Inspired by the brazen words of Thai prime minister Samak Sundaravej, who said only one person was killed in Thailand’s October 1976 massacre that actually killed at least 46, other world leaders, tired of apologizing for atrocities committed long ago, have released statements downplaying their own nations’ tragedies.
In Washington DC, President Bush gave a televised speech from the Oval Office to announce that slavery was “simply a case of some poorly assimilated, illiterate Africans who forgot to pick up their wages.”
Speaking after his recent primary win in Virginia, US presidential candidate John McCain chimed in that the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre of nearly 500 Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, was “just a lone soldier letting off a little bit of steam.”
In Berlin, Andrea Merkel told a BBC correspondent that the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered, had been exaggerated. “It was just a small movement among some avant-garde artists, including this failed painter named Hitler. One day, a few visitors to an installation in Auschwitz wandered off and never came back.”
Rwanda’s leader, prime minister Paul Kagame, said he was bored of discussing the country’s 1994 genocide, labeling it “no more than a school yard tussle between brothers.”
