A recently published book asserts that IBM's German subsidiary manufactured and designed the Hollerith punch-cards that assisted the Nazis in persecuting the Jews from 1939 to 1945. On the same day the book hit the shelves, a lawsuit was thrown against IBM for assisting in the Holocaust. An outcry comes from radical African American members of the National Reparations Convention for trillions of dollars in reparations for hundreds of years of slavery and discrimination. Smith & Wesson, a venerable handgun manufacturer, is forced by various city governments to bear total responsibility for the sale of all guns to criminals and sanction all the sales of S&W dealers.
The Feminist Majority seeks to educate people about the systematic inequities that society forces on women, denying them their fair $523,000 over the course of their working lives. It seems that any imagined or perceived insult to any party -- no matter how long ago, how indirect or how loosely connected -- is cause for reparations. Everyone with an IBM employee number is a part of a party who insulted every single Jew by providing the machines to the Nazis to efficiently murder six million. Every member of society is liable for the sins of their fathers in discrimination against blacks and women. Every S&W manager is responsible for every single gun that was ever used in a crime.
Guilt -- by corporations, the Caucasian race, by males -- runs rampant through our society. Whenever something is wrong or unequal, we shout that someone must be responsible. Responsibility for any negative effect, potential or extant, separated through whatever time and space and levels of responsibility, is borne by all for all. Here is a list of my crimes:
I supported George Bush, who supported John Ashcroft, who is ardently pro-life. I am a misogynist pig.
I wrote a program for the PalmPilot that increases the efficiency of data entry and importation. I have thus contributed to the "digital divide" by increasing the capital of all the tech-savvy workers and unemploying the noble but uneducated who can't use Palm Pilots.
I paid taxes to the United States Government. I helped the same institution that supported the School of the Americas, the slaughter of 1.6 million Vietnamese, Edgar Hoover and various other nasty things.
Please forgive me! It's all my fault as a male oppressor capitalist tax payer that everything is bad. I have total responsibility for everything that happens as a result of my actions! I ought to pay now! Here!
Yet obviously there have been some sins committed against me and my factions:
I fell down at the Skiway. It isn't because of my lack of skill, it's because the Skiway didn't put up a sign warning me against the hill, my instructor pointed us down that hill, and other skiers had made the snow uneven.
I lost some cash in the stock market. This is because the damned other NASDAQ investors inflated the value of the companies, sweeping me up in the Internet hysteria.
I'm a Filipino-American and the Philippine economy is terrible right now. This is obviously because of American and Spanish imperialism (as well as Japanese conquest for three years), all of whom robbed and subjugated the country from 1500 to 1946.
However, there is a large difference between me and the National Reparations Convention, the Holocaust survivors, the mayors of crime-ridden cities and the Feminist Majority. I decide to forgive. There was no way that anyone could have known how terrible the snow was for people as bad at skiing as me. Ultimately, the decision to invest in BUY.com was mine and mine alone. And there were so many influences in recent Filipino history that could have made the country into, if not Hong Kong, at least Korea. Therefore America and Spain bear no blame.
Speaking more generally, we can say that while the Holocaust may have been abetted by IBM's employees, it certainly wouldn't have stopped had they laid down their machine tools. Could one expect 1930's Germans to realize the magnitude of the crime they were committing? Indeed, slavery and discrimination happened centuries ago and there has been 30 years of civil rights -- plenty of time for all Americans to achieve the goals they would have wanted as individuals. Why should we redistribute based on the notion that American society unanimously oppressed each and every African American man and woman? And I doubt that S&W's purchase policies had anything to do with more than a few gun deaths, given that a criminal could choose a Beretta, a Ruger or a Colt pistol to commit their dastardly deeds.
The nitpicking of lawsuits based on shaky ground relieves Americans of the need to control our destiny. By constantly seeking reasons why circumstances have changed we avoid our own free will. We lose our liberty when we cede more and more of our present circumstances to predestination. Were we all to follow the infinite causal chain that these mendacious lawyers predicate, we would be unable to do anything for fear of the terrible responsibility for what was to come. We must stop this. I declare, here and now, that IBM could have done nothing to make the Holocaust any less bad than it was. I declare, here and now, that I am responsible for my own lack of foresight for investing in BUY.com. I declare that I am not a racist for increasing the efficiency of data input. I declare that Smith & Wesson is only responsible for the manufacture of their weapons and that to expect anything else is to blither about in the abyss of free will.
And I declare that I am a free agent. I am not part of a male conspiracy to shut down women. I am not a part of the society that discriminated against blacks 30 years ago. I act as an individual. And I absolve myself of any of the collective guilt that people who share certain of my aspects may bear. The National Reparations Convention will have to get their money from someone else. America is not a society composed of squabbling factions. Yugoslavia, yes, or maybe another one of those tin-pot European or Asian states. We stand as individuals linked by a common love for liberty.
