To forge ahead, people must address the past

Thousands of young Chinese who stoned the Japanese Embassy in Beijing this week could probably explain to John Tamihere why he will hear about the Holocaust for the rest of his life.

Their protest evolved in a strictly 21st-century way - text messages and emails urged them to assemble.

But their grievance started long before they were born, in the bleak years of the Japanese invasion of eastern China before and during World War II.

China says up to 30 million of its people died during the eight-year invasion, and 95 million were made refugees. Sixty years later, many Chinese are still bitter. They say Japan has not shown adequate contrition.

The conflict flared again this week when Japan printed new school history textbooks that critics say distort the past and portray imperial Japan as a liberator rather than an occupier of its Asian neighbours. The books don't even use the word "invasion".

"Japan doesn't face up to its history," said Cheng Lei, a 27-year-old information technology professional protesting in Beijing.

North and South Korea have also condemned Japan's seeming reluctance to acknowledge the past.

The lesson in the streets of Beijing for Tamihere is that it is all-but impossible to shake off the grip of historical injustices. And what the Japanese invasion is to the East, the Holocaust is to the West. (And the Armenian massacre is to Turkey, and the Rwandan genocide is to Africa ... to mention just a couple.)

So John Tamihere couldn't have picked a worse way of illustrating a point.

Tamihere says he brought the Holocaust up in an interview with Investigate magazine to draw a parallel with Maori Party politicians raising issues from the past rather than dealing with the issues facing Maori today.

He told the magazine: "I'm sick of hearing how many Jews got gassed ... How many times do I have to be told and made to feel guilty?"

Dr David Macdonald, senior lecturer in political studies at Otago University, and an expert in genocide and Holocaust studies, says the point of discussing the Holocaust is not to make people feel guilty.

"I don't think anyone wants New Zealanders to feel guilty about what happened. I don't think any Jewish people are going to imply that New Zealand collaborated in the genocide or could have prevented it.

"I suppose what John Tamihere wants is for the issue not to be discussed anymore, but part of moving on as a society is talking about the issues ... "

Macdonald says talking about the past can be a way of resolving it. "Germany, you might say, has moved on in the fact that it probably isn't going to exterminate people again, but their idea of moving on is to endlessly discuss issues of the Holocaust to make sure that everybody knows about it and everybody is committed to making sure it doesn't happen again.

"So moving on doesn't necessarily mean forgetting, and it doesn't necessarily mean not talking about an issue. I think to properly move on you have to acknowledge that something has happened.

"The Japanese style of moving on is to try to minimise what happened ... and that's a way of moving on for some people but it doesn't really move the society forward in a very positive way."

The philosopher Nietzsche suggested we abandon the past. The past, he said, "returns as a ghost and disturbs the peace of a later moment".

He advocated that for the sake of happiness people should "actively forget" the past and thus be liberated from it.

"It's still there, but it doesn't affect you. I think that's extremely difficult," says Dr Patrick Hayden, senior lecturer in political theory at Victoria University in Wellington.

That's because attempts to bury the past tend to backfire and create a backlash - as in the case of the Japanese textbooks.

"It's the return of the repressed," Hayden says. "In one way or another these past injustices are going to continue to haunt the society that's attempting to make some kind of transition. And that will come back and have to be dealt with.

"Some kind of catharsis is needed. If there's no catharsis, I think whatever the past issue is will continue to haunt a society."

How do we ensure that the mistakes of the past don't recur? "Well unfortunately for someone like John Tamihere, that does require repeating history so that we can continue to learn from it," Hayden says.

"One might pose the question: is that a responsibility of a democratic citizen, in fact, to continue to learn and to hear about these things, if we're going to build into our culture respect for human rights or democratic values, or whatever it might be?

"And history doesn't stand still, so if he, or some other person, has heard it now, someone else has not heard it, so the dialogue has to continue."

Gerhard Schroeder, the German chancellor, says in Germany remembrance of the past is a moral obligation.

"It is true that the temptation to forget and suppress it is great, but we will not succumb to it," he promised in a speech in January to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi death camp Auschwitz.

Schroeder had some advice for Japan. "With a sensitive and self-critical manner of dealing with your own history you will not lose friends but rather win friends," he said.

"Every country must find its own way to deal with the good sides as well as the darker sides of its history."