ABSTRACT
The guilt is supposed to apply to everything and to everybody who is an American. Not to plead guilty, not to accept this burden of guilt, is only to confirm the guilt. This is not an individual guilt, such as would accrue after an arrest for drunken driving and a court sentence for the crime. This is collective responsibility for what every American does both in and out of government. Dotson Rader has put it this way, “When the young can internalize and accept as probable an early death, when they can welcome it and seek it out like terminal patients in unendurable pain, then everyone in this country is guilty, for the young contracted the disease of nihilism from the old.” Dr. Hannah Arendt has put her finger on the fallacy of collective guilt: its denial of a common humanity, what she called “the unitary origin of the human race”.
