No Country Faces Its Past Honestly

From Red Memory by Tania Branigan:

No country faces its past honestly, and some in China have asked why the West was transfixed by the Maoist trauma recorded in books like Wild Swans when it appeared uninterested in slave narratives. America’s self-image as a beacon of democracy is undimmed by its cozying up to dictators, plots to oust or kill elected leaders, and backing of murderous anti-communist purges. More Britons believe the empire was a source of pride than shame; a benevolent institution, not created at gunpoint to enrich ourselves but rolled out to bring railways, cricket, and Shakespeare to the globe’s four corners. The West didn’t consciously conceal as China did; in its arrogance, it rarely noticed there was something to forget. We had often preferred to export our greatest sadism, and to allow others to enrich us by means we never questioned or recognized.