The Sunflower_ On the Possibilities and - Wiesenthal, Simon copy

I explicitly and emphatically reject the idea of collective guilt, but I do believe that there
is such a thing as national or state responsibility for genocide, for mass murder, and for
drumming up an artificial hatred among the ordinary people, by various means, to make that
genocide easier to carry out. It cannot be stressed enough that the punishment of the guilty
and some measure of justice are absolutely necessary for forgiveness or reconciliation even
to be considered. If genocide goes unpunished, it will set a precedent for tomorrow's
genocide. Without justice, there can never be reconciliation and real peace.
But when speaking of crimes against international humanitarian law, the Geneva
conventions and the Genocide Convention—the very instruments of international law based
on and built upon the ashes of the Holocaust—we must remember that each crime against
international law is a crime against humanity and not only against the person or society
targeted for extinction. That is the whole point of international law. And we must also
remember that each and every victim is one of the collective us, whether they be Jews in
Europe of the 1940s or Muslims in Europe of the 1990s.
As to the original question, I myself and the other readers will have to answer for
themselves. I can say, however, that an argument can be made to forgive if there is a genuine
recognition of guilt. But I cannot stress enough that to forget is unthinkable, both when
discussing the Holocaust and Bosnia. In the end, reconciliation must be the end goal for a
return to the inherent beauty of living.
Thus at the threshold of the twenty-first century, what have we gained from our
experiences with man's inhumanity toward man? Apparently not that much. After knowing
what we knew about the Holocaust, the genocide of Bosnia and Herzegovina should shame
us all. Of course that shame would not bring back life to the dead of Auschwitz or Treblinka,