Es tut mir leit Or, The Devil Lies in the Detail,

Extract offered from TheTimes Oliver Moody from Berlin 18-08-2020 “We want to face up to our moral and political responsibility,” Ruprecht Polenz, the former CDU general secretary leading the German delegation, told me. “Namibia wants to see that the plea for forgiveness is seriously intended and not just lip service. That’s why it’s a question of what consequences the apology should have.” Contrast this with the non-apologies and token mea culpas that have become a tiresome fixture of British politics. Most recently Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, told A-level students he was “incredibly sorry” for the chaos the pandemic had wreaked on their education, only to defend the government’s approach to correcting their grades as “robust and fair”. And the missing phrase not to be forgot, just afore the quote above: 'It’s not the apology that’s at issue, though, but what the apology implies. Germany already said sorry for the genocide in 2004. Now it is trying to work out how to expiate its guilt meaningfully, primarily through money — not just in a lump sum of compensation, but also through long-term development funding.' ... In her 1958 book The Human Condition, the German-born political theorist Hannah Arendt argued that apology and forgiveness were the foundation of freedom. Without them, she thought, we are condemned to remain shackled to our past mistakes and denied the possibility of change. But seeking and granting absolution are not to be trifled with, precisely because they are so central to our humanity. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/germany-can-teach-us-how-to-say-sorry-properly-kf2zz9dfn Cross referenced with https://lanniewelleven.blogspot.com/2018/04/or-devil-finds-work-fred-moten-on-james.html