The historian Ludwell H. Johnson III argued that “the job of the historian is not to pass judgment, but to try to understand.” By trying to understand the past, historians enrich our cultural heritage and help us to build on the achievements of our predecessors while, hopefully, avoiding their mistakes. History is, of course, a vital component of understanding the world in which we live today and the goals to which we should strive. But many of the debates now styled as “historical” are not about history at all—although they may seem to concern historical facts, the selected facts are those that can be used to induce guilt. In his 2002 book Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, Paul Gottfried explains how guilt serves as the weapon of the “therapeutic state.” The therapeutic state identifies our iniquities and informs us of how to make expiation and transform ourselves into model citizens. Gottfried gives the example of the role of the state in “modifying social behavior,” and “socializing ‘citizens’ through publicly controlled education and wars against discrimination.”
The function served by guilt, in assisting the efforts of the state to re-educate citizens, is to persuade people that they are indeed truly wicked and can only be redeemed through state interventions. Guilt plays a key role in persuading people that the “thought police” who restrict individual liberty are not the sinister tyrants depicted by George Orwell, but are really just there to help everyone avoid being as sinful as their forebears. History is mined for examples of collective guilt for the sins of the past. Gottfried observes that “such sins include, but are not exhausted by, sexism, homophobia, slavery, and a by now multifunctional Holocaust, guilt for which has been ascribed to Jewish indifference as well as to Christian malice.” Gottfried observes that the correction of these sins has resulted in widespread cultural acceptance of extensive restrictions on liberty:
Today in most Western countries, public speech and written publications that unsettle ethnic and racial minorities have undergone the process of criminalization. Among Americans the outlawing of environments and behaviors believed to offend women, gays, and other “minorities” has achieved the same repressive result as the numerous laws enacted against “crimes of opinion” in Europe.
In his essay “Guilt Sanctified,” Murray Rothbard also highlights the role of “guilt” in advancing state tyranny:
A brief rundown: guilt for centuries of slavery, guilt for the oppression and rape of women, guilt for the Holocaust, guilt for the existence of the handicapped, guilt for eating and killing animals, guilt for being fat, guilt for not recycling your garbage, guilt for “desecrating the Earth.”
The argument is not, of course, that these things are “good” or that nobody would be justified in viewing any of these things as “sinful,” but rather that moral guilt over these issues is used as a political weapon to browbeat people into supporting or at least tolerating coercion. There is a very important moral and ethical distinction between things that are wrong, and things that everyone must be coerced into doing or prohibited from doing by the state. If we value individual liberty, we cannot endorse political policies whose purpose is to coerce citizens—or any group of citizens—by the imposition of moral guilt.
An example is the persistent attempt to impose moral guilt on the American South for slavery that was abolished in 1865. The history of the South is said to be “about slavery” or—at the very least—some sort of “virtue-signaling” statement concerning slavery is demanded in any discussion of the South. It is almost impossible to mention any aspect of the South without automatically triggering superfluous moralizing over the evils of slavery. This is not a recent development. As early as 1865, the Radical Republicans commenced interpreting all political debates concerning the South as “about slavery.”
In a stunning display of “now see what you made us do,” the Republicans blamed the South for Lincoln’s decision to wage war against them—it was their own sins that had caused the war and the burning of civilian homes and farms. Thaddeus Stevens made speeches explaining that the purpose of Reconstruction was to punish the South for waging war on the North—even though all the South had done was to secede. This moralizing was carried through into the “reconstruction” of the South. Samuel W. Mitcham cites, as an example of the ideological links drawn for that purpose between war, secession, and Reconstruction, the Marxist historian James S. Allen:
Reconstruction was the continuation of the Civil War into a new phase, in which the revolution passed from the stage of armed conflict into primarily a political struggle which sought to consolidate the Northern Triumph.
Part of this political struggle involved imposing endless moral guilt on the South. Notions of revolt and secession which had always been associated with heroism in the context of the American Revolutionary War—undeterred by the fact that all the original colonies were “slave states”—were now deemed to be wicked and unconscionable in the context of Southern secession. Readers will be aware that Rothbard regarded the War for Southern Independence as a just war, and on the question of secession he wrote:
In 1861, the Southern states, believing correctly that their cherished institutions were under grave threat and assault from the federal government, decided to exercise their natural, contractual, and constitutional right to withdraw, to “secede” from that Union. The separate Southern states then exercised their contractual right as sovereign republics to come together in another confederation, the Confederate States of America.
In his comments on the breakup of Yugoslavia, Rothbard declared: “Let secessionists depart: would that all attempts at secession, including that of the South in 1861, been treated the same way!” This right to withdraw from the Union was expressed most clearly by Florida’s Ordinance of Session which stated:
We, the people of the State of Florida, in convention assembled, do solemnly ordain, publish, and declare, That the State of Florida hereby withdraws herself from the confederacy of States existing under the name of the United States of America and from the existing Government of the said States; and that all political connection between her and the Government of said States ought to be, and the same is hereby, totally annulled, and said Union of States dissolved; and the State of Florida is hereby declared a sovereign and independent nation; and that all ordinances heretofore adopted, in so far as they create or recognize said Union, are rescinded; and all laws or parts of laws in force in this State, in so far as they recognize or assent to said Union, be, and they are hereby, repealed.
Even Abraham Lincoln, though he later denied it when the South seceded, had previously defended the right to secede. In 1848 he stated:
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right—a right which, we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movements. Such minority was precisely the case of the tories of our own revolution. It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines, or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones.
Why did the right to secede subsequently devolve almost entirely into moralizing about guilt and punishment for slavery? The reason why slavery in the American South became the source of “forever guilt”—even as slavery in the American North was almost entirely memory-holed—was because it continued to serve a useful political purpose. If people are no longer interested in the slave plantations of New England, parts of which are 96 percent white and have almost completely forgotten that they were ever slave states, it is pointless trying to guilt-trip them over it. But people are constantly reminded about the slave plantations of the South. 56 percent of black people still live in the South, and it is therefore in the South that guilt over slavery is most politically evocative. In this context collective guilt from a time long gone by, which holds an entire people responsible for events in the past, still yields political fruit for the guilt-trippers. Describing the nature of collective guilt, Rothbard wrote:
Note that this guilt is never confined to the specific individuals, say, who enslaved or murdered or raped people. (There are, I dare say, very few enslavers left in America today—say a Southern slaveholder aged 150?) Effectiveness in inducing guilt comes precisely because the guilt is not specific but collective, extending throughout the world and apparently for all time.
The guilt-trippers are determined that nobody will ever be able to speak of the Old South without being swarmed by the sorts of admonitions described by Rothbard: “to give due public lip-service to a long list of solemnly avowed guilts... Guilt is everywhere, all-pervasive, and brought to us by the same scoundrels who once promised us easy liberation.” The best response to the politics of guilt is to be equally determined in rejecting all forms of collective guilt, to resist all attempts to induce moral guilt for events of the past. As Rothbard advises in “Guilt Sanctified”:
As in all other aspects of our rotten culture, the only way to save the day is to raise the banner high and engage in a frontal and all-out onslaught against the Left Guilt-inducers. In such an onslaught lies the only hope of taking back our lives and our culture from these malignant pests and tyrants.
