What we can learn from Desmond Tutu, a man for whom forgiveness trumped vengeanceBy Stan Grant
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Desmond Tutu showed us that we can triumph over history.
Resentment and vengeance were not for him. As apartheid fell, he set his nation on a more profound path: freedom and forgiveness.
To Archbishop Tutu, forgiveness and reconciliation were the "only truly viable alternatives to revenge, retribution and reprisal".
"Without forgiveness," he said, "there is no future".
Together with Nelson Mandela — South Africa's first black president — Desmond Tutu sought to unite and heal his nation.
Archbishop Tutu, who died on Sunday, headed a truth and reconciliation commission, significantly not a truth and justice commission. The difference is critical. He did not seek to punish. But the truth would be heard.
Justice may have been easier. Certainly, black South Africans had cause to see those who had inflicted such suffering pay for their crimes.
Retribution would have been entirely human. Indeed, the process of reconciliation was criticised for being weighted too heavily in favour of the perpetrators.
This was the test of leadership: to lift his nation's sights.
Forgiveness or resentment?
Archbishop Tutu appealed to a higher truth. A higher justice, if you like. He offered his people a more godly task.
"Forgiveness is not facile or cheap. It is a costly business that makes those who are willing to forgive even more extraordinary," he said.
But are there crimes so monstrous they can never be forgiven?
Desmond Tutu was the conscience of a nation
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Philosopher Thomas Brudholm has criticised Tutu's reconciliation. Recalling the atrocities and genocide of modern times from Poland to Germany to Cambodia to Rwanda, he says, in the face of such crimes, "healing appears like a fantasy".
To Brudholm, resentment can be a virtue. He says there can be too much pressure on survivors or victims to forgive.
Indeed, there is a tendency to blame those who have suffered the most.
"When societies try to 'move on' after mass atrocity, victims who cannot, or will not, abide with the call to forgive and reconcile are often pictured as 'prisoners of the past'," Brudholm says.
Brudholm is inspired by Holocaust survivor and writer Jean Amery, who said there were things that cannot so easily be placed in "the cold storage of history".
Brudholm challenges us about what to do with history, what the Polish Nobel Laureate poet, Czeslaw Milosz, called "the memory of wounds".
'Historical fever brings decay'
It can seem as if there is no way to break the chains of the past.
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said we were all "condemned to history".
Friedrich Nietzsche warned that history would be the death of us.
The past, he said, becomes "a festering wound". It can become the poison in the blood of our identities.
Our "historical fever", Nietzsche said, "may bring about the decay of a people".
If history becomes sovereign, he wrote, it "would constitute a kind of final closing out of the accounts of life for mankind".
Isn't this what we see in our world now?
Everywhere, there is resurgent populism, nationalism, sectarianism, tribalism. And it feeds on historical resentment.
Xi Jinping tells the Chinese people to never forget the hundred years of humiliation by foreign powers. Vladimir Putin laments the end of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.
Political leaders like Turkey's Erdoğan, Hungary's Orban, India's Modi, all use history as a weapon.
Far-right extremists and Islamist militants too draw from the toxic well of historical vengeance.
It has been called militant nostalgia. The promise to restore a people to a lost glory. It is captured in vacuous bumper sticker slogans like "Make America Great Again".
From left or right, the politics of history is the province of scoundrels. Worse than that, it can become a death cult. We are pitted against each other by those who return, time and again, to the original wound that they cannot or will not allow to heal.
Not that we can deny the past. But we ask ourselves who owns truth? Who decides when or how truth is told? All nations have stains on their history.
What about Australia?
Australia is no exception. For too long we silenced our truth. The Uluru Statement from the Heart has called for truth-telling as central to giving voice to Indigenous people.
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It is a journey our nation is already on, however haltingly. These are hard truths to tell and to hear.
We cannot just "move on". We live in history. But history need not live in us.
That is what Desmond Tutu taught us. We can do worse than look to his example. He was a giant who appealed to our better angels when other so-called leaders appeal to our worst.
Maybe politics wins. Maybe hatred and vengeance are the easiest paths to power. But Archbishop Tutu knew that politics is not peace. It is not truly freedom.
Desmond Tutu was not blind to the evil we can do. As a black South African, he experienced the worst of it.
South Africa today is a nation still on the journey from its past to the future. But Desmond Tutu left them a legacy to build that nation: forgiveness is stronger than politics. It is love.
Stan Grant presents China Tonight on Monday at 9.35pm on ABC TV, and Tuesday at 8pm on ABC News Channel.
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Gerry Yokota
Favorite Tutu Quotes on Palestine (all from God Is Not a Christian)
If you changed the names, the description of what is happening in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank could be a description of what is happening in South Africa. Israel cannot do that: it is out of line with her biblical and historical traditions. Jews, having suffered so much, cannot allow their government to cause other people to suffer so much. Jews, having been dispossessed for so long, cannot allow their government to dispossess others. Jews, having been victims of gross injustice, cannot allow their government to make others victims of injustice.
It is necessary to go beyond denunciation of violence. We must go further by insisting on the removal of the conditions which are conducive to violence.
(In response to accusations of being antisemitic for criticizing the Israeli government) I criticize Mrs. Margaret Thatcher fairly sharply, but I’ve not usually been called anti-British for doing so.
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