historical Crimes?
6. Restitution in East Central Europe: Deserving and Undeserving Victims
The second part, Colonialism and its Aftermath, deals with situations that originated much earlier on the historical timeline. The geographic scope of Part II is much broader than in Part I. This section includes:
1. “First Nations” Renaissance: Indigenous Groups and the Pluralistic Model
2. Native American Restitution: Land, Human Remains, and Sacred Objects
3. Hawaii: The Other Native Americans
4. Oceanic Models for Indigenous Groups: Australian Aborigines
5. Once Were Warriors: The Limits of Successful Restitution
6. Restitution for Slavery: Opportunity or Fantasy?
The Guilt of Nations’ concluding chapter is entitled Conclusion: Toward a Theory of Restitution. Here Barkan makes his case for the growing moral tendency toward restitution for past injustice. He writes to the important role of apology as a prelude to healing. Moreover, he discusses the dynamic nature of restitution and how the best intentions can sometime go awry. But he cautions us that noting “. . . the limitations of restitution is not to negate the moral, historical, and political significance of such transactions” [p. 349].
Thirty-one pages of notes augment the text. It is evident that Barkan’s book is the result of much research and he is not at all stingy in crediting his sources. The concluding thirteen-page Index is also quite detailed. This tool makes it fairly easy for the reader to refer back and revisit areas of particular interest.
The Guilt of Nations is an important work. Elazar Barkan is an outstanding scholar with impressive credentials. These can be viewed on the Claremont Graduate University’s website [http://www.cgu.edu/faculty/barkane.html]. Barkan’s style, however, was not to my taste. While I found the contents scholastically well documented, the book itself made for a somewhat stodgy read. Two sentences from the concluding paragraph [taken from page 349] illustrate this point.
"As restitution creates new resources to be shared between the belligerent sides, it plays a role in providing both mechanism and models for resolution of other contemporary disputes. In a world that privileges economic transactions, the moral economy of restitution is a viable option for conflict resolution, even if its ramifications on the identities of the protagonists leave many aspects of historical injustices unaddressed."
In the 1954 classic, On The Waterfront, Marlon Brando has the pivotal role as ex-fighter Terry Malloy. That character delivers one of cinema’s most memorable lines; “I coulda been a contender”. In The Guilt of Nations, Elazar Barkan has a powerful punch to throw. Sadly, it is his delivery that may allow this to be shaken off as just another glancing blow.
The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices
Elazar Barkan
W.W. Norton & Company
New York
Hardback, 2000
ISBN: 0 393 04886 1
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