I don’t want to identify her, so I’ll call her Karen. We aren’t friends anymore, but I’ve thought about our final interaction a number of times as things continue to get worse, and I wonder if she’s changed her mind now, if she’s finally acknowledged the harm the current Abomination in power has done to vulnerable humans—no, I don’t wonder; I know she has not, and I know she will not.
Karen came to her own defense several times over the years, protesting that my judgment was unfair. After this specific disaster began in earnest back in 2016, I raged and ranted publicly and even penned a book about white evangelicalism’s unmasking. I never said anything specifically about her specifically, but she sometimes took it that way.
In our last, and possibly final, exchange, she wrote, “I am a good person.”
My response was that I couldn’t judge your heart, but I could look at your actions in support of a man who demonstrably was NOT a good person, a man who was doing real harm to humans, some of whom I knew personally and loved.
She responded briefly that she had written a long reply but then deleted it, wished me well, and that was it.
***
In the summer of 1945, the allies put up posters in towns and villages across Germany with photographs and stories from Bergen-Belsen, the camp where Ann Frank died, underscored by the accusation, “You are Guilty!” *
Karl Jaspers writes about these posters in a small book created from a series of lectures he delivered after the war. He published it under the title Die Schuldfrage (The Question of Guilt); when it came out in English translation, the New York publishers, apparently wanting to make sure the blame for the war remained squarely where it belonged, changed the title to The Question of German Guilt, and in it Jaspers does explore the guilt carried by Germans for the Nazi atrocities.
Jaspers tells us that many of the people in these villages had truly not known of the atrocities and they were horrified. They were also defensive and protested that the accusation was unfair—how do you hold us guilty for something we did not know? Jaspers had known, however. He had remained anti-Nazi in Germany throughout the war, but admits, “We survivors… did not go into the streets when our Jewish friends were led away,” and so these lectures were something other than disinterested scholarship.
As a way of trying to figure out who in Germany was guilty of what, Jaspers comes up with four categories of guilt: criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt, and metaphysical guilt.
Criminal guilt is the easiest to identify, though holding the guilty to account might not be. There’s no shortage of criminal activity I could point to, but let’s just focus on ICE for now: guilt goes all the way from the agents brutalizing, and occasionally murdering, human beings in the streets, to those staffing the for-profit concentration camps, to the owners of those camps raking in taxpayers’ money for the imprisonment and torture of human beings—as I write this, according to ICE Tracker, it is 554,011 souls and counting, 75% with no criminal record whatsoever.
It stands to get worse. The Abomination has plans to build out an archipelago of these concentration camps to imprison hundreds of thousands more humans—don’t think for a minute this is just for immigrants. Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac report for The New York Times, “the Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.” They’re not demanding that information out of sheer curiosity.
There is talk of turning concentration camps into forced labor camps, which would leave only the extermination camps to begin the genocide, while official government websites post neo-Nazi slogans and AI created iconography that harkens back to Nazi Germany’s race-doctrine propaganda posters. There will be evidence; photographs and videos will emerge. Crime eventually meets with punishment, though not always, and Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, thinking of the Holocaust, uses the term “radical evil” to describe a guilt so enormous that it can neither be punished nor forgiven.
***
Regarding political guilt, Jaspers writes, “Everybody is co-responsible for the way he is governed.” He goes on to claim that when a nation is found guilty of crimes against humanity, all of its citizens are liable and must suffer under whatever judgment is rendered.
***
Moral guilt is personal. Though people may be guilty of the same moral failings, everyone must shoulder their own and no one else’s. When the news reports that ICE is brutalizing humans, that ICE has killed another human, the metonymy gives cover for individuals who might never face the consequences of their criminal acts but will have to individually face or flee their own moral guilt.
Those who do not commit the crimes but approve of the actions of the Abomination’s thugs… After the police officer strangled a Black man to death with his knee in Minneapolis, I saw the video Karen approvingly posted of someone running into the street and ripping down a Black Lives Matter flag, and writing under it, “That would be me.” When the Abomination responded to the 1619 Project with the white nationalist 1776 Commission, Karen turned up on social media in a tee shirt with 1776 emblazoned across the chest.
It’s not just ardent supporters who carry moral guilt though. Jaspers writes that “many [Germans] were outraged and many deeply moved by horror,” but “even more went right on with their activities, undisturbed in their social life and amusements.” That indifference, he writes, is also moral guilt.
Jaspers defines metaphysical guilt as a failure to “live unconditionally,” that is, to live in the belief that every human life is just as precious as your own. This is not exclusively a Christian virtue, but Jesus clearly does call on his followers to love your neighbor “as yourself.” **
Karen will have to deal with what moral guilt she might have, but I cannot act as if we just have a difference of opinion and should agree to disagree and set it aside. Rural Germans might well not have known what was going on; they didn’t have televisions and their radios spewed nothing but propaganda.
I know Karen would take issue with my characterization of the situation. I know her news universe and mine are a Venn diagram of a disjoint set, the circles don’t touch. I also know she isn’t among the low-IQ, low-information MAGAs we read about. She’s smart and she’s educated, which only makes it worse. What she is doing right now is tantamount to the Germans in the 30s who did know and yet continued to support murderous Nazi Brownshirts.
For those of us who openly oppose the current Abomination, if their violence continues to spread, it will not just be people in Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, who have to decide whether or not to put our lives on the line in defense of our fellow humans. Jaspers characterizes the thousands of German citizens who openly fought the regime as those who sought death and found it. He goes on:
We survivors did not seek it. We did not go into the streets when our Jewish friends were led away; we did not scream until we too were destroyed. We preferred to stay alive, on the feeble, if logical, ground that our death could not have helped anyone. We are guilty of being alive. We know before God and it deeply humiliates us.
Jaspers admits that these categories “are, of course, not absolutely valid.” He is not only a public intellectual attempting to clarify the German situation after the war; he is a man trying to make sense of what he has survived, a broken man but a man very much alive. He doesn’t keep his distance by sticking with the plural in describing metaphysical guilt. He steps out from the crowd and makes his confession: “That I live after such a thing has happened weighs upon me as indelible guilt.”
*The version I found online: Diese Schandtaten: Eure Schuld! (These Atrocities: They are Your Fault!) The photographs are truly horrific, so I leave it up to you.
** For Jesus’ answer to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” see Luke 10: 25-37
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