Krygier strikes me as more persuasive than Melissa Nobles' The Politics of Official Apologies (Cambridge University Press, 2008) which I reread last when I should - mea culpa - have been marking undergrad essays on terra nullius and human rights charters. He offers a perspective on questions raised in an article by Arne Ruth on 'Myths of neutrality: Ignoring the Holocaust in Sweden and Switzerland', which ends with a comment by Adolf Muschg regarding Swiss laundering of Nazi gold
It was long ago: now we are paying for the sleepless nights that we didn't have because of Auschwitz; now we are overtaken by all the concerns which never affected us in relation to the building of Europe, drowsing in the sleep of the self-righteous, a state of mind where tears turned dry.Quite. Jack Balkin has meanwhile assessed the claim (perhaps someone was asleep in Constitutional Law 101) that it was unconstitutional of US President Obama to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. I remain of the belief that the Prize went to the wrong person - as with announcements that Gitmo would disappear and DADT would be revoked, Obama hasn't actually done enough to deserve the glittering bauble - but then the Peace Prize as such has been tarnished through past distribution to sundry nasties. It's a bit like someone giving you a supposedly chilled shrinkwrap package of raw chicken from the supermarket. Uh-oh, it's well past the use-by date and it's warm. Some presents are best left to others.
