In my View [9]

Should I feel guilty because a cow farmer in Taranaki is supporting his small family and his large bank balance on land that once supported thirty Maori families who did not possess bank balances? He is paying an absurdly low rent for his land. And it was men of my race who laid the foundations of this injustice. Nevertheless, it is not I who robbed the Maoris of their land; nor do I possess any part of that stolen property. And I am fully prepared, as now, to speak out against the social and racial injustice. Therefore I am not guilty about it. I feel grief and anger and annoyance that men of my race have done this kind of thing. But I am not prepared to take on board a burden of racial guilt.

Should a German, born, let us say, five years before the Second World War - that would make him about thirty-five years of age – feel national and racial guilt because of the Nazi atrocities against the Jews? Only, I think, if he fails to make publicly clear that he personally is neither pro-Nazi nor anti-Semitic. The son may feel some shame if his father were a sadist; but it is absurd that he should feel guilty on account of crimes he neither committed nor condoned. He may, if he so chooses, take it upon himself to pay some fraction of his father’s debts – to make some reparation, as the German Government has appropriately done, to relatives of the victims of those massacres. But he is not bound by conscience to do this; since he is not his father. In fact, if he is neurotically eager to do it, we may suspect that he does in some measure still identify himself with the attitudes of his father.

And what of the man who was an adult when the Nazi regime was in control of Germany, and who did not openly oppose it? Should he feel guilt? – I think he may. Yet we should remember that only a minority in this country – which is by no means totalitarian – are actively opposing our participation in a war where eighty per cent of the casualties are civilians, and that quite a number of us speak publicly in favour of the racist and repressive Smith regime in Rhodesia. I think that only a small handful of us would have risked likely torture and death by opposing the Nazi persecutions, if we had been born German citizens. I cannot be absolutely certain that I would have belonged to that handful; because I am a weak man with a horror of prolonged physical pain. The guilt that attaches itself to acquiescence does not belong to any page 44 particular nation. A great many of us acquiesced in the twice-repeated use of the atomic bomb in the Japanese sector of the War.

And what of the man who actually commits the crimes? I believe he can repent. His repentance should certainly include an effort towards reparation. But, since I am a Catholic Christian, I do not believe that any human being is incapable of repentance; and repentance frees us of guilt, though not of the sober knowledge that we have done great evils.

When the Japanese dories come inside the limits we have set, there are quite a few of us who say, ‘Ah, these Japs! They are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Remember how they acted in the prisoner-of-war camps . . .’. We would do better to remember our active or acquiescent part in the harm that was done to the Japanese, and repent for it. I do not believe we should spend our lives in sackcloth and ashes. That is the road of neurotic guilt which does not produce the freedom to love well. But we should make it plain that we distinguish between those who have committed crimes, those – like most of us – who have acquiesced, and those who have committed no crimes. And where crimes have been committed against ourselves it is our business to forgive them. There is no other way to end the bitter chain of cause and effect.

1969 (579)