Carrol Cox:
> This kind of focus on personal guilt (or on personal credit for that
> matter) simply interferes with political work. Universal guilt is also
> universal innocence (or as they say, all cats are black in the night).
But we're not talking about personal guilt. That's for Robert MacNamara. As I pointed out previously, the bourgeoisie bathe in warm guilt about past misdeeds while they concoct new ones for the future. The sense of communal responsibility is something much more profound and maybe primitive, where the entire community may be polluted by a crime in which all participate, even though all may not will it. Americans can no more escape from the taint of Vietnam (and, on a larger scale, the extermination of the Indians and the crimes of Negro slavery) than Germans can escape the taint of the Holocaust. But they can, if they wish, make some effort to emerge from the social order which incubates such events.
One can believe, as some liberals do, that there are really no communal experiences, desires, or acts, or even that communities don't really exist except as mental constructions. However, if there are actually communities and they actually do things, then presumably they can do evil and can bear responsibility for it as communities. One can guess as well that some of their constituents might sense that responsibility, and even be motivated thereby to political actions.