Ignorance isn’t an excuse or is it?

The claim reminded me of ones I sometimes hear in Germany: my grandfather was a secret resistance hero. Like any other significant movement, the civil rights movement created longing, exaggeration, and outright lies. When the shouting is all over, who doesn’t wish they’d been a hero?

Neiman, Susan. Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (p. 153). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

After the evil behavior is over it is a common defense mechanism to assuage the guilt and shame of participating, or doing nothing, to imagine ourselves secret resistance heroes. It’s like the little girl who says to her father, “What did you do in the war daddy?”

We deal with our guilt by absolving ourselves of it by pretending we took courageous stands against the wrongdoing when at the time we were too afraid to do so. So we make stuff up or embellish what we did do to cast it in a more favorable light. 

How many people now will admit they voted for Donald Trump or one of his supporters who advocated the insurrection? The common excuse is “I didn’t know at the time.” Really? Ignorance isn’t an excuse, or is it?