Kevin's Watch

My country has much to answer for. We invented the concentration camp in the Boer War, we butchered our way across the world in the pursuit of Empire and we enriched our cities with the wealth earned from the trading of slaves.

In Germany the AfD has gained seats for a far right party in the Bundestag for the first time since the war, and a key theme in their campaign was that Germans should revise the way they see their history: that they should shed the guilt of the Holocaust and take pride in the sacrifices of their forebears in both of the world wars of the last century.

To what extent do you think that nations should carry a collective responsibility for the actions of generations past in their history. Should the sons of the father's be the curse of the children - or does each generation start afresh with a tabula rasa, a clean sheet on which they write their story afresh with no baggage from the past to weigh them down?

It's a tough question. On the one hand, it would be nice to be able to say "Hey, that wasn't us who did that bad stuff, we're not to blame, and therefore we have no responsibility."

On the other hand, it's naive to assume that those who suffered through / from / as a result of that bad stuff will be as forgiving of us as we are of ourselves.

Also, that bad stuff has effects which continue to be seen and felt, even years, and sometimes generations, after the fact.

Even if we aren't responsible for it personally, I think that lasting effect still needs to be taken into account.

--A

It is difficult; why do I feel more lenient toward the historical sins of my country than I do toward those of others? Sure, there is somewhat of a greater time gap in our case than elsewhere, but not much - and it doesn't stack up to use it as a 'get out of jail' card anyway. The truth is we're just more forgiving of ourselves (even in the things we personally do wrong) than we are of others. But I guess, just as in the shop, I take the flack from a customer in the name of the store even when the mistake isn't mine, so I do so in the case of my country (or come to that my family etc).

Yeah, we're never the bad guys in our own eyes.

(Interestingly, I used to work for a guy who carried around a pocket-knife made by his grandfather in one of the British concentration camps. )

--A

I was just posting about this in the Columbus thread in the Tank. No one should be blamed for the actions of another. This is simply bad logic. Ironically, it's often a precursory move to evade responsibility for one's own actions, doubling the error. If you can't be blamed for your own plight, then how can I be blamed for mine? If people are victims of their own birth, then aren't I also a victim? I didn't choose to be a white male of European descent.

With that said, the past does matter ... but only in terms of an explanation, not in terms of a blame game. We should know how we got here, not merely to avoid repeating past mistakes, but also because we have the fearsome power of amplifying those mistakes on a global scale.

Instead of thinking ourselves victims of the past, we should view ourselves as the heirs of humans who lived lives that were orders of magnitude worse than ours. Gratitude. Infinite gratitude for unspeakable sacrifice. Despite all of their mistakes, they led to this point. They got us this far, resisting extinction and natural selection. I hope our children will be able to say the same. Instead of asking ourselves, "How much blame do I hold for my past," we should be asking, "How much will I contribute to the future?"

So then we're not gonna talk about Worf?

One German commentator I saw on TV in the aftermath of the German AfD 'success' in their election said "We of all nations, because of our history, have an absolute duty to root out and condemn any form of racist extremism at the first sign of its presence......." This was what prompted the thread - this idea of perhaps not so much guilt or responsibility, but the past as a burden to be carried down through the ages. Perhaps though that is inevitable, insofar as the perception is that of the descendants rather than the rest of the world. The same phenomena as suffered by the children of monsters, writ large at the national level.

Fist and Faith wrote:So then we're not gonna talk about Worf?

The thread title was to lure you in under false pretenses.