Guilt trips taken to the extreme

LONG SHADOWS: Truth, Lies and History by Erna Paris (Bloomsbury, 20) THIS timely and commendable book by the Jewish-Canadian author Erna Paris asks a crucial question: how do nations confront their past if the truth is shameful? She places several countries on the psychiatrist's couch and examines them one by one, and comes to some interesting and important conclusions. By visiting each of the countries and speaking both to the victims and, occasionally, the children of the perpetrators of historic crimes, Mrs Paris has conscientiously lifted stones and flashed her torch at the murky slime that lies beneath.

In Japan, she visited a loathsome-sounding temple to the 1937-45 war effort, a place called the Yasukini Shrine, which if ever such a place existed in Germany would have been concreted over in 1945, but at which the Japanese Prime Minister took part in a ceremony as recently as 1996. The shrine is unashamed in its glorification of Japan's war record, and uses convenient euphemisms for the horrors committed. The Rape of Nanking in 1937, in which 260,000 Chinese were killed, is called "The China Incident", and there is no direct reference whatever to Changi Jail, the Bataan Death March, or any other atrocities.

Mrs Paris does not let them off so lightly, however, and records how in Nanking "people were disembowelled, decapitated, burned and drowned; maddened soldiers punched out eyes with awls, excavated hearts from living bodies, castrated men and jammed poles into the vaginas of living victims. Women of all ages were gang-raped in broad daylight before they were killed; fathers were forced to rape their daughters, sons to rape their mothers. Killing competitions boosted morale among the troops, who were encouraged to improve their efficiency." Some "incident".

Compared with the outright denial of guilt by the Japanese, the Germans are rightly praised for their postwar efforts to come to terms with what happened, not least through the payment of DM 104 billion (32 billion) to the victims of the Holocaust.

FRANCE'S selective memory and enthusiastic mythmaking about her 1940-44 ordeal falls somewhere between the Japanese and German experiences. The author has written a book about Klaus Barbie, "the Butcher of Lyons", who stood trial for his crimes as the head of the Gestapo in that city. Yet Barbie was a German Nazi and, like the Fascist militia leader Paul Touvier, who was tried in 1994, was not representative of ordinary Frenchmen.

Maurice Papon, on the other hand, who was tried in 1994 for his role as sub-prefect of Bordeaux in charge of Jewish deportations, was an apolitical highflying bureaucrat and loyal functionary whose career blossomed under the fourth and fifth republics. Mrs Paris explains how this came about largely because "the dearly beloved fiction of allencompassing resistance was invented by Charles de Gaulle because he believed it to be in the best interests of the nation". In other words, he tried the Japanese route and only the overwhelming weight of evidence forced France down the German route instead.

The author is on less steady ground when she leaves the admittedly well-trodden area of the Second World War. Her description of the United States as a country that "has not recovered from the tragedy of having instituted slavery on its democratic soil" is wrong on two counts: firstly, slavery predated American democracy by almost two centuries, and secondly, America recovered soon after the civil war. As with her representation of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Mrs Paris's automatic assumption that black = good, white = evil is far too simplistic an approach in what is elsewhere a subtle and well-argued book.

It would have been interesting to have read what the author felt about how Britain has come to terms with her imperialist past, or how perestroika ensured that Stalin's former henchmen were allowed to escape retribution for their role in the Gulag, but instead she concentrates on Serbia, Israel and Rwanda in the rest of the book.

Some parts have a slight what-I-did-in-my-holidays feel to them, and the author's own abiding sense of guilt over her country's treatment of the native Canadians seems to lead her to want to apologise even for crimes - like American slavery - which were committed in the 1860s. A former Nazi apologising to and recompensing a Holocaust survivor might, were he genuinely contrite, have some meaning. The great-grandchildren of slave-owners apologising to the great-grandchildren of their slaves is little more than an absurdity.

That is why Japan's continued refusal to properly compensate the survivors of their wartime atrocities is so morally reprehensible. As they have cynically and actuarially calculated, in only a few years' time it will be too late.

lNapoleon and Wellington, by Andrew Roberts, will be published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in September.

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