-----Original Message-----
From: Edmund Hardy <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sunday, August 07, 2005 4:44 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,
I was denying that personal guilt can survive in the sense of guilt as
personal responsibility. So I do not understand your _but_.
Any <country's> guilt is problematic because the country is not the
perpetrator. And I was adding to that the awareness that, more and more, the
people who murdered their way through WWII are dead.
I don't feel any guilt as such for what happened then; and I want no one who
wasn't alive then to feel guilt. I do know that the potential to do the same
is in my make up, as it is in everyone's; and I want people to accept that
if they can. I don't feel it as guilt myself; but I am aware of it.
I am not saying I, as different from others, am capable of tyranny and
murder. I am saying every member of humanity is capable of tyranny and
murder. I believe it is so, but only on the basis of my all or nothing i.e.
I haven't looked into myself especially and found murder and tyranny. I just
see it everywhere.
> 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.
a function of the historicity of the social and political context of living
in a culture, eh? I'll need time to digest that. As we all live in cultures
and have a social and political context, I guess this means what I just
said. That anyone could have done it given the appropriate triggers.
I don't think there is any culture that has condoned or acted in a way
different to any other. It goes around. Some of us are being a bit ok now...
I used to think that about Sweden; then i found out about the Nordic League
and the enforced sterilisation... I used to be greatly moved by National Day
in Jugoslavia
>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.
???
Japan does not feel. England does not expect. Those are social facts. Some
people in Japan or Britain have got hold of the tannoy and reached some kind
of agreement about what to say. And they don't "I feel" because they want to
direct us away from where the power is. Sometimes they say "British Govt"
and it's nearly always interesting to try to see why; but it is always the
govt though sometimes they are only saying because someone else with money
tells them to
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".
I don't see that. I think you're mixing categories. "America will feel free"
/ "America feels safe", yes. But "America feels strongly about its
immigrants from Greece", no.
That people might have expressed their feelings by attributing words to a
virtual reality does not make those words to have happened
> 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..."
Well, I agree with that if it's a majority of Londoners, otherwise I want it
to be "There is a feeling among a minority of Londoners"
but as you say that isnt to say that London feels; because it doesn't
L
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