----- Original Message -----
From: "Edmund Hardy" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, August 07, 2005 4:43 PM
Subject: Re: Not exactly Hiroshima but about unhealed wounds
> "In such circumstances, Japanese guilt and American guilt become somewhat
> problematic. To survive as an idea it must become a form of original sin;
> and that hasn't been a great success as a liberating idea."
>
> But I don't think it does survive "as an idea", in the sense of guilt as
> personal responsibility, but rather as a function of the historicity of
> the social and political context of living in a culture, components of
> which have, in the past, condoned or acted in a particular way. It's this
> historicity that we face, or track, and the way we do has implications for
> how we act now, within and through a public life.
>
> As for country or nation as person, "Japan feels", "England expects", then
> this is a way of thinking which is a social fact, and because of that, we
> need to consider them seriously. For example, the way that the idea of
> "America" was a very potent one for many who emigrated there from, say,
> Greece during the twentieth century, which might have been expressed as
> "America will...", "America feels". If lots of people In London have said
> a very similar thing about the July bombings, then I think it's fine to
> say, "There is a feeling among Londoners", which isn't to say "London
> feels..."
>
> Unless some mythic creature rises and proclaims itself "Albion", or
> "humanity", obviously...
Reminds me of my grandmother who, so the story goes, used to comment on the
WW2 news: "Now if *I was England . . . (I would do such and such)."
joanna
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