International Order, Collective Guilt, And The New Inquisitors

An excerpt from, “Collective guilt and Collective Punishment” By Alfred De Zayas, CounterPunch, November 10, 2023:

Collective guilt can turn against any group of people.  Perpetrators can become victims of a reverse collective guilt syndrome.  After the end of the Second World War, the Germans were held collectively guilty for Nazi crimes.  Revenge was overwhelming: 14 million ethnic Germans were expelled from their 700-year homelands in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, East Brandenburg, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, resulting in at least two million deaths, some who were direct victims of violence, rape and even torture, and those who lost their lives as a result of the expulsion, which was accompanied by exposure to inclement weather, cold, lack of food and medicine. This was the greatest mass expulsion known in European history, and it was collective punishment on a grand scale.  There was no attempt to establish any personal guilt, millions of anti-Nazis were expelled on the sole criterion of being German.  A purely racist measure backed up by decisions taken by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt already at the conferences of Teheran and Yalta, and concretized in the Potsdam Protocol of 2 August 1945.

The British publisher and human rights activist Victor Gollancz described the expulsion as follows: “If the conscience of men ever again becomes sensitive, these expulsions will be remembered to the undying shame of all who committed or connived at them … The Germans were expelled, not just with an absence of over-nice consideration, but with the very maximum of brutality.”

The British publisher and human rights activist Victor Gollancz described the expulsion as follows: “If the conscience of men ever again becomes sensitive, these expulsions will be remembered to the undying shame of all who committed or connived at them … The Germans were expelled, not just with an absence of over-nice consideration, but with the very maximum of brutality.”

One would have thought that the enormity of the crimes committed against Germans in the years 1945 to 1949, just because they were Germans, would have created a precedent to abolish forever the horror of mass population transfers.  Yet, in the 1990s the world witnessed the obscenity of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, which gave the Security Council the opportunity to establish the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.  Even the judgments of the ICTY did not end our addiction to collective guilt paradigms.  Whereas in the 1940s and 1950s the Germans were universally seen as collectively guilty for the Nazis, now at the beginning of the 21st century, many people perceived the Serbians as collectively guilty for Slobodan Milosevic.

Alas, the spirit of collective guilt and collective punishment has not disappeared from the world.  We see collective punishment against entire civilian populations in the blockades imposed against people considered unilaterally by some countries as dangerous or hostile.  One of the worst expressions of collective hatred is the imposition of unilateral coercive measures ostensibly against governments, but in reality against peoples.  Such unilateral coercive measures constitute a new form of warfare, hybrid warfare, non-conventional warfare – which kills as viciously as bullets.  The principal practitioners of UCMs are the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union.  Such UCMs have been imposed on countries opposed to the unipolar world demanded by the US. To make matters worse, those countries that impose UCMs dare invoke human rights in order to justify the unjustifiable.  It is no less than a sacrilege, a blasphemy, to falsely accuse the victims of committing human rights violations, in order to render the UCMs more palatable by claiming that the measures are intended to bring about a democratic change of government.

An excerpt from, “Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl on Collective Guilt” By Barry Brownstein, Intellectual Takeout, April 24, 2024:

In his essay “The Case for Tragic Optimism,” published as an addendum to Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl further explains why he rejects the concept of “collective guilt.” It is, he wrote, “totally unjustified to hold one person responsible for the behavior of another person or a collective of persons.” To make his point, Frankl shared this story:

An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, ‘How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler’s language?’  In response, I asked her if she had knives in her kitchen, and when she answered that she did, I acted dismayed and shocked, exclaiming,  ‘How can you still use knives after so many killers have used them to stab and murder their victims?’

. . .Frankl would maintain that wrongdoing in the world cannot be attributed to group identity.

Man’s Search for Meaning is one of humanity’s most influential books because of its power to guide human beings to flourish by making meaning in their lives. The basis of making meaning is taking responsibility.

Those who are taught they are victims are taught to shift responsibility for their decisions onto someone else. Frankl didn’t live to see DEI initiatives or our modern culture of victimhood, but his words help us pierce the illusion of collective guilt and ground ourselves in truth: “No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.”