The Strange Principle of Class Guilt

 

The idea that because one member of a group, or "class" of people is guilty of a crime means that all people of that class ought to be punished is a prickly pear of an idea.

This is slightly different from the idea of punishing a group because within it, a criminal class is "hiding behind the skirts" of some members of the group, but the two are really one in the same in practice, as what is really being said is that those people providing the skirts ought to resist the criminal element and offer them up for punishment and if they do not, well then you kill every one.

It also says, of course, that you see all the people in a group as being indistinguishable: Don't you know, all (fill in the blank) Negroes, Chinese, Vietnamese, Jews look alike to you. Their individual facial features do not register with you; they are simply Negro, Asian, Jews to you.

This is the idea which operated behind lynching a randomly caught Negro as a warning to others, after a white woman reported she was raped by a Black man.

What of "class guilt"?

During the American Civil War, Lincoln's favorite general, Ulysses S. Grant, was outraged by reports of Jewish merchants who were selling captured bales of cotton on a black market and illegally profiting. He then issued this order, Field Order #11:

“The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department.”

This resulted in thirty Jewish families living in the Department of Tennessee being forcibly ejected from their homes and expelled. To Grant, all Jews were the same; all were guilty, because, you know, the Merchant of Venice.

Lincoln, being a lawyer, and understanding justice, and having read Shakespeare,  promptly slapped Grant down on this and told him, "You cannot punish a class of people for the transgressions of a few."

After the assassination of Hitler's beloved lieutenant, Reinhard Heydrich, near the village of Lidice, in what is now Czechoslovakia,  the Germans simply killed everyone--men, women and children-- in the village as a warning, a punishment and an instrument of terror. An Aryan fair haired boy had been murdered; a  class of human beings (non German members of a nearby village) was exterminated.

Heydrich, the Aryan

Memorial to the Lost Children of Lidice

Later, during the Vietnam War, American soldiers, being mostly non Asian, came to see all Vietnamese villagers as untrustworthy. They established "free fire zones" and killed anyone living in them to "destroy that village to free it." The village of My Lai paid the price of this attitude, and infants, mothers, fathers were laid to waste. The Viet Cong were operating in the vicinity and the Americans couldn't tell Viet Cong from garden variety Vietnamese villagers, so just shoot them all. Notice the mothers cradling their babies.

My Lai: Paying the Price of Living While Vietnamese

Now, the same thing is being promulgated in Gaza by Netanyahu:  Because there are Hamas living among the Palestinians in the department of Gazza, that geographic area must be cleansed of all Palestinians, and the presence of these miscreants among a class of human being, namely the Palestinians, justifies the killing of all those human beings; the whole class has to be eliminated from a territory.

Somehow, people still defend this.

Where is Lincoln, when we need him?