The Sin of Passivity

What do you say to a man who stands by and watches when another is being killed nearby ? Or more precisely what does that man say for himself. That there was little he could do against armed murderers; that he didn't know the murdered man or maybe and most likely, that he saw nothing. Any one of these answers comes from those of us who were in Delhi in 1984 or in Mumbai in 1992 or in Gujarat in 2004. They are good enough to save face or even to avoid accepting any blame. But what of a lifetime of guilt. Can we avoid that? Avoid thinking of the little boy whose life may have been saved if we had as much as taken him home.

It seems people can and did. Time magazine's cover story on Hitler "The Betrayer" in its issue dated May 7, 1945, has this damning indictment of a people who had been thoroughly defeated and discredited by then.

"In all the various emotions which the Germans are feeling now—fear, anger, hopelessness, bitterness, shame, servility and helplessness—there is one which you will rarely find and that is a sense of guilt, the sense of being responsible personally and as a nation for what has happened.
Most Germans realize now or profess to realize that this war was unnecessary and wrong. But they still don't go beyond that to the salient realization that Naziism and everything that went with it was wrong. The main reason the war seems wrong to them is because they lost it. They place the blame on Hitler because he got them into it; if he had won the war few people in Germany today would be concerned with the question of whether the war was right or wrong."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,797474-1,00.html

Funny thing is, it's probably that absence of debilitating guilt which allowed the post war generation to rebuild a ruined nation into the European powerhouse we have today.