The Outcome of Collective Guilt Trips

As examples from America and Israel show, the result of national guilt trips is not good. If we'd stop feeling guilty for everything--by the way, stop and look at who's making us feel guilty in the first place (!)--and stand up for our principles, there'd be a lot less violence in the world.


In his column today, Thomas Sowell had this interesting observation.

During the 1960s, the idea spread like wildfire that whatever you were lacking was someone else's fault — society's fault. If you were poor, whether at home or in some Third World country, you were one of the "dispossessed" — even if you had never possessed anything to dispossess you of.

The urban ghetto riots that swept across the country during the 1960s were all blamed on society. This view was formalized in a much-hailed report on urban violence by a national "blue ribbon" commission headed by Gov. Otto Kerner of Illinois.

This sweeping and heady vision made it unnecessary to stoop to anything so mundane as hard facts — which would have included the fact that urban riots struck most often and most violently when and where this collective guilt vision prevailed.

Southern cities, where at that time discrimination and poverty were more pronounced than in the rest of the country, were not nearly as often or as hard-hit as cities outside the South.

Dore Gold made the following note on page 5 of his recent book, The Fight for Jerusalem.

The Palestinians claimed the violence bgan as a spontaneous reaction to Sharon's visit to the temple mount. But Arafat's minister of communications...freely admitted the planned, organized nature of the campaign... "Whoever thinks the Intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon's visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque is wrong," he explained. "The intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat's return from the Camp David negotiations."

Palestinians aren't stupid. They can see someone's weakness when they intend on giving away the farm.

Israel in the summer of 2006 fell victim to public opinion, fueled by bought-and-paid-for Islamists like Juan Cole and al Jazeera. Israelis felt not nearly as much guilt as did the Americans, but the minor Israeli and major American guilt was milked for all its propaganda value by the anti-freemen in cheering the Hizballah troops.

Bullies do this. Packs of wolves exhibit this behavior. People who are in the wrong are emboldened by weak behavior from people who are right. My goodness we have a lot of guilty people in this country. It's ironic that when we stop being able to feel guilt for things that are really wrong, we have a craving to replace it with guilt that is misplaced. Another sad thing is that a lot of the rest of Americans, including such organizations as the Council on American Islamic Relations, are preying on our guilt. Is it any wonder poor excuses for human beings continue to target innocent Iraqi civilians? They salivate at our guilt. And we continue to exhibit it. It is not Bush's fault that people are killing each other in Iraq. Nor is it yours!

It's time to get our butts off our stinky couches, turn off our boob tubes, and start finding out what's really going on in the world today. We need to stop feeling guilty for the things we're doing right, especially when those who have destroyed in their own countries everything we hold dear are the ones making the accusations.

There are things to feel guilty for. Supporting a fledgling democracy is not one of them.