Some European friends were over to visit last night, and our conversation ranged all over the place.  One area where we spent considerable time was discussing various countries’ violence against others.  My German friend expressed a strong sense of collective responsibility for the crimes committed by Hitler before she was born.  I offered another opinion.

I told her that Germany had won my admiration by doing something I doubt any other country has done: explicitly admitting to the crimes committed in its name, and making sure that knowledge of them was an important part of every young German’s education.  
Japan has yet to follow suit, nor do other countries, particularly the US.  

Here so-called ‘patriots’ get upset when people focus on the crimes committed in our country’s name, and there have been plenty, particularly regarding Indians and slavery.  We are a culture where Lieutenant Calley’s massacre and mutilation of Vietnamese at My Lai,  a massacre and mutilation of the bodies stopped only when other far better Americans turned their guns on him and his troops and threatened to fire if they kept it up.  Our so-called ‘patriots’ did not honor Warrant Officer One Hugh Thompson, Jr.,  and the troops who brought the murders to an end, but they made a song about Lt. Calley as a man who did his duty into a national hit.

What if we and ever other country had a national holiday celebrating not our greatness but contemplating our misdeeds. Students would prepare reports and there could be television broadcasts and an address by the President.  The point is not to wallow in collective guilt, for truly, I suspect every people who has had both opportunity and power, has committed such crimes.  The entirely innocent are the entirely powerless.  Rather, the purpose is to kill the demented belief that somehow we are intrinsically better than another people.  Instead the message would be that any nation worthy of pride would include the willingness to acknowledge its misdeeds with every individual pledging they not recur on their watch.  At the moment Germans are head and shoulders above Americans in this regard.

But maybe there is hope.

I was delighted to discover this morning that the New York Times called for a serious investigation of the crimes of the Bush administration.  It has more guts than most Democrats and all Republicans to my knowledge.  Perhaps this could begin a cleansing of the American soul, and develop into a day of recognition not that we are uniquely bad, for we are not, but that when people let their better nature take a back seat, hideous crimes are committed in their name.  I suggest that the date for such a holiday would be when John Yoo submitted one of his depraved memos. 

Someone might wonder what this has to do with Paganism.  Quite a lot, I think.  Pagans are fairly unique in regarding our world as a sacred place.  Maybe it’s about time we started treating it like one.  A beginning would be to start recognizing when we have acted worse than beasts, and vow not to do it any more.

UPDATE
There are in fact a very few Republicans of note I have discovered who do support an investigation of Bush’s crimes.  They have more respect for the rule of law than Obama at this point.

UPDATE II.
Upon reflection, I think the best date for such a national observance would perhaps be the birthday for Warrant Officer One Hugh Thompson, Jr., the genuine hero of the My Lai atrocity. He could serve as an example other Americans could hope to emulate.  By contrast, the best thing for the country regarding John Yoo would be to send him to prison and then utterly forget everything about him but his crimes.