From the Women's Review October 2001 Letters column:
From the Women's Review October 2001 Letters column:
Dear Women’s Review:
How breezy Jane DeLynn is--"For me history also stops at the Holocaust and other exterminations seem mere afterthoughts; been there, done that" [reviewing Sonia Pilcer’s The Holocaust Kid, September 2001 issue]. If history stops at the Holocaust what's the point of remembering it? And to demand "personal accountability" from the "seemingly ordinary 'decent' citizens of countries like Germany, the USSR, Japan, China, Rwanda, or the former Yugoslavia"--what is this babble? Who is Jane DeLynn to declare whole populations guilty and all survivors of atrocities personally accountable for the atrocity? Has she visited Hiroshima lately? Or lower Manhattan? Been there? Done that? Maybe if she went a little deeper into her Buddhism she'd hit on the First Noble Truth.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Portland, ORJane DeLynn replies:
How breezy Ursula Le Guin is re her assumptions of others’ experience! As a matter of fact I haven’t just visited lower Manhattan lately--I live there, south of Canal, the part that’s patrolled by cops and National Guardsman. I also was in Saudi Arabia, and later Kuwait City, for two months covering the Gulf War. Not that I see the relevance of this. Surely she’s not saying atrocities don’t count unless they’re experienced first-hand, is she? Or that because suffering exists (First Noble Truth) we should do nothing to alleviate it? The whole problem, as I see it, is that we don’t have empathy for what doesn’t touch us personally--in our own or others’ countries--and not just those things that are caused by acts of war.
What most disturbs her is my discussion of personal accountability for citizens in countries that commit large-scale atrocities. As it is, the greater the crime, the less the punishment. In the past, the atrocities were committed mostly by armies, and defeat tended to take care of that, but that is no longer the case. The emphasis on "Nuremberg"-type trials, which focus on a few symbolic scapegoats, only exacerbates the problem by tending to exonerate the many. This satisfies no one's sense of justice, and it certainly has not worked as a deterrent to ward off further atrocities. That it is difficult to show precisely what degree of culpability each citizen has does not mean that citizens, as a whole, have no culpability.
So--just as a thought experiment and seeing that we cannot imprison millions--suppose we take a rehabilitative approach, and force the perpetrators of evil to atone for that evil by doing good. E.g. after World War Two Germans could have performed two years of humanitarian service: help the Jews build Israel, work in DP camps, help rebuild destroyed Jewish homes and factories, Russian cities, etc. I mean every German, regardless of what they personally did or didn’t do in the war, for as members of a community they are atoning for a community to which they belonged with all its privileges and responsibilities. Ditto the Japanese in China, Malaysia, Manchuria. Harder when the atrocities committed are mainly within the borders of one country--but how about making Hutus work as servants in Tutsi families, or Khmer Rouge taking are of the orphaned and the maimed? How about, for that matter, sending US citizens to Vietnam and Cambodia to atone for the harm we perpetrated in those countries?
Hopelessly quixotic, I know--but if members of the Mormon faith manage to serve two year missions in foreign countries as a matter of course, should the perpetrators and passive bystanders to evil do less? That such a thing has not even been suggested merely shows how far the world is from even beginning to deal with these serious questions.
The Women’s Review of Books welcomes letters from readers, sent via email or regular mail. In our print edition, we print as many letters as we have space for; to make room for as many different voices as possible, we ask readers to keep their letters to a maximum of 300 words. Letters longer than this will most probably be cut, and we may find it necessary to cut even briefer letters. All letters must include name, complete postal address and telephone number, although writers may request that we withhold their names from publication. Letters may be sent to The Editor, The Women’s Review of Books, Wellesley College, Wellesley MA 02481, emailed to lgardiner@wellesley.edu, or use our Letters to the Editor form on this website.