> But collective atonement is not always wrong -- and therefore,
>neither is collective guilt. The guilt that Germans have felt for the
>Holocaust has been in many ways a salutory and sometimes even a radical
>impulse.
I don't agree. The concept of collective guilt was coined by the conservative German émigré Lord Vansittart. The Allies employed 'collective guilt' as a legal justification for the occupation, and it was used as the ideological underpinning of the reconstruction.
As such it had a curious effect: The most explicit Nazis were singled out for punishment; those who profited by the regime, and on whose behalf it suppressed the masses were exonerated from their direct culpability; the German working class - despite being victims of the regime - were ideologically implicated in the guilt.
The effect was that Germany rebuilt with the same ruling elite who had profited by the Nazis taking power (minus the most explicitly pro-Nazi political leaders). However, the elite was able to criminalise any popular movements as potentially fascistic. Mass mobilisations were discouraged on the grounds that the masses were 'collectively guilty'.
Even to this day, the collective guilt ideology has the effect that fascism is largely misrepresented as a popular and mass phenomenon, rather than an elite strategy with a particular social basis amongst the petit bourgeoisie. The implication is that mass politics are suspect, and that things are better left to experts. The apolitical atmosphere of the German recovery, is testament to the deadening impact of the collective guilt ideology.
Put simply: All Germans were not equally guilty. Working class Germans suffered the suppression of their political, social and cultural organisations, and were subjected to massive increases in exploitation, militarisation of labour, and rationing. They consistently denied the NSDAP their votes. Those amongst them who were Jews, Communists, Socialists, etc were killed.
By contrast the petit bourgeoisie and capitalist class profited by the Nazis (though the latter more than the former). Consequently, they supported the NSDAP financially and with their votes.
I could say more about the poltical deficiencies of oppositional movements in the seventies that tried to give the collective guilt ideology a radical twist, but that's another story.
>I wish the Americans and British felt as much guilt for their
>genocides. Similarly, it doesn't seem wrong to me for a citizen of an
>OECD country to feel the first world owes the third world a debt of
>atonement for ravages of colonialism both classical and neo. So long as
>all national action is collective; so long as all national identity is
>collective; and so long as we think that international politics has a
>moral dimension; then some sort of notion of collective guilt seems
>inescapably implied by those premises. Not, I underline again, as a
>warrant for punishment, but as a framework for assigning blame. That is
>to say: collective guilt is moral guilt, not criminal guilt. Using it for
>punishment is a perversion of law, not a perversion of morality. (It
>removes the individual and universal dimensions that both define modern
>law and provide its legitimacy.)
>
>Benedict Anderson wrote something interesting along these lines in the
>current New Left Review (235, in "The Promise of Nationalism," an address
>on the immediate past and future of Indonesia). There he argues that
>collective guilt is indispensible to a nationalism worth having. (And
>that in Indonesia, a nationalism worth having would be the best of all
>possible options.)
>
><quote>
>
>In a book I recently published, half-jokingly I put forward the slogan "Long
>Live Shame!" Why so? Because I think that no one can be a true nationalist
>who is incapable of feeling "ashamed" if her state or government commits
>crimes, including those agianst her fellow citizens. Although she had done
>nothing individually that is bad, as a member of the common project, she
>will feel morally implicated in everything done in that project's name.
>
><unquote>
>
>Michael
>
>__________________________________________________________________________
>Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com
>
-- Jim heartfield