Burnt Orange Report

Back to the Future

By Jim Dallas

The ACS blog has a thorough post on Dr. Thomas Woods' "politically incorrect" (which is to say revisionist, at best) history of America.

Some times I have to thank the blog gods for timely coincidences; in this case, I must be thankful for Amitai Etzioni's post this week on collective guilt:

Etzioni, the grand old man of communitarianism, writes:

Communal responsibility is based on the fact that we are born into a community and share its history, memories, identity, achievements, and failures. We are not simply individual human beings, who can retreat behind a Rawlsian "veil of ignorance," secure in our universal rights and historical innocence. We are also members of specific families and communities. We cannot help but share their burdens, just as we share in their treasures; their responsibilities as well as their privileges. Thus, an American inherits both the proud memory of the Boston Tea Party and the agony of slavery; both the marvelous work of the Framers of the Constitution and the slaughter of Native Americans; the vigilant protection of freedom--from Greece to Korea--and the killing of innocent children, women, and other civilians in My Lai. The memory of slavery is particularly telling. Abolished some 134 years ago, before the ancestors of most contemporary Americans had even immigrated, slavery is still part of the American past; we cannot erase or ignore it. Most important, our aggrieved past commands us all to act, not merely the sons and daughters of plantation owners. We are all co-responsible for that which our community has perpetrated and condoned, for both past sins of commission and omission.

It needs to be stressed that Etzioni (who is Jewish) explicitly notes that he is not arguing in favor of "blood guilt." What's he's arguing is that, just as our children (as well as new immigrants) inherit our national debt in perpetuity, or our environmental catastrophes, so to do they inherit moral obligations, by virtue of being members of a collectivity, regardless of their race or religion.

Dealing with these obligations requires some maturity; Etzioni has some suggestions about that:

● First, it cautions not to look for easy scapegoats. While not denying, or diminishing their importance, one can never blame select power elites ("the Nazis did it, not the Germans"), objective conditions ("it happened because of runaway inflation, massive unemployment"), or even third parties ("Hitler was caused by the humiliating armistice imposed on Germany at the end of World War I") for the dark moments in one's communal past. I am not suggesting that external forces and objective conditions do not play a role in a nation's history; but they do not exempt one from sharing the responsibility for one's community and its course of action.

● Second, remember the past. Each generation of parents is obligated to recount the formative events of the past to its children. In the United States, we still mourn the circumstances, savagery, and massive bloodshed of the Civil War. Without drawing any parallels, it is a credit to Germany that as a community–albeit not every single German–it has learned to do the same concerning the history of the Nazi era.

And yet neo-Confederates and their sympathizers are ignoring both of these points, seeking out scapegoats and obfuscating our rememberance of the past.

Were it true that slavery was (as Woods apparently claims) not a cruel institution; were it true that the legacy of racism was not a stain on our history; were it true that America didn't have a history that involved the killing of labor organizers, were it true that our nation hadn't a history of imperialist aggression - were all these things true, perhaps history wouldn't be such a painful thing to read. All glory, and no shame, the way it ought to be.

I would hope, though, that we'd be big enough such that we'd engage history head on, instead of tuning out what we don't want to hear.