What's Really Important While recently watching the movie "The Reader," based on a novel about a former female Nazi concentration camp guard being tried in Germany in 1958 for war crimes, a question crossed my mind. In real life, how many of the outraged adults on the panel of judges or spectators at that trial would have in some way shared some complicity for what happened in their nation in the late 1930s and early 1940s by reason of knowing that something heinous was occurring and not objecting? The concentration camps didn't exist in a vacuum - they were spread throughout Germany, employed tens of thousands of Germans, and housed millions of prisoners, not to mention the stink in the air from the ovens burning bodies. Did they realize these atrocities were committed in the name of the German people (as are the occurrences of every war), and did they suspect how long the stigma of guilt would hang over them and their nation when it finally ended? And what if there had been no war crimes tribunals?
Now I'm not in any way comparing the level of abuse of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and other facilities around the world with the treatment of the Holocaust victims - the degrees of difference are too enormous to consider. The comparison I do make, and what deeply bothers and offends me, is that the American Government aka the Bush Administration did choose to sanction torture, and that that decision ultimately reflects on all Americans. Thus, our Republic, albeit a very questionable one (Democracy is too funny to consider seriously), becomes responsible for such actions, and by default "we the people."
Will America, as did Germany, purge the guilt and attempt to reclaim its honor by punishing those grossly misusing governmental authority, or will it ignore their decisions, condone those actions, and effectively set a precedent for their reoccurrence in the future? Will those of us who stood against the Iraq War and torture be exonerated or actually end up sharing some complicity in this whole mess?
