Living in the Fourth Reich

BBC World News had a story a week from Sunday in which a reporter went to Serbia to cover the homegrown (if very small) movement for a national apology for the massacre at Srebrenica. The video clip was of a debate over responsibility for the killing of over 5,000 (exact number unknown) residents of the Bosnian Muslim town. Mass graves are still being turned up in the area now, almost ten years after the war's end. Anyway, the debate devolved quickly into older attendees chanting the names of fugitive Serbian war criminals and the youth shouting "fascist!" at their parents and elders. Interviews with people on the street revealed mainly ambivalence about dealing with the event in the name of the national conscience. One young man, however, said that he felt bad and that he believed the country should be shamed in atonement.

Germany, it occurs to me, had a similar problem, but on a grander scale. Generations of German youth came up not only reviling their parents and grandparents for their docility or complicity in the actions of the Nazi regime, but also hating their homeland and refusing to use certain words that evoked memories of the war. They have been a long time in working through that internal conflict, and Germany as a nation hasn't completely dealt with its legacy.

What will the United States do in ten years? Smile, shop, drive, and pretend nothing happened? Sure, for a while. Look back at Fahrenheit 9/11 and see the reaction to the Iraqi woman whose son was killed by US troops. Look at the American woman whose son was killed in Iraq. Now look at all the grinning white faces whose children will never die in a foreign war. Do they care? Isn't it obvious that they don't?

But somewhere down the line, we WILL care. As a nation, we will want to reconcile our principles with our actions; we will get tired of suppressing our guilt. And then what will we do? Will we be shamed, as a nation, for our actions? Does that concept even exist in our culture? We have never, as a nation or as a people that thinks it understands its own history, admitted wrong or made atonement. Recall: 110,000 ordinary people were vaporized in one week in 1945. Historians, and that's about the extent of it, debate whether atonement is necessary--sixty years later.

Start planning your legacy now. Your children will ask you about what you did while the United States was murdering the planet, and you'd better have a good answer. Mass murder on the scale of Iraq and Afghanistan has never been carried out by this country before, for this duration, for this goal, and by these means. This is an unique and horrific situation. And it will be back to haunt us. What are you going to do when that happens?