Are We Guilty?

 Over the summer, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney indelibly (and correctly) said that the U.S. had essentially "attacked" his country in an unprovoked act of trade aggression. "America has changed, [...] and we will not return to our old relationship," he said. 

I was of course entirely with him on the merits. The Trump administration had started harassing Canada, belittling its nationhood, threatening to annex its territory, and using strong-arm trade war tactics to try to force it to cede sovereignty—all totally without provocation. It was and is an insanely gratuitous sabotage of a centuries-old friendship and alliance. 

Yet, I recall thinking that Carney's phrasing felt odd. What does he mean about "America" this, and "United States" that? I wanted to know. Doesn't he know that this is just Trump being a freak? Doesn't he know that no American other than the deranged narcissist who by a quirk of fate happens to sit in the Oval Office would be blowing up our bilateral relationship in this way for no reason?

The same goes for Trump's sabre-rattling against our NATO ally Denmark and his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, etc. I always expect our rational allies to join us in rolling our eyes at Trump, saying "there he goes again; this is gonna be a long four years." I never expect them to think the rest of us approve of this, or even have anything to do with it ourselves. 

Don't they know we're just as trapped by this madman as they are? 

But there are actually some good reasons both for our allies to fear Trump more than we do—and to blame us collectively for his actions. First of all, we Americans are in some ways actually less trapped than the rest of the world. We have some constitutional checks and a legal system we can appeal to if Trump abuses our rights. 

By contrast, Trump's power in the international domain is essentially constrained by no force other than what he has called "his own morality" (and god help the person who has to depend on that). There is virtually no judicial review of his use of American military hegemony or our control of the global financial system. If Trump wants to impose sanctions tomorrow on our closest allies and freeze them out of the global banking system for cooperating with the ICC, he can do so. 

Then there's the fact that our own country often falls into the lazy habit of attributing collective guilt to the citizens of other nations; so why should we expect to be treated any differently? 

Are the Russians all guilty of Putin's invasion of Ukraine? The suggestion is insulting, given the number of Russians who were willing to lose their freedom and be disappeared into the dreaded Russian prison system in order to march in protest against the war. Yet, we are sanctioning all of Russia collectively for Putin's invasion—a policy that does not and perhaps cannot distinguish dissenters from war-mongers. 

In his classic essay on "The Responsibility of Peoples," Dwight Macdonald argues that the notion of collective guilt among civilian populations is essentially a form of modern animism—attributing shared personality to a mass of distinct individuals only by a kind of mythological fiction. 

Macdonald was mostly examining the question of whether the German people as a whole could be considered guilty for the crimes of Nazism; but his reasoning applies to any political situation involving the abuses of a modern state.

He observes that the Nazi propaganda apparatus never had nearly as much success in stirring up mob violence against Jewish citizens as it hoped to incite. While the state and its goons promoted a ceaseless stream of antisemitic hate, he writes, they generally had to inflict the violence they sought themselves. "[T]he crowds that watched these organized atrocities were silent and withdrawn when they did not venture to express their disapproval," Macdonald writes. 

This seems reminiscent of the way our own regime conducts its would-be pogroms. The Trump administration spent months trying to orchestrate a hate campaign against Somali refugees in Minnesota and Haitian asylum-seekers in Ohio. They posted endless hate content and white nationalist slogans on social media. Trump directly called Somali people "garbage" and said no less heinous things about Haitians. 

Yet, in the end, they had to send in their own jackbooted thugs to carry out the violence they sought. The people of Minnesota and Ohio were mostly appalled at these unprovoked attacks on their neighbors. Many went out in protest. Two of them lost their lives because they dared to oppose the administration's hate campaign. Even those who refrained from protesting almost universally disapproved of the government sending troops to their streets. 

The ceaseless stream of white nationalist and Neo-Nazi extremist content coming from our official DHS channels, then, didn't succeed in stirring up any kind of genuine mass sentiment against Somalis and Haitians. When J.D. Vance pounded the table to emphasize his agreement with Trump's racist smears against Somalis, he perhaps illustrated the depths of degradation and moral humiliation which a human being can plumb. But his act was not reciprocated by other Americans who do not organize their entire lives around flattering Trump.

In the end, if the administration wants a pogrom, they have found they have to send in their own hired thugs in body armor and with assault weapons at the ready to carry it out. 

It may be the case that the sort of American like Renee Good or Alex Pretti who gives up their lives to protect the rights of others is a rare specimen. Most people, Macdonald observes, are not heroes. 

So too, one could say of the Russians that the number of them who chose exile or jail rather than be complicit in Putin's war was small relative to the overall population. If the mass of people really wanted to overthrow Putin, why haven't they done so? 

Macdonald observes that the same argument could be applied with even more force to democratic nations like ours. If we said to the Germans, "why didn't you get rid of Hitler [...] they can say: But you people (in America and England, at least) merely had to vote against your Government to overthrow it, while we risked our necks if we even talked against ours." 

Indeed. This is why I say that for an American to talk about the collective guilt of the Russian people, while dissidents still languish in Siberian prisons for marching against the war, is a kind of obscenity. We don't even have the excuse that our own government's wars of aggression and human rights atrocities against refugees and civilian populations occurred without any expression of our consent. After all, we chose to elect Trump twice to federal office. 

"But this is monstrous, you say?" Macdonald writes; "We, the people didn't do these things. They were done by a few political leaders[...] In any case, I can accept no responsibility for such horrors. I and most of the people I know are vigorously opposed to such policies[.]" 

That was essentially my gut response to Mark Carney's comments above. 

Yet, Macdonald points out, Roosevelt lost little public support because of principled human rights objections to saturation bombing of civilian populations, or turning away boats full of Jewish refugees from Europe, or interning Japanese Americans in concentration camps. "How many votes did Roosevelt's refugee policy cost him?" Macdonald asks. 

So too, liberal intellectuals have spent years pulling out their hair over the fact that most American voters don't seem to respond to messaging about how Trump threatens democracy or human rights or other abstractions. Instead, the thing that appears to have doomed him in public opinion polls recently is the fact that his policies (like the Iran war) are now negatively impacting people's pocket books, by raising gas and consumer prices. "It's the economy, stupid," and all that. 

By comparison to the angry public reaction to paying more at the pump, Trump's illegal renditions to a torture prison in El Salvador, say, somehow provoked less of a response. Trump lost a lot fewer votes over his refugee policy than he did over inflation (the same goes for Biden, by the way—unless it was that he lost votes for being too welcoming of asylum-seekers, rather than for keeping Title 42 and other unlawful anti-asylum policies in place as long as he did). 

"It is a fact," writes Macdonald, "that few people have the imagination or moral sensitivity to get very excited about actions which they don't participate in themselves (and hence about which they feel no personal responsibility)." (As Arthur Koestler argues, in his essay on why people disbelieve atrocity stories, there is a "tragic plane" and a "trivial plane" of life, and most people cannot connect the two for long.) 

If this is true of many modern-day Americans, who doubtless feel that Trump's pogroms against stigmatized outgroups have nothing to do with them one way or the other, we must accept it is probably true of most Russians when they think about Putin's war. 

We could conclude from this either that everyone is guilty or that no one is; but certainly we cannot regard one state's civilian inhabitants as more inherently evil than another. Heroes may be rare in any nation; but so too are villains. The number of people actually and enthusiastically committed to Trump's extremist agenda is quite small in this country; just as we must assume the number of people in Russia who really support Putin's war is tiny. The problem is just that this small minority currently holds power. 

If we wish to insist that we are not guilty of Trump's crimes, then, we must be willing to extend the same privilege to civilians of any other nation. To quote Thomas Hardy: "Though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore does not mend the matter."