Speaking frankly, I’m totally confused why Eric Holder, the new Attorney General of the United States called me a coward. Perhaps I am taking it too personally, since he accused the whole nation of being cowards.

Apparently, his accusation stems from some idea he has that there has not been enough truthful dialogue on the matter of race. This goes to the heart of my confusion. What am I supposed to say in such a dialogue? That racial discrimination is awful, that the blacks are descendants of slaves, a disgusting phenomenon that was abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation more than a century and a half ago? That America has done its darndest to correct the horrors of bigotry that stemmed from that enslavement era by passing civil rights legislation that guaranteed equal treatment under the law for everyone, whatever their race? That we should be vigilant in the protection of those rights?…

Read more: I’m No Coward Mr. Holder

I’ve always been impressed by people in public life who have mastered the art of the public apology. Some have couched their pleadings in terms of remorse as, for example Timothy Geithner, Tom Daschle and Charles Rangel, throwing themselves on our mercy, hoping that the media and the public would buy into their “forthright” confessions of ignorance and innocence in the matter of their blatant tax evasion.

Their ploy is to publicly castigate themselves for their naiveté and stupidity or worse, hoping that their thespian qualities and careful scripting by public relations consultants paid or volunteered would carry the day. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t as poor Tom Daschle found out. Perhaps there was too much public resentment about Daschle using his Senate inner knowledge to make a killing financially, appearing to severely weaken his populist image.

One of the most artful tactics of apology came from Richard Nixon when he was the Vice-Presidential candidate running with Dwight Eisenhower.…

Read more: The Politics of Apology

In five more years, 2014, it will be one hundred years since the start of World War I. The chances are that there are few, if any, living humans who can bear witness to any of the events associated with that war.

Indeed, the virulent hatred of Germany and the Kaiser generated by that cataclysmic event has long receded. It is left to historians to dispassionately record the facts of that hatred as merely a background study of the attitudes of the populations who supported the allied cause. The hated villains of that era, the Kaiser and his mad Generals who instigated the slaughter, have long disappeared from living memory and become footnotes to the main drama of the killing fields and its disastrous aftermath.

Unlike the Hitler era, the Kaiser’s reign did not enjoy the technological advantages of sophisticated and heroic moving pictorial images, leaving historians and information consumers bereft of material to accentuate and propagandize his legacy on television, the internet and movie theaters.…

Read more: Will a Historical Hitler Make a Comeback?