But when you're a government and you need popular opinion on your side, a good apology can pay off in spades. But since most governments are also douchebags, they never want to apologize too much. So there's kind of a delicate balance there that almost always yields thoroughly ridiculous results.

Apologies are so difficult that some people manage to go pretty much their whole lives without ever offering them.

5 America Apologizes for Japanese Internment, Barely

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Two months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, FDR signed Executive Order 9066 forcing every single one of the more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans on the West Coast of the United States into internment camps. Officially they were called "Assembly Centers," which sounds a little more fun, sort of like Field Day.



The winner gets a writ of Habeas corpus!

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More than two thirds of the people interned were full-fledged U.S. citizens, ripped from their jobs and their homes and forced to leave virtually everything they owned behind.

Then they were transported to hastily renovated racetracks and fairgrounds for the remainder of the war, where hundreds died from inadequate medical care and "bullet in the neck" syndrome.



Basically, they were involuntarily turned into carnival workers, without the dignity.

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How'd They Make it All Better?

After the war ended the government reacted shockingly quick, and in 1948 Congress allowed every citizen that was held in the camps to claim compensation for what they had lost. Of course, this offer wasn't made until after the IRS had destroyed most of the detainees' tax returns from the decade before, making it virtually impossible to prove a loss of any kind. This is sort of like stealing somebody's wallet, then saying you'll be happy to return it as soon as they prove their identity with a valid driver's license.