Revered computer scientist Donald Knuth has a page on "Infrequently Asked Questions". (http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/iaq.html) and questions #4 and #5 do a good job of bringing up the issue of the moral responsibility a country's leaders have to its citizens.
I don't have any answers to his questions but would to avoid discussing them can't help but to implicitly spread the guilt around among the willfully silent.
It's a question for the ages, what does a society do when its leadership commits hubris?
Monday, February 15, 2010
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Not only do we not ask these questions (or infrequently ask them) about some events, but we only ask them about situations that we have a natural inclination to not support in the first place (how many liberals questioned the Clinton Administration's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia?). But we also don't ask them about autrocities our nation committed in the past. How much do we really bring our nation to task for our offenses of bigotry, slavery and genocide?
And say what we want about Iraq, but it was a war duly authorized by Congress. So invading Iraq was not illegal or immoral.
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