Collective Responsibility Is Real, But Guilt Is Always Individual
There is a phrase I keep hearing, and every time I hear it I feel a chill, because I know exactly where it leads. The phrase goes: if Russians don’t pour into the streets to stop this war, then they are all accomplices — every last one of them. It is meant to sound morally uncompromising. In fact it is the opposite. It is a slogan that hands an enormous, undeserved gift to the very people who started the killing. And I want to explain, as carefully as I can, why I believe collective responsibility is real and inescapable — and why collective guilt is a poison that has only ever produced fascism and Bolshevism. ...