ABSTRACT
For the internalization of guilt or shame to be effective, there must be a set of external, and usually political, restraints on behavior. Social systems provide a continuum; it is only when one examines the poles of this continuum that the extent of the differences in human organization becomes apparent. Communist societies claiming international socialist economies are no less brutal, and are arguably more so, than are fascist societies claiming national socialist economies. The genocide committed against the Armenian people illustrates how different facets of state authority, and even overlapping state authorities as such, serve to generate an appropriate ideology to perform the necessary nationalist dirty work. A major category left unresolved by such an interior or national model is the function of genocide due to imperial aggression or foreign intervention. Guilt societies are less concerned with psychological manifestations than with the sociological recognition of wrongdoing.
