Could you elaborate on how you consider this Burkean? Thanks.

"I know a fair number of younger Germans who are obsessed with Germany's past, who rather than drawing lessons from it, wallow in its wrongs. They turn morose and depressed, and are forever defensive and apologetic about their country."

Some of my best friends...?

Burkean? Why not Judaic? A reparative view of history seems part and parcel of that particular heritage.

I had a friend in college, a German exchange student. She was outgoing, charming, and in general one of the most pleasant, fun, carefree people you'd ever meet. She took a part time job working for a caterer. She was sent to wait tables at, I believe, an anniversary party for an older Jewish couple. She was bringing coffee and clearing tables for a table of elderly people. One of them asked her a question, and she told me she was absolutely unable, no matter how hard she tried, to answer verbally, as she couldn't stand the thought of revealing her German accent to them. She was born in 1980; her parents probably weren't even alive in WWII.

This all sounds nice and good, but how do you tell people to take that guilt and turn it in to a nice healthy sense of communal responsibility? How could such a course be pursued, and what does it mean in practical terms.

The distinction he draws between communal responsibility and collective (or even hereditary) guilt is interesting. I think I am less of a communitarian than Etzioni is, but he's close to striking the right balance here.

Too often, thinking about these issues can slide into notions of collective punishment, and excuses for lazy, bigoted thinking about groups of people (sometimes couched in terms of demands for denunciation: "All people of group X must loudly denounce outrage Y NOW, or I will consider them collectively guilty", etc., etc.)

The whole point of remembering the holocaust is the promise, "Never Again." My instinct, if I were to encounter somebody who's wallowing in guilt, would be to say, "tell me what specific steps you've taken toward the goal of Never Again." If they couldn't answer with anything concrete, I would say "your sense of responsibility is pointless if you're not going to back it up with deeds."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/opinion/27appelfeld.html?pagewanted=all&position=

This is not a story with a happy ending. A doctor who survived, from a religious background, who sailed to Israel with us in June 1946, told us: "We didn't see God when we expected him, so we have no choice but to do what he was supposed to do: we will protect the weak, we will love, we will comfort. From now on, the responsibility is all ours."

Aharon Appelfeld

Burkean would have been called "conservative" by good old Russell Kirk, author of "The Conservative Mind", who was already being mocked by the emerging voices of "the Right" back in the mid-seventies. It goes even more to my point that whatever this "Right" movement is which uses the Republican party as its political expression is not conservative in economic, political, religious or moral values.

Commutarian? Burkean? Isn't he really talking about the stain of original sin - the sins of the father being vested on the heads of the sons for a thousand generations?

Eyzioni has brandnamed "communitarian". You didn't see Ray Charles drinking Coke, do you?

Stains of original sin? I'd say that's going a bit too far. Let's look at this commonsensical issue. If you call yourself "German" for instance, aren't you going to be connected to every trait that anyone who ever meets you, or reads about you, or hears about you, thinks of as a "German" trait?

All of us must bear the burden of our guilt until the debt is paid. The debt will always be paid.

The Germans have a very large debt.

Original sin works, well beyond just Germans. How many generations of not only Germans but everyone the broadest-defined western civilization, must accept to be, well, browbeaten into putting holocaust guilt at the forefront of their conscience? How many people must accept the colonized status of the Palestinians under the weight of communitarian guilt? Ami Eden's "Playing the Holocaust Card" in Saturday's NYT only begins to deal with this issue. It is, however, as urgent an issue as he stresses. Not just in Germany, but everywhere.

The thing to keep in mind about the Holocaust is that ANY of us could have done it. To quote Primo Levi at the end of one of very good books on his sojourn in Auschwitz: it's ridiculous to say that the Nazis were "inhuman", or even that they were innately more evil people than the averge person. They acted the way they did because the pure-chance swerves of history resulted in their growing up, from childhood on, in a society in which their parents, most of their friends and most of their teachers told them that Jews were monsters. Of course huge numbers of them believed it, as huge numbers of us would have believed it in the same situation. And once the chance trends of history produce the same situation again, the same thing will happen again -- as, indeed, it's already happened several times since.

The most terrifying aspect of the chance nature of history is not the threat it produces to our physical safety; it's realizing the tremendous limits that it slaps on what we fondly think of as our sanity. And the only hope for even partially reducing the extent to which people are bamboozled into acting like monsters in the future is for EVERYONE to be continually on guard, all the time, against that danger. Not just Germans.

Self-pity as self protection. It's contemptible.
Isreali liberals behave the same way.

This deserves to be applied closer to home.

What should our children do about US support for the Likud regime, and Labor before them? I would argue that this is not as bad as it would have been to support the nazis, but it's still pretty bad.

What about our acceptance of the iraq war? Suppose that we wind up unnecessarily killing 130,000 iraqis. That's a far cry from the 13 million in the death camps. One percent. And our population is maybe 10 times what the germans had? Can we say that it would only amount to one mili-holocaust? But then, we aren't finished with our proposed war on islamofascists. We might kill our unnecessary hundreds of millions yet.

Does it matter that the nazis believed they were basicly alone in the world, that no one would lift a finger to help them when they were in trouble? They had been right, it was true after WWI. They were fighting for their lives against the odds and they had few resources to spare for enemies who fell into their hands. We hardly have that excuse. Though we're starting to develop it. And the israelis have cultivated that attitude despite US support. Is it a valid excuse to mistreat people, that you believe you're in a desperate battle with people who'd do anything to destroy you?

It's so much easier to do the right thing when you're the richest nation in the world and there's no serious threat against you.

Is it right to hold the losers to higher standards than we hold ourselves? Maybe. They could have ended the agony sooner by surrendering sooner. They could have died with far less blood on their hands.

It's all pretty bleak. I'd rather not think about it. No one will call us to account unless we fail and lose, if we succeed in taking over the world no one will dare accuse us of our crimes. Much easier that way.

As to whether it is Burkean, it does remind me a bit of a famous passage from the Reflections:

"As the ends of [society] cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

But then you can find practically anything you want in Burke, whether you want to take the powers-that-be down a peg or whether you want to sanctify them. Just find some group which seems to be abusing power, whether they are the King's lackeys or a mob of revolutionaries, and Burke will give you some invective to hurl at them.

[Godwin's Law violation]

Guilt is meant to be a personal behavioral modification mechanism. When you transgress against another person or persons guilt instinctively lets you know it was wrong and a lesson is learned that will prevent you from repeating the transgression. The lesson learned is also a remedy for the guilt itself, it provides resolution. (Ah! I f*cked up but I understand that now, a veil of ignorance has been lifted and I can take comfort in the fact that I will not knowingly repeat the offense.) Trying to take on guilt for the actions of others in the community steps out of this personal framework altogether, short circuiting the intrinsic inner knowledge and losing the possibility of remedy and resolution.

I haven't read the other commenters' contributions but I have given to thought to this on this sad accosion.

All I would like to share as a Christian-by-culture Belgian born from other Belgians who were 1 year old when WWII ended is what a Jewish-French friend of mine, after whom I have named my son, told me on some quiet afternoon: all I wish is to live together with my wife and my adopted son in the most boring normality, here in the US or back in France, my country. And he added "I hate Likuniks because they are working against my dream".

On his behalf, my humble contribution to those whose humanity was undone in Auschwitz shall be to act in the most normal way towards my Jewish friends.

What is odd about Germans who are tortured by endless guilt -- or those who say they should be -- is that they are making the same sort of racist assumptions as the Nazis. They seem to think there is something inherently bad about Germans, some mark on their souls, just as anti-semites claim that Jews are bad and always will be.

The proper purpose of guilt, as Etzioni says, is to get use to correct our lives. You can't do that if you believe you are a devil.