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I feel like I have to speak against the guilt you're referring to being unable to forgive. Collective guilt is only believed in by people who haven't thought th

I feel like I have to speak against the guilt you're referring to being unable to forgive. Collective guilt is only believed in by people who haven't thought through the horrific enormity of the implications and others who want them... it is also falsely implied by a partial reading of the scriptures. Yes, "the people of Israel" were lead into captivity or out of it together, but God used the Babylonians to save Jeremiah, and all of the poor in the area who were previously living innocently and with nothing got to take the vineyards and the farms, along with the prophet, who lived among them. Individual guilt can be synchronized by the same peer pressure forces as synchronize the movements in the histories of all sons of Adam equally. Nonetheless, it remains individual guilt even when it appears to rest on many people who did the same bad thing all at once.

deleted 3y ago
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giraffe_lady 3y ago
What a time to well-actually someone lol. Anyway it doesn't matter, it's not even my place to forgive here, that's not a power I have. They should never forgive us, all of us individually, each for our personal complicity in this.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  I don't think it is a small issue, collective guilt is the concept that justifies dropping bombs on homes where children live because of the horrific attack carried out by a government that stopped holding elections before they were born, that justified said attack being carried out against whoever the gunmen running out of the cage could find unprotected, and that justified the logic of every antisemitic conspiracy theory ever devised (which disagree on the "facts" but universally assume that there's a connection between allegations of distant events and Jewish people the reader might actually meet). It justifies the association of criticism for Israel with antisemitism being used to manufacture consent in the US, (through the implication that collective guilt is such an obvious principle that anyone who criticizes Israeli foreign policy must extend the blame to everyone supportive of their recognized religion, and consequently must be silenced before they express that which they are thus calculated to believe) and it is why hate groups have picked up the story and are trying to run with it, which is ideal for the enemies of the peace movement because the impression that belief in the existence of collective guilt is an immutable and universal fact in American culture (it isn't, nobody feels guilty over the disasters of the past 50 years; rather everyone imagines themselves part of the peace protests) makes it appear to people associated with Israel that denial is a matter of serious self-interest. I don't know of any other way to resist such an abstract bordering on philosophic evil but to annoy everyone with essays like this, yes, even at such a time... a time as we are living through and people no different from me will not.

deleted 3y ago

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giraffe_lady 3y ago

What a time to well-actually someone lol. Anyway it doesn't matter, it's not even my place to forgive here, that's not a power I have. They should never forgive us, all of us individually, each for our personal complicity in this.

whatshisface 3y ago
I don't think it is a small issue, collective guilt is the concept that justifies dropping bombs on homes where children live because of the horrific attack carried out by a government that stopped holding elections before they were born, that justified said attack being carried out against whoever the gunmen running out of the cage could find unprotected, and that justified the logic of every antisemitic conspiracy theory ever devised (which disagree on the "facts" but universally assume that there's a connection between allegations of distant events and Jewish people the reader might actually meet). It justifies the association of criticism for Israel with antisemitism being used to manufacture consent in the US, (through the implication that collective guilt is such an obvious principle that anyone who criticizes Israeli foreign policy must extend the blame to everyone supportive of their recognized religion, and consequently must be silenced before they express that which they are thus calculated to believe) and it is why hate groups have picked up the story and are trying to run with it, which is ideal for the enemies of the peace movement because the impression that belief in the existence of collective guilt is an immutable and universal fact in American culture (it isn't, nobody feels guilty over the disasters of the past 50 years; rather everyone imagines themselves part of the peace protests) makes it appear to people associated with Israel that denial is a matter of serious self-interest. I don't know of any other way to resist such an abstract bordering on philosophic evil but to annoy everyone with essays like this, yes, even at such a time... a time as we are living through and people no different from me will not.