A “culpable victim”, I suppose, is one who is somehow responsible for his injury. Mostly we fret over all the “innocent victims,” especially in war, who presumably had nothing to do with what happens to them and just were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But it gets sticky. We are all prisoners of our fate. Most societies are somewhat cohesive, and they are led by elites that control how they react. And, like individuals, societies are also subject to outside random forces. By the rules of the universe, we are all innocent victims, affected by plague and famine, and _ yes _ war.
It’s been a conceit of modern civilization that we are beyond all that, that someone is now in control. But that “someone” must be in the elite, and the elite are embedded in the population, and therefore the whole society is hardly “innocent.” More to the point, those innocents support the strength of the elite if only by living and contributing to the society. A “good German” was supporting the Nazi war effort even if all she did was grow a garden and sit quietly at home.
The real culprit is overreaction. It’s easy to end crime in a city by dropping a nuke. Lots of innocent victims, but also eliminate the guilty and those who even implicitly supported them.
A true civilization tries to understand and moderate the complexities of innocence.
We seem to be losing that naive hope once more.
HuntingtonHarborThoughts 