"Happy Memorial Day, Mr. Kissinger"

[Gordon Fitch]

Joanna Sheldon wrote:
> > I hadn't started paying taxes at that point,
> > but just being a citizen of such a monstrous killing machine was enough to
> > give me the horrors.  Still is.

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.