> A usable past cannot be created out of collective guilt or even
> collective responsibility, however.
What makes you say this? I don't see how an unusable past is created out of a feeling of collective responsibility.
> It's memories of resistance to
> oppression and exploitation inside and outside the United States that
> give leftists a usable past. It's erasure of those memories that
> breeds acquiescence: if no one resisted in the past, why should we
> now? And it's erasure of the same memories of resistance that sows
> contempt for the oppressed -- notwithstanding the Christian maxim, no
> one respects the meek.
Why do you have to have memories of resistance but no responsibility for exploitation? This makes no sense. Who gets to decide what a usable past is? The oppressors? The victors? The victims?
> On 6/1/06, Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > I think the US gov't did
> > acknowledge most of its past crimes and apologized for
> > some (e.g. slavery or internment of Japanese
> > Americans).
>
> Japanese internees and their surviving spouses, children, and parents
> were the only ones who actually received financial compensation
> (paltry as it is, it being $20,000 each -- surely the price of liberty
> cannot be so low?) from the American government for the damage it
> caused them.
>
> Yoshie
But those reparation were based on memories of resistance rather than any collective responsibility, right?
John Thornton