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  3. Does Wall Street owe the people of America an apology? That was Senator Sherrod Brown’s suggestion to Ben Bernanke and Hank Paul

Does Wall Street owe the people of America an apology? That was Senator Sherrod Brown’s suggestion to Ben Bernanke and Hank Paul

admin2015-03-25  101
问题     Does Wall Street owe the people of America an apology? That was Senator Sherrod Brown’s suggestion to Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson during a Senate hearing last week.【F1】lf so, the humbled titans of finance will be in good company; institutional apologies have mushroomed in past years. British Christians, for example, have expressed public contrition for slavery and have even considered apologizing for skepticism about evolution. Nicolaus Mills, an American commentator, calls the fashion for saying sorry a "global culture of apology". That may be an overstatement; public kowtows are still rare compared with the manifold wrongs of the past. The bigger question is what, if anything, they mean.
    Apologies for past wrongs by present-day institutions are trickier still. Jonathan Sumption, a London lawyer and historian, calls them "a vulgar anachronism"—in effect, he says, "a rebuke to the past for not being more like the present".【F2】Trading apologies and forgiveness on behalf of dead people sounds unauthentic—especially when the issue is centuries old(such as Viking rape and pillage in Ireland, which Denmark’s culture minister Brian Mikkelson mourned in 2007). Collective guilt is an odd idea even in the present. Yet at a minimum, owning up to what happened in the past, and learning lessons from it, should benefit everyone.
    【F3】Successful apologies are usually a tactic of international or national politics, particularly when a new leader wants to distance himself from past mistakes. Italy has just apologized to Libya and paid reparations for colonialism(in exchange for energy deals and co-operation on migration). America’s ex-president Bill Clinton and Britain’s former prime minister, Tony Blair, were skilled in the theatre of public contrition on issues such as slavery. South Africa’s president F. W. de Klerk apologized for apartheid in 1992; Nelson Mandela then apologized for atrocities committed by the African National Congress. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission recorded individuals’ suffering and gave perpetrators a chance to confess and say sorry.
    So what makes a public apology successful? Melissa Nobles, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in apologology, says that they can give official backing to a particular view of history, help contain political grievances peacefully and encourage public-spiritedness among alienated parts of the population.
    But apologies don’t come free.【F4】They raise the annoyed question of compensating; not just money, but the promise of different legal treatment, including the right to sue for compensation. Canada has recompensed indigenous children removed from their homes; so has the state government of Tasmania. America and Canada have compensated ethnic Japanese citizens interned during the second world war.
    Still, fear of the legal consequences of saying sorry may be overblown.【F5】Mr. Rudd’s apology explicitly stated that it would have no legal import; a landmark court case confirmed that previous apologies by Australian states were protected by parliamentary privilege. America’s apology for slavery was a cashless one.
【F3】
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答案成功的道歉通常是国际和国内政治的一种策略，尤其是当一个新的领导人想要把自己和过去的错误分隔开来的时候更是如此。
解析 本句的主干为Successful apologies are usually a tactic of international or national politics。翻译情形和上一题类似，英文中承前省略了成分，但在汉语表达中如果不把隐含的意思补译出来，句意则会显得含混不清，这时就需要使用增译法，补译原文隐藏的含义。
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