remembrance and forgettance
This page is here because the Council of Europe (COE) asked for some 'background information' on Remembrance. 'Teaching Remembrance' is one of the Directorate of Education's pet projects, and one of the new themes for Compass, the Council's (so-called) human-rights-education manual.
In the end, given the focus of the COE, and their restrictions on questions termed 'political', I found it impossible to come up with anything anodyne enough to satisfy them. The main concern, after all, of the COE's Remembrance project is to '...recognise the uniqueness of the Shoah as the first deliberate attempt to exterminate a people on a global scale'. I found myself unable to agree with that either as a statement of fact, or as a priority in (human rights) education.
So these were some of the things that I would have liked to say about the artificial act of Remembrance, and about the artifice of acting out Remembrance while forgetting what is most important. This artifice I call Forgettance.
Nuggets can be found here.
The word itself is really a word for governments rather than for people: people remember, rather than engage in Remembrance (which always has a capital letter because it is more official and more hallowed). And Governments use Remembrance most judiciously to tell us what we should Remember, how we should Remember it, and what we should Forget...
Forget Fallujah. In fact, for trying to remember Fallujah, Maya Evans was arrested, convicted and charged.
Remember 9-11, constantly. Remember the Holocaust, and remember our war dead (but not those of other countries).
Forget Chechnya. Forget Palestine. Forget the Turkish Kurds. Forget the Chagos Islanders. Forget Dresden - and indeed, the victims of any 'allied' bombing runs.
Remember Kosovo (but judiciously). Do not remember that the 'ethnic cleansing' happened only after we rained bombs down on the Serbs. Do not remember the Krajina Serbs (or any of the other Serbian victims).
Forget Sharon, Suharto, Pinochet (judiciously), Karimov, Tudjman, Moi, Mobutu, and scores of others. Forget their victims. Forget Saddam Hussein until 1991.
From 1991, Remember Saddam and his victims, together with those of Mugabe (forgotten until the late 1990s, then vociferously Remembered). Remember Milosevic, Stalin and Hitler - this last at every opportunity to justify new wars.
Lessons worth Remembering
Of course, it is not really remembering past crimes that is important, but understanding and acknowledging them. And in fact, perhaps if we would finally understand and acknowledge the terrible things that we have done, then we might be allowed to lay them to rest, even to forget1. I would almost say that then we would be well advised to put them aside, because only in that way could we - the human race - move on.
With the holocaust - which is the usual target for Remembrance - it seems that we are nowhere near the stage of understanding and acknowledgement. There have almost certainly been more words written about this terrible crime than any other, but still there are enormous areas where we simply fail to see. Here are four, for starters, with a few accompanying nuggets, which will increase as I manage to dig them out:
Acts of forgettance
- Collaborators
The first blind spot concerns the ease with which any one of us could become - and does become - an accomplice in terrible crimes, simply by not being aware of our own role, or not wanting to be aware of that role. The wars that we are waging today are only possible because the broad mass of the British and American people are blind to the victims, or for some other reason are prepared to let the crimes continue. One day these crimes will be seen for what they are, and will be placed alongside the acknowledged 'crimes against humanity'. Then maybe we shall acknowledge our own passive role in allowing them to happen - and the fact that nothing could have happened if the whole of the great British public had stood up against it.
See Stanley Milgram's article 'Perils of Obedience' for the best account I know on this.
- Other victims of the holocaust
The second blind spot in our understanding is easier to identify, in theory it is easier to rectify, and for those reasons it is perhaps more shaming that 'we' have managed to do neither. We beat our breasts about the Holocaust, we make sure that Remembrance projects address that crime, above all others, and we constantly cite Hitler and the Nazi regime as proof that evil really exists. And yet, despite all that, we have not recognised properly, let alone compensated or begun to learn lessons from the fact that that regime, and its allies in crime, treated the Roma as a group at least as badly, and often more so, than they treated the Jews. Nor have we only failed to recognise, we continue to this day to exercise discrimination of the most demeaning and disgusting kind.
If we are going to shout about some victims of the holocaust - and we should do - then we need to shout about them all. And if we really mind about the crimes that were committed by the fascists, then we need to understand the underlying attitudes which made society accept the crimes at that time, and to recognise those attitudes today - particularly when they can be seen within ourselves. See this page for nuggets, and this site if you are in any doubt that discrimination against the Roma is flourishing today.
- Other holocausts
The third blind spot concerns the numerous other holocausts which we remember far less well, either because the victims are at least in part our victims, or because they are less near to the European consciousness - both geographically and ethnically. Iraq and Afghanistan today offer the most obvious examples, with a possible three million2 killed already in these two lands, as a direct result of our own government's actions. Others round the world get periodic attention, as long as the victims are victims of our enemies, and as long as they live in a part of the world that we covet.
Gideon Polya, in this article, provides a list of major holocausts over the last century which were not even mentioned in a recent US Resolution condemning holocaust denial. The list includes the following (in order of occurrence):
The 1904-1907 German Namibian Genocide (the Herero population dropped from 80,000 to 15,000); the 1915-1918 Turkish Armenian Genocide (1 million victims – still denied by Turkey); the 1930-1933 Russian Ukrainian Genocide (5 million victims); the 1937-1945 Japanese invasion of China (35 million Chinese victims); the non-Jewish victims of the Nazi German World War 2 Holocaust – 20 million Soviet citizens, 6 million Poles (half of them Jewish), 1 million Serbs, 0.5 million other Yugoslavs and 0.5 million Roma (Gypsies); the man-made, 1943/44 British Bengali Holocaust (4 million victims – still largely written out of British history books); the 1947 Indian Partition (1 million victims); the 1994 Hutu Rwandan Genocide (1 million victims); the 1971 West Pakistani Bengali Holocaust (3 million victims, 80% male; 0.3 million women raped by the US-backed West Pakistan military); the 1965 Indonesian Genocide (1 million victims); the 1975-2000 Indonesian East Timorese Genocide (0.2 million victims out of a population of about 0.6 million); the US Indo-China war (13 million excess deaths); the post-1950 First World-driven Third World Holocaust (1.2 billion excess deaths, mainly in Africa, Asia and South America); and the post-1950 First World-driven Muslim Holocaust (0.6 billion excess deaths; mainly in Africa and Asia).
- Palestine and the State of Israel
And finally, the fourth blind spot, and the one that is hardest to speak about, precisely because we do remember (in some senses) the Nazi holocaust. The mere mention of the victims of the state of Israel is enough, in many people's eyes, to brand one as an anti-Semitist, but it is possibly the fear of being so accused that is most to blame for the unforgivable silence by the world on this issue.
Nothing will ever justify or excuse the utterly barbaric treatment suffered by the Jews under the Nazis and others. But pitying those victims - and accusing their oppressors - should never be a reason for failing to look at and failing to pity the other victims around the world.
So should we fail to look at and pity the victims of the State of Israel, just because that state is inhabited by many of the survivor-victims of fascism, and just because most of the victims of fascism were of the same ethnicity as those controlling the State of Israel's policies today? Only, surely, if we believe that ethnicity has any part to play in determining crimes against humanity. If it does not have any part to play - and of course I don't believe it does - then I cannot see why the question of ethnicity should be of any relevance at all. We are, after all, allowed to criticise Mugabe without being accused of being anti-Zimbabwean; and the press falls over itself to criticise the regimes in Venezuela and in Cuba, while - apparently - being pro-Venezuelan and Pro-Cuban. Where is the difference?
On this page you can find a small fraction of the crimes that have been, and are still being committed against the Palestinian people. Nothing can ever justify or excuse the Nazi holocaust, but nor can anything justify or excuse what is happening in Palestine today - and has been happening for 60 years - at the hands of the Israeli state and with the compliance and active support of people and governments including my own.
"Look, you can do what you want, there is no way that you can erase it," he said about the ever-present images of death. "They may not be alive but they are there. They are there in the day, they are there in the morning. They are there at night when the sun sets. You can forget about forgetting - it's like a daily call card"
Eugene de Kock ('Prime Evil'), quoted in Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela's A Human Being Died that Night
---------
Notes
Post new comment