PAN Discussion Group Wednesday October 25th 2006
Subject: Selective Memory and Collective Amnesia: What we remember and what we choose to forget
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Location: Northside-ish – Irving and Damen RSVP for details
Time: 7pm to 10pm - ish
Bring drinks and snacks to share
General:
The articles are the basis for the discussion and reading them helps give us some common ground and focus for the discussion, especially where we would otherwise be ignorant of the issues. The discussions are not intended as debates or arguments, rather they should be a chance to explore ideas and issues in a constructive forum. Feel free to bring along other stuff you've read on this, related subjects or on topics the group might be interested in for future meetings.
GROUND RULES:
* Temper the urge to speak with the discipline to listen and leave space for others
* Balance the desire to teach with a passion to learn
* Hear what is said and listen for what is meant
* Marry your certainties with others' possibilities
* Reserve judgment until you can claim the understanding we seek
Any problems let me know...
847-963-1254
tysoe2@yahoo.com
The Articles:
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First an edited article that explores the various types and theories of memory
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/rmpa00.htm
Memory, Autobiography, History
John F. Kihlstrom Editted
The Experience of Remembering
One's memory of an event reflects a blend of information contained in specific traces encoded at the time it occurred, plus inferences based on knowledge, expectations, beliefs, and attitudes derived from other sources.
In other words, remembering is more like making up a story than it is like reading one printed in a book. Every memory is a blend of knowledge and inference. Remembering is problem-solving activity, where the problem is to give a coherent account of some past event, and the memory is the solution to that problem.
There are actually three varieties of recollective experience, or memory "qualia": remembering, or conscious recollection of some past event; knowing, or abstract knowledge of that event; and feeling, an intuition that an event occurred.
In my view, each of these different varieties of recollective experience is based on the rememberer's access to different sources of information. In remembering, one gains access to a full episodic memory trace, including a raw description of the event in question, the spatiotemporal context in which it was situated, and some representation of the self as the agent or patient, stimulus or experiencer of the event. In knowing, self-reference is absent: one simply has the abstract knowledge that something happened at a particular time and place. In feeling, the person accesses at least a partial description of the event, but no episodic context, and no self-reference. Thus, the person's recollective experience varies, not with the strength of the underlying memory trace, but with the nature of the information on which the recognition judgment is based. One could develop a similar analysis of recall.
Actually, though, I think that there's more to memory than remembering, knowing, and feeling: there's also believing. This idea is a little confusing, because in philosophy belief is a general term for any representational mental state -- something which has a proposition as its content, and which combines with a motive to direct behavior. Memories, then, are just a special class of beliefs -- beliefs about the past, just as percepts are beliefs about the present. But I'm not talking about beliefs in the technical sense of philosophy: I'm talking about belief as the phenomenal basis of remembering: one's inference that an event occurred in the past -- an inference that is based on available world knowledge, including one's knowledge of oneself, in the absence of any recollection. Thus, if you were to ask me whether I ever swam in Skaneateles Lake, in upstate New York, I might well say "yes, I believe so", because I was born and raised in the Finger Lakes region, I know that I've swum in Keuka and Seneca Lakes, and my family had friends who lived in Skaneateles. But I don't remember ever doing such a thing.
Memory and Memoir
However, we do see something like remembering-as-believing in autobiography, and in history. One of the interesting features of contemporary literature is the gradual displacement of the novel by the memoir. As the critic James Atlas wrote in the New York Times Magazine, "the triumph of memoir is now an established fact". Instead of reading fiction about ordinary people (the technical definition of a novel, as opposed to myth or legend), we now read nonfiction about ordinary people
Interestingly, the novel itself emerged from earlier literary forms, which look a lot like autobiographies and histories. In English, for example, there are "memoir novels" like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), "epistolary novels" like Richardson's Pamela (1741), and "histories", like Fielding's Tom Jones (1749). By the 19th century, the familiar form of the modern novel had been established: an omniscient third-person narrative of ordinary people engaged in the ordinary course of everyday living. Now, it seems that we've come almost full circle: the memoir has displaced the novel as the literary genre of our age. We've returned to a first-person narrative of ordinary people in everyday life, but also with a kind of omniscience in which authors view earlier experiences in the light of later ones.
AA and the Return of the Memoir
Perhaps one factor in the rise of the memoir is the popularity of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and similar support groups derived from it. A major aspect of participation is the sharing of a "narrative" of each member's involvement with alcohol. As one AA participant noted: For scholars of literature, folklore, therapy, and popular culture, Alcoholics Anonymous offers riches: a written and oral genre ("tell me our story," one drunk tells to another); highly developed narrative codes (what it was like, what happened, what it's like now); a central text (Alcoholics Anonymous, known as the Big Book); and a recognizable semiotics (the coffee cup, the church meeting room with folding wooden chairs). Like folklore, AA loves a story, passes it on, and fine-tunes it for the neighborhood, the occasion, or the local slang. Like therapy, AA values the telling itself as discovery. And like all good narratives, the AA member's story begins with a piercing conflict that may seem hopeless....
The poet Patricia Hampl notes this trend in her wonderful book on the memoir, I Could Tell You Stories (1999), which is subtitled Sojourns in the Land of Memory. There she recounts an experience in which her father took her for her first piano lesson. The passage goes on for a couple of pages, and there's quite a bit of detail, including the red "Thompson book" which I remember from my own piano lessons (and you probably do, too). She then writes:
For the memoirist, more than for the fiction writer, the story seems already there, already accomplished and fully achieved in history ("in reality", as we naively say). For the memoirist, the writing of the story is a matter of transcription…. The experience was simply there, like a book that has always been on the shelf, whether I ever read it or not…. On the day I wrote this fragment I happened to take that memory, not some other, from the shelf and paged through it. I found more detail, more event, perhaps a little more entertainment than I had expected, but the memory itself was there from the start. Waiting for me.
And then she drops the other shoe:
Wasn't it? When I reread the piano lesson vignette just after I finished it, I realized that I had told a number of lies. It turns out that almost every detail in the memory is wrong, or at least questionable, right down to the least questionable thing of all: the red "John Thompson" piano book -- which Hampl didn't use, though she envied those children who did. Hampl concludes:
So what was I doing in this brief memoir? Is it simply an example of the curious relation a fiction writer has to the material of her own life? Maybe. But to tell the truth (if anyone still believes me capable of the truth), I wasn't writing fiction. I was writing memoir -- or was trying to. My desire was to be accurate. I wished to embody the myth of memoir: to write as an act of dutiful transcription. Yet clearly the work of writing a personal narrative caused me to do something very different from transcription. I am forced to admit that memory is not a warehouse of finished stories, not a gallery of framed pictures. I must admit that I invented.
Historians confront the problem all the time, especially in the "new social history", which seeks to go beyond the documentary record of great deeds and battles, and which often relies on oral history – which is to say, on memory. The historian David Thelen of Indiana University (and spouse of the psychologist Esther Thelen), has pointed out that "the challenge of history is to recover the past and introduce it to the present". This, of course, is the task of memory as well. Moreover, just as psychologists began their study of memory by focusing on issues of accuracy as in our measures of "percent correct" and "d-prime", historians have also been concerned with whether participants in some historical event accurately remember what actually occurred. As Thelen (1989, p. 1123) writes:”The historical study of memory would be the study of how families, larger gatherings of people, and formal organizations selected and interpreted identifying memories to sere changing needs. It would explore how people together search for common memories to meet present needs, how they first recognized such a memory and then agreed, disagreed, or negotiated over its meaning, and finally how they preserved and absorbed that meaning into their ongoing concerns”.
More recently, under the influence of the reconstructive principle, psychologists have shifted their concern to the problem of how people remember. And along the same lines, the new generation of social historians are interested in "why historical actors constructed their memories in a particular way at a particular time". These parallels between cognitive psychology and history are the subject of a new scholarly journal, History and Memory -- which, although primarily concerned with the Nazi Holocaust, stands for a broader connection between history and psychology..
The problem with oral history is that sometimes it is wrong, as we saw in the "John Dean" problem. Listeners of a certain age will remember the White House counsel during the Nixon Administration, who at the Senate Watergate hearings gave detailed accounts of conversations he had in the Oval Office. It seemed as if Dean had a verbatim memory for the conversations, which made him an extremely persuasive witness. But after his testimony, Alexander Butterfield, another White House aide, revealed the existence of a White House taping system. Dick Neisser compared Dean's testimony to actual transcripts of two critical conversations. In the September 15, 1972 conversation, Nixon said none of the things attributed to him by Dan. Dean's memory of the March 21, 1973 "cancer on the Presidency" conversation, fairly represents the first hour of the meeting, when Dean was delivering a formal report, but not the second hour, which consisted of spontaneous conversation.
Neisser concludes: "Dean believes that he is recalling one conversation at a time, that his memory is "episodic" in Tulving's sense, but he is mistaken." Dean clearly believes his own testimony, largely because his specific memories are consistent with what he knows to be true on other grounds, and we are disposed to believe him for the same reasons. Mostly, however, he has remembered only the gist of his conversations with Nixon, abstracted over many such conversations, but he has imported many details into his memory, so that his memories are not faithful representations of any particular episodes.
Memory and History
These problems in psychotherapy are matched by problems in history, especially when historians rely on memoir or oral history, in the absence of written records or other forms of corroboration.
Consider the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski, a Swiss musician whose book, Fragments (1995), portrays a young Jewish child's life in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. As Wilkomirski tells his story, he was born in Latvia in 1939, witnessed his father's execution when he was 3 or 4 years of age, and was incarcerated in a series of camps. At the end of the war, he was found wandering around Auschwitz, and he was placed in an orphanage in Cracow.
Wilkomirski included in his book a group photo taken in a Polish orphanage around 1946: one of the children is highlighted by the annotation, "Could this be me?". In any event, he was relocated to Switzerland in 1948, and recovered memories of his camp experiences during psychotherapy. Wilkomirski's book is vivid and powerful. Jonathan Kozol, reviewing it in the Nation, compared it with Elie Wiesel's Night, one of a true classics of Holocaust literature. The book won a host of literary prizes, including the Jewish Quarterly prize for non-fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for autobiography; the American edition was listed by the New York Times as a "notable book" for 1997. It has been called the "most successful Swiss book since Heidi".
Fragments is also often cited as an example of the qualities of traumatic memory: it is fragmentary (hence its title), lacking in narrative coherence. Wilkomirski's story has also been touted as evidence for the success of recovered memory therapy. More recently, however, strong doubts have been raised about its provenance. In contrast to Night, it is lacking in specific details -- but then again, what do we expect from the memories of a 4-year-old child? More unsettling is the fact that few young children survived the camps. Children younger than 7 years were usually killed quickly after their arrival and apparently there were no children at all at Auschwitz. Despite Wilkomirski’s photograph from Crakow, Swiss adoption records indicate that Wilkomirski was born Bruno Grossjean near Bern, Switzerland in 1941, to a poor, unmarried, Protestant woman. He was a public ward until 1945, when he was taken in as a foster child by Kurt and Martha Dossekker, and raised by them in Zurich; in 1957, he was formally adopted. Bruner appears in Dossekker family pictures dating from 1946, and school records dating from 1947. He attended university, worked as a musician and instrument-maker, became an amateur historian of the Holocaust, and changed his name to Binjamin Wilkomirski in the 1980s. Both his adoptive parents died in 1986.
It is now widely believed that Fragments is a work of "nonfiction fiction". It has become very common for writers to incorporate fictional scenes into nonfiction -- think of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, or the work of Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe. Just last year, Edmund Morris inserted himself, like Woody Allen’s Zelig, as a character in his authorized biography of Ronald Reagan, following the president from a high-school football field in Dixon, Illinois, straight into the White House. Wilkomirski seems to have done the opposite: to incorporate nonfiction, details of the Holocaust gleaned from a lifetime's obsessive reading, into fiction -- a memoir which isn't based on personal recollection. The irony is that Fragments works as a piece of fiction -- but as one critic noted, "Nonfiction sells better than fiction".
Moreover, in a striking parallel to the views of some trauma therapists, some publishers seem to feel that it is not their job to fact-check their authors' memoirs. Arthur Samuelson, Wilkomirski's American publisher, noted that:
We don't have fact checkers. We are not a detective agency. We are a vehicle for authors to convey their work, and we distribute their information with a feeling of responsibility.
Similarly, Elizabeth Janeway, his American editor, stated that:
We don't vet books on an adversarial basis. We have no means of independent collaboration [sic].
Reliance on uncorroborated memory may be good for the publishing business, but it may not be good for history. But then again, it may not be good for the publishing business, either. After commissioning an independent investigation, Wilkomirski's German publisher withdrew the book from circulation.
Questions of fact have also been raised about another autobiography, I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (1983), which chronicles the life of a Maya Indian growing up in during a period of civil war which pitted a right-wing government against left-wing guerillas, and landowners of European descent against indigenous peasants. Menchu details the squalid conditions of peasant existence, such as her lack of formal education and her youngest brothers' deaths from malnutrition. She also related personal horrors, such as an army attack on her village, the burning of prisoners in the central plaza, the torture and killing of her mother and brother, the police execution of her father.
I, Rigoberta Menchu is a very powerful book, which quickly entered the canon of Latin American Literature; it is one of the most popular books sold on college campuses, and won Menchu the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. There is no doubt that the conditions of the time in Guatemala were awful, mostly by virtue of government atrocities perpetrated in behalf of the oligarchy. At the same time, research by David Stoll (1999), an anthropologist at Middlebury College, has revealed that many of the specific incidents in Menchu's book were exaggerated or fabricated. Menchu received a junior high-school education as a scholarship student at an elite Catholic boarding school; she almost certainly never worked on a plantation; her father was killed in a land dispute with his in-laws; her brother was killed by the army, but she never saw it happen, and he was not burned in the plaza; her youngest brother is alive and well; two older brothers died of starvation and disease, but before Menchu was born. Stoll concludes that Menchu's book cannot be strictly autobiographical, because she simply did not have many of the experiences that she claimed to witness.
But it would be too simple, and wrong, to say that Dean, and Wilkomirski, and Menchu lied, and it would be too simple to say that patients with false or implausible recovered memories lie. There may be a lot of truth in their accounts -- just not historical truth. After all, in the immortal words of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury, Richard Nixon was "Guilty, guilty, guilty!", and John Dean got that right. Apparently, Wilkomirski believes that his story is true: according to the New York Times, when the veracity of his book was challenged by his German publisher, he stood up defiantly and declared: I am Binjamin Wilkomirski!. Even his severest critics think that he is sincere. Menchu, for her part, replied that her story is "my truth", and that:I have a right to my own memories-- though more recently she has conceded that some material was historically false.
Errors and distortions are natural consequences of the reconstructive process: individual experiences will be confused, vicarious experiences will be remembered as personal, and the stories of many individuals will be conflated into the story of one person. Ronald Reagan sometimes told about being among the troops who liberated the Nazi death camps at the end of World War II, when in fact he was in Hollywood watching documentary film footage of their liberation as a member of the First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army. (The film was subsequently collected into the documentary, Lest We Forget, which Reagan showed to both his sons on their 14th birthdays.) Michael Korda, who edited Reagan’s autobiography, tells of the President bringing an audience of Medal of Honor winners to tears with the story of a bomber pilot, whose plane was shot down during a raid, ordering his crew to bail out. Just as he is about to do so himself, he finds that his tail-gunner, a fresh-eyed kid, is trapped and can't escape. The pilot grasps the boy’s hand and says, "Don't worry, son, we'll ride down together". Nobody bothered to ask how anyone ever found out about this episode -- and in fact it’s the climax of A Wing and a Prayer (1944), one of the most successful propaganda films of World War II (not least because of its effective combination of documentary footage with scenes filmed on a sound stage)
Remember the line from American Beauty? "I know video is a poor excuse, but it helps me remember." Maybe memory is just like a movie after all. These incidents remind us that memories are not just representations stored in the mind and the brain; memories are also things we do, in the process of reconstructing the past. As such, memories serve personal and social purposes.
Memory, the Self, and Society
On the personal side, our memories appear to be reconstructed in accordance with theories of the self: our views of who we are and how we got that way. Each autobiographical memory, then, is part of a personal narrative, which reflects our views of ourselves. Long ago, Alfred Adler (1937) made this point about our earliest recollections: that they represent the current "life style" of the individual, and serve to remind the person of who he or she is. Adler thus reverses the Freudian view of causation: childhood memories don't determine adult personality; rather adult personality determines what will be remembered from childhood. More recently, Michael Ross (1989, 1994) has argued that people construct their personal histories around tacit theories of the self, and revise these histories as our self-concepts change.
One function of the past is to explain the present. We see this clearly in the search for recovered memories of trauma, as the psychoanalyst Brooks Brenneis, himself a severe critic of the recovered memory movement, has pointed out. But we also see it elsewhere. Wilkomirski's and Menchu's memoirs reflect a personal truth, a personal history remembered from a particular point of view. They are subjectively compelling -- even if they are inaccurate or false outright.
But more than that, memories serve social purposes. Menchu says that her book represents her truth, but she also says that 'It's also the testimony of my people", and that her autobiography is "part of the historical memory and patrimony of Guatemala". This is the meaning of Stoll's subtitle: in some sense, Menchu's story is indeed "the story of all poor Guatemalans". Thus, individual memories are also constructed around tacit theories of society: personal narratives are part of social narratives, and vice-versa.
So-called flashbulb memories, once attributed to a "Now Print!" mechanism in the brain, reflect this relationship between the personal and the social, the individual and the collective. Flashbulb memories may or may not be accurate, but as Dick Neisser (1981) has pointed out, they are benchmarks lying at the intersection of private and public history:They are the places where we line up our own lives with the course of history itself and say "I was there".
This perspective is consistent with Bartlett's insight about memory, as reflected in the full title of his 1932 book: Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. In the latter part of the book, the part hardly ever read by psychologists, Bartlett wrote that:
Remembering is an act of communication, of information sharing and self-expression, as well as an act of information retrieval. Accordingly, our memories of the past are shaped by the interpersonal context in which they are encoded, stored, and retrieved.
Psychologists don't study the social aspects of memory much, but historians and sociologists have recently taken up the problem. Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945),argued that because "We are never alone", all individual memories are collective -- the only exception being memory for dreams. “The individual calls recollections to mind by relying on the frameworks of social memory….. There are surely many facts, and many details…, that the individual would forget if others did not keep their memory alive for him. But, on the other hand, society can live only if there is sufficient unity of outlooks among the individuals and groups comprising it…. This is why society tends to erase from its memory all that might separate individuals, or that might distance groups from each other. It is also why society, in each period, rearranges its recollections in such a way as to adjust them to the variable conditions of its equilibrium.”
As an example of "the social frameworks of memory", Halbwachs pointed to "the collective memory of the family": that there are events shared only by family members, and events known only to family members. I do not know of good data on this subject, but intuitively it seems clear that families are bound together by their shared memories at least as much as they are bound together by their shared genes. When you enter a family, to the extent that you enter a family, you acquire its memories; and when you leave a family, to the extent that you leave it, you begin to forget. Memories probably play a critical role in other natural groups as well.
More recently, Halbwachs’ views have been championed by a new generation of cognitive sociologists, who view memory as a social construction, the past as shaped by the concerns of the present. Eviatar Zerubavel, in his recent book Social Mindscapes (1997), offers the sociology of knowledge as an antidote to the universalism and particularism of psychology: as experimentalists, acting nomothetically, we are interested in how humans in general remember; and as clinicians, acting idiographically, we are interested in how and what individuals remember. But Zerubavel points out that
There are no mnemonic Robinson Crusoes.
In his view, individual remembering does not take place in a social vacuum; that others help us to remember, and to forget; and that there are social rules of remembering, which determine what we are to remember, and what we are to forget. Through a process of mnemonic socialization, we acquire new memories when we enter social environments; our communities are communities of thought, comprising a fund of social knowledge and a body of social memory. As members of mnemonic communities, we remember things we never experienced, and come to identify, as group members, with a collective past.
Zerubavel points out that many social conflicts are best viewed as "mnemonic battles" over what is to be remembered, and how. We see this clearly in the literature of the Holocaust, which is dominated by the theme of memory, and the injunction never to forget. We also see a struggle over memory in the controversies that surround certain museum exhibitions, such as Harlem on My Mind, The West as America, and the Smithsonian’s aborted attempt to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II (Dubin, 1999).
Memory in a Personal and Social Context
In other words, memory is simultaneously a biological fact, a faculty of mind, an exercise in rhetoric, and a social construction. The clear implication of this conclusion is that memory can no longer be studied by cognitive psychologists alone, let alone by cognitive neuroscientists. Within psychology, cognitive psychologists need to ally themselves with personality and social psychologists, who have expertise in such areas as persuasive communication, identity formation and the self-concept, causal attribution, and impression management. But memory can't be studied by psychologists alone, either. We need to understand the social purposes that memories serve, and the impact of social structures and organizations on what Bartlett called the "manner and matter" of remembering. We also need to understand memory as a form of rhetoric and literature, a mode of speaking and writing about oneself and one's society.
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Several people referred to Truth commissions. Here are some pieces that explore their effectiveness in Sierra Leone with reference back to South Africa
http://www.usip.org/fellows/reports/2004/0429_shaw.html
Forgive and Forget: Rethinking Memory in Sierra Leone's Truth and Reconciliation Commission Rosalind Shaw, Senior Fellow
Introduction
As the international community reflects on the tragedy in Rwanda ten years ago, the question of how societies should attempt to heal the wounds from past virulent conflicts has recently received renewed interest by members of the press, policy, and NGO community around the globe. How effective are truth and reconciliation commissions? Are there lessons learned from the experiences of truth and reconciliation commissions in Sierra Leone and elsewhere that can be used by the international community to deal with the aftermath of other conflicts in different parts of the world?
Report Summary
After a decade of civil war in Sierra Leone, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began its public hearings in April 2003. Funded through and coordinated by the UN's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, and assisted by consultants from the International Center for Transitional Justice in New York, TRC staff in Freetown sought to create a commission appropriate to Sierra Leone. Building on findings from her field research on Sierra Leone's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), senior fellow Rosalind Shaw analyzed the contentious relationship between remembering, healing, and reconciliation, and the purported therapeutic and conciliatory effects of truth and reconciliation commissions.
Conceptual Challenges of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions: "Truth" Telling
Shaw observed that the locus classicus of truth commissions is one of political violence by a repressive state, where such commissions enable victims to challenge the state's official version of the past through personal testimonies of suffering. In the politics of memory that operates in truth commissions following such crimes, personal memories become a site of redemption and of moral accountability.
Outside this locus classicus of covert, state-sponsored violence, for instance in a civil war in which neighbors fight against neighbors, truth telling can provide a "re-balancing"—by, for example, making it clear that atrocities were committed by each side, or alternatively that genocide did, in fact, take place. But the production of an official "truth" by a national commission will not command agreement and "heal" a wounded or divided society. It is deeply problematic to suppose that one either can or should produce a single collective memory: social memory is always a process, and always a contested one.
Remembering and Healing: Challenging Assumptions
Shaw argued that assumptions about the healing and conciliatory power of verbal memories of violence and abuses in truth commissions are very problematic.
First, the language of national healing anthropomorphizes the nation as a feeling and suffering entity. This is basically a nineteenth century, or Durkheimean, idea that society is like an organism that can be healthy or sick. Violence certainly changes social institutions and practices, but it is not valid to conceptualize these changes in terms of a kind of collective psyche that can be healed through a cathartic process of truth telling.
Second, it cannot be assumed that truth telling in a truth commission is cathartic and healing on a personal level either. Some people do feel a great deal of relief and satisfaction when they testify, especially when the reality of the violence and abuses toward them has not been publicly acknowledged before. But others (60 percent of those who testified in South Africa) feel worse after testifying. A truth commission is not therapy.
Third, the conviction that recounting verbal memories of violence and trauma is the means of healing psychological trauma is the product of a dominant culture of memory in North America and Europe. It arose out of specific nineteenth and twentieth century historical processes. In other parts of the world, where different memory practices have developed through different histories of violence, Western psychotherapy might not be the appropriate solution. Words are only one way of externalizing trauma. In her previous research on memories of the slave trade in Temne-speaking areas of Sierra Leone, Shaw found that several historical layers of violence—such as the Atlantic slave trade, the nineteenth-century trade wars, and the imposition of a colonial protectorate in 1896—are remembered non-discursively in the landscape, ritual practice, and visionary experience, but rarely in discursive verbal form.
Challenges to the TRC in Sierra Leone
Beside these conceptual issues mentioned above, the TRC in Sierra Leone faced several challenges:
Let's 'forgive and forget'
Shaw observed that most Sierra Leoneans were very divided about the TRC and truth telling. Most people with whom she spoke in her field research since the civil war wanted to forget. It was common to hear people say, "Let's forgive and forget," or "Let's forget about it." Some people were able to integrate the TRC message into this prevailing understanding of healing and reconciliation as forgetting. They created a synthesis. But for many people—including many victims—the TRC was an obstacle to healing and reconciliation. In some places, such as communities that developed their own techniques to reintegrate ex-combatants, the TRC disrupted their practices of reintegration and reconciliation. Sometimes whole communities agreed not to give statements, or to give statements that withheld information that they thought might be damaging to the families of ex-combatants. People wanted to protect their communities and their relationships.
The TRC as a Covert Conduit to the Special Court
The problematic nature of truth telling in the Sierra Leone TRC was compounded by the operation of the Special Court of Sierra Leone—the tribunal created to put on trial those who bore the greatest responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Many Sierra Leoneans feared the TRC was a secret conduit for evidence that would be turned over to the Special Court. Because of this, many ex-combatants simply chose not to participate in the TRC process.
Fear of Retaliation and Distrust of the Government
Fears were also exacerbated by the relationship between the TRC and the government, which has (incorrectly) viewed both the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels and the war itself as "northern." There are concerns that the TRC's national commissioners are too close to the government, and that the official memory of war produced in the TRC's final report may reflect this. Some in the north, moreover, fear retaliation by the government once the TRC concludes its work.
Local Practices of Memory, Healing, and Reconciliation
Shaw argued that if the emphasis were shifted from "sensitizing" the population to the practices and goals of truth commissions, and toward sensitizing those within such commissions to grassroots practices of social recovery already in use around them, this diversity of memory practices might be harnessed to transform truth commissions themselves.
She found that although people in Sierra Leone had been talking about the violence when the violence was present, once violence stopped, healing took place through processes of social forgetting. Social forgetting is different from individual forgetting in that people did not simply forget on a personal level. Social forgetting is the refusal to give the violence social reality, to reproduce it through public speech. Over time, Shaw found that this promoted healing, social recovery, and personal forgetting.
Local Rituals and Practices
Grassroots forms of healing and reconciliation in Sierra Leone include Pentecostal healing and rituals to reintegrate child ex-combatants. Shaw observed that war-affected youth in Pentecostal churches used prayer, Bible reading, and spiritual healing in order to exorcize their memories of violence and rebuild their lives. In Temne-speaking communities in the Northern Province, praying over water or kola, asking God and the ancestors to give the child a "cool heart," and rubbing the water on the head, chest, arms, and feet bring about an inner transformation in the child and his/her social relationships. Part of having a cool heart is not talking about the war: the children are remade as new social persons.
These are local, but not "traditional" ceremonies, and entail people drawing upon their knowledge and skills to innovate and adapt forms of reconciliation and social recovery appropriate to the context of the civil war.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Shaw recognized that there is always a need to document abuses through first-hand testimonies, and that truth commissions provide an important frame for debates about past violence. But, she asserted, there is also a need to recognize the significance of grassroots practices of memory, healing, and reconciliation beside those of truth commissions. She warned that if we want a new generation of locally meaningful truth commissions, we have to develop sensitivities to these other practices, and to build on them rather than marginalizing them. If we discount local processes as less important than a disembodied idea of national healing, we may jeopardize any form of social recovery. As TRCs are increasingly considered part of a conflict-resolution "toolkit," we need to create culturally informed commissions if we are to have more locally and regionally effective forms of transitional
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More specifics, clipped from:
http://www.usip.org/pubs/specialreports/sr130.html
"Revealing is Healing"?
In South Africa's TRC, the slogan "revealing is healing" crystallized ideas about the healing and conciliatory power of verbal memories of violence and abuses that were promoted in that commission. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Chair of the TRC, set forth these ideas in the Commission's final report:
There were others who urged that the past should be forgotten—glibly declaring that we should 'let bygones be bygones'. This option was rightly rejected because such amnesia would have resulted in further victimisation of victims by denying their awful experiences... The other reason amnesia simply will not do is that the past refuses to lie down quietly. It has an uncanny habit of returning to haunt one. "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it" are the words emblazoned at the entrance to the museum in the former concentration camp of Dachau. They are words we would do well to keep ever in mind. However painful the experience, the wounds of the past must not be allowed to fester. They must be opened. They must be cleansed. And balm must be poured on them so they can heal. This is not to be obsessed with the past. It is to take care that the past is properly dealt with for the sake of the future.
Through this metaphor of the injured body whose festering wounds can heal only by being painfully re-opened and cleansed through truth telling, Tutu represents the TRC as a therapeutic process. Whether this TRC therapy works at a personal or a national level, however, is left undefined, thereby enabling these levels to be conflated.
What, however, is national healing? The idea of healing a nation that is wounded or traumatized is primarily nation-building rhetoric that anthropomorphizes the nation as a feeling, suffering entity, as Brandon Hamber and Richard Wilson have noted. This notion derives from nineteenth-century models of society as akin to an organism that can be healthy or sick. Such biological models for societies have, however, long been discredited. While mass violence certainly disrupts and transforms social institutions and practices, it is not valid to conceptualize these changes in terms of a damaged collective national psyche that can be healed through a cathartic process of truth telling.
Nor can it be assumed that truth telling in a truth commission is necessarily healing on a personal level. Some people do feel a great deal of relief and satisfaction when they testify, especially in situations of covert state violence, when abuses toward victims have been denied and people's experiences of suffering have not been accorded reality. But even here we should not assume that testifying is a cathartic and healing experience: in 1997, the New York Times reported that the Trauma Center for Victims of Violence and Torture in Cape Town found that some 60% of those who testified in South Africa's TRC felt worse after testifying. A truth commission is not therapy.
Underlying the very concept of truth telling as bringing about healing and reconciliation are ideas of the efficacy of recounting verbal memories of violence and trauma. These ideas are the product of a culture of memory that arose from specific historical processes in North America and Europe, originating, perhaps, in the redemptive significance of confession in the church, and developing more recently through Freud's ideas about repressed memories, the psychiatric construction of the increasingly dominant concept of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and its treatment through verbal processing, and the place of the Holocaust as the paradigmatic modern atrocity that must be remembered in order to prevent recurrence. Through these developments, the explicit verbal recounting of past violence and suffering has been cast as a preeminently liberating mode of memory. Alternative and incommensurable understandings of the healing powers of forgetting have long coexisted in North America and Europe, crystallized in the expression "forgive and forget" and in the etymology of the term "amnesty," which derives from the Greek term amnestia, "to forget." But such understandings have been displaced and discredited through the expanding dominance of a memory culture that authorizes remembering over forgetting.
In other parts of the world, where different memory practices have developed through different histories, these memory practices may again compete with globalized forms of remembering that are imported and promoted through such arenas as Western psychotherapy and truth commissions. In parts of Mozambique, for example, rural communities incorporated ex-combatants and healed those affected by the war through spirit mediumship, which externalizes past violence through ritual, as Alcinda Honwana has reported. Psychosocial programs that encouraged people to remember and talk the violence out were not effective, since verbally recounting memories of the violence opens one up to spiritual attack. A TRC, moreover, was overwhelmingly rejected by both rural and urban Mozambicans as a process that would undermine rather than foster reconciliation.
Such popular rejection of truth commissions and Western psychotherapy is rare, however. Both Western psychotherapy and truth commissions are imbued with the authority of Western science, liberal models of social and political change, and the political economy of humanitarian assistance. The case of Sierra Leone demonstrates, however, that even when a truth commission is demanded and embraced by local NGOs, its failure to take seriously and to build upon local practices of healing and reintegration can undermine its effectiveness.
Accountability vs. Reintegration
Do local techniques of post-conflict healing, reconciliation, and reintegration resolve the need for justice and accountability? Here, I would argue, a distinction should be drawn between the need to make states and leaders accountable for mass violence on the one hand, and the treatment of rank-and-file perpetrators on the other. If most survivors of the violence want some form of retributive justice against the latter, then a truth commission or TRC is unlikely to be an adequate response. But in Sierra Leone, as in Mozambique, most survivors wanted reintegration and peace. Here, a truth commission—especially one with public hearings—was popularly felt to be a destructive process.
When I asked survivors of the violence in the northern Sierra Leonean communities in which I worked what form of justice they wished to see, some did speak of the need for retributive justice: "We you do bad ting na road, na bad ting den go pay you" ("When you do a bad thing on the road, it's with a bad thing they will pay you"). But an overwhelming majority responded "I have no power; I leave my case to God." If encouraged to think about what they would want if they had power, most then replied "If I had power, I would still leave my case to God, for the sake of peace," deferring to divine justice and viewing punishment and retaliation alike as escalating rather than ending the cycle of violence.
Sierra Leone's TRC, then, was operating in an environment in which alternative practices of reintegration, reconciliation, and social recovery were already established in many locations. Although the integration and reintegration of ex-combatants remains problematic, with large numbers of former fighters remaining in the towns in which they were demobilized, unable or unwilling to return to their former homes, many people in urban locations—both ex-combatants and civilians—nevertheless share in the cultural understandings of healing and reconciliation that these practices enacted. While ex-combatant numbers in urban locations are too high, and authority structures too fractured, for the techniques of integration and healing to operate in the same way as they do in rural communities, both civilians and ex-combatants again understand reconciliation and healing in terms of social forgetting.
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What about the possible alternative to TRC. How do Law trials, etc, affect collective memory
http://www.unt.edu/lpbr/subpages/reviews/osiel.htm
MASS ATROCITY, COLLECTIVE MEMORY, AND THE LAW by Mark Osiel. 1997 Reviewed by Michelle Donaldson Deardorff, Department of Political Science, Millikin University.
Attempts at deliberately constructing a society's collective memory have recently animated discussions in such diverse disciplines as experimental psychology, public history, and law. Mark Osiel's MASS ATROCITY, COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND THE LAW focuses upon the deliberate use of criminal trials in the transition to a liberal democracy from an autocratic state that has sponsored massive human atrocities. While he recognizes the detailed scholarship on the deterrence and retribution functions of criminal justice systems, Osiel is interested in the role of the criminal justice system in social engineering. He finds that public criminal trials "when effective as public spectacle, stimulate public discussion in ways that foster the liberal virtues of toleration, moderation, and civil respect" (p. 2). MASS ATROCITY intends to show how these virtues can be achieved while responding to both practical obstacles and ethical objections to orchestrating prosecutions of bureaucratic mass atrocities. While Osiel relies upon a wide variety of contemporary and historical examples of such trials, his stated purpose is to focus on the Buenos Aires trials of military officers.
According to Osiel, the predominant purpose of such trials is the development of a coherent collective memory of a people, a way of historically, legally, and societally examining a painful history and using it to create a more open, classically liberal society. More specifically, a form of societal solidarity must emerge from the trials. He describes two forms of such solidarity--mechanical and discursive. Mechanical solidarity assumes that a common history of the country and shared values can result from a public criminal trial, via an unified interpretation of these recent events. Osiel argues that criminal law, with its basis of competing narratives, can only provide mechanical solidarity "when virtually all members of society share a particular view of justice" (p. 36). In light of the societal emotions that are inherently residual from a mass atrocity, this form of solidarity is an unrealistic objective. Consequently, the goals of such trials should be discursive solidarity, where disagreements on outcomes, punishments, and guilt will remain but where acceptance of the legal and political processes underscores the entire event. "In this spirit, opposing parties greet each other not with a fraternal embrace, nor even a business-like handshake, but rather a nod of mutual agreement, initially grudging, that they will occupy the same society-- reluctantly but inescapably--for the foreseeable future"
In pursuit of this objective of discursive solidarity through public trials, Osiel recognizes and responds to six primary challenges to both the appropriateness and effectiveness of public criminal justice trials. First, in a liberal society, the rights of defendants are strongly valued, but the type of trial to make the good public theatre necessary for popular engagement endangers fair trial for defendants. Osiel argues that liberal show trials are justified on the grounds of the "liberal nature of the stories being told .... Liberal show trials are ones self-consciously designed to show the merits of liberal morality and to do so in ways consistent with its very requirements" (p. 65).
Second, if the criminal trial and hence the legal system, is to effectively change the collective memory it must tell "stories" compelling to the general public. The concern is that, in order to create interesting narratives, the historical record could easily be compromised. His rejoinder is that because legal scholars have always recognized the existence of competing narratives, a fact he believes historians have only recently accepted, the legal system is constructed to tolerate such ambiguities. He concludes that "courts may legitimately tailor the stories they tell in order to persuade skeptical publics of the merits of liberal morality. But they may not exclude incompatible stories from public hearing" (p. 141). Historians will provide some of these incompatible narratives. These narratives will eventually, in a free liberal society, compete with the official legal interpretations to influence the collective memory.
The third danger in the use of public criminal trials is found within the inherent limitations of legal precedent. One extreme view of precedent reads the legal judgment in these trials as controlling in later cases. The author argues such an interpretation greatly increases the authority allocated to the legally determined victims. By increasing the identity of survivors as victims, Osiel fears that a country will cease to develop into a healthy democracy. The second extreme emerges if precedent is read too narrowly, requiring too few to assume responsibility for the recent atrocities in the country's history. "The past can have little relevance to the present when it is understood as a story about how the evil few led the innocent many astray" (p. 158). For a trial to overcome these limitations, Osiel argues that those representing the law, specifically prosecutors and judges, must be forward in publicly asserting the strengths and limits of the law.
A fourth concern in reconstructing collective memory in a fractured society through a public criminal trial is the ability of the law "to infuse shared recollection of moral failure" (p. 166). Osiel finds that maintaining discursive solidarity as a clear goal of the trial is the only way in which the relationships between accuser and accused can remain fluid with both sides recognizing complicity, both collectively and individually. The fifth obstacle Osiel identifies is the viability of constructing a new collective memory, especially with only public law as a tool. Can law change social norms? He argues that the role of the law in these circumstances should be "to stimulate a candid discussions of just what these shared norms are, or should be" (p. 210) resulting again in discursive solidarity. Osiel realizes that social solidarity and collective memory may be either coincidental by-products or elements that can be deliberately constructed. Nevertheless, he asserts that whatever legal participants do be done publicly and visibly. This, he argues, mitigates many potential dangers.
The final concern he addresses is the implications of such public construction of collective memory. Osiel does not find this form of legal engineering a threat to judicial legitimacy, in part because "leading legal theory already acknowledges an element of 'construction' ineradicably present in the very nature of legal interpretation within a liberal community" (p. 242). Yet, many of these influences must be kept private to maintain legitimacy, not of the court, but of its resulting narrative. This narrative must become the authoritative interpretation in order to influence the collective memory, but to ensure discursive solidarity it cannot mandate closure.
Osiel concludes by arguing that despite moral challenges to such blatant legal and political manipulation and regardless of the practical limitations of the criminal justice process, "it is not too much to hope that courts in such societies might make full use of the public spotlight trained upon them at such times to stimulate democratic deliberation about the merits and meaning of liberal principles" (p. 300). The resulting debate creates the discursive solidarity fundamental to a liberal pluralistic society.
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Talking of mass atrocities, how do nations that were the home of the Nazi come to terms with their past
Germany and Nazi Heritage
http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/REZENSIO/buecher/gust1098.htm
Peter Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung: Gedaechtnisorte im Streit um die Nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit. Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, Reviewed for H-German by Stefan Gunther
James E. Young was one of the first Holocaust scholars to make the point that "memory of the Holocaust is ... as plural as the hundreds of diverse buildings and designs by which every nation and people house remembrance."[1] Peter Reichel, a political scientist at the University of Hamburg, attempts to elucidate this connection between the genesis and history of memorials and political culture for Germany after 1945. The goals he sets for this book are ambitious: following Maurice Halbwachs, he attempts to trace the trajectories of collective memory and the factors through which this memory manifests itself in what he calls "public memory culture." Reichel has written a book that espouses both stylistic clarity and an awareness of complexity in the analysis of the contingencies - historical, ideological, and aesthetic - of this culture.
Reichel starts with the premise that despite decades of research on Nazi Germany, "the consensus about the evaluation of these twelve years has not become greater but rather weaker and more difficult" (p. 10). He locates the main reason for the increased difficulty in interpreting Nazism primarily in the fact that public memory about these years has not only been subject to the interpretive conflicts inherent in historiography but has also - and he argues, primarily - been conditioned "by being embedded for decades in the intra-German conflict of political systems" (p. 10).
From the onset, then, Reichel argues for a concept of memory and memorialization that is historically contingent - subject to the expediencies of the "Realpolitik" of each of the two German states and ultimately representative of the fact that especially in the political culture of a united Germany, tension will continue to exist between desires to maintain a discussion about Nazi Germany via airing out different approaches to memorialization and the desire to fix memory once and for all by designing monuments to end all ambiguities.
Reichel is especially convincing when he argues that every memorial, as a sort of cultural sign, inscribes in itself a dualmovement: not only does it speak to the historical events made manifest in his production, but it also "documents ... the reception and interpretive history of an event" (p. 33).
This observation enables him to make a distinction between the ways in which East Germany, West Germany, and Austria engaged the public memory of Nazi Germany. Austria, in his interpretation, has been eager to construct the myth of being Nazi Germany's first victim and has put itself, by this rhetorical sleight ofhand, into the position of externalizing its Nazi past. East Germany, on the other hand, universalized the Nazi era by interpreting it as an outgrowth of the socio-economic factors of capitalism carried out to its logical extreme and thus bestowed on itself an antifascist foundation myth. Finally, West Germany, by claiming the legal succession of the Third Reich, aswell as through only half-hearted efforts at de-Nazifying the public sector, had no choice but to internalize Nazism's problematic heritage and engage all its repercussions.
It is this interpretive matrix that is, simultaneously, the book's biggest advantage and drawback. On one hand, Reichel succinctly explains the reasons for the divergent interpretations of the Nazi era in East and West Germany. For instance, his discussion of the Buchenwald concentration camp as a "monument of heroic self-liberation" and thus as reflective of a view of Nazi oppression as a mere precursor to the socialist revolution to follow neatly expresses East Germany's view of the victims as, ultimately, fighters and victors. Similarly, his account of the development of the Dachau camp into a memorial site reflects accurately the tensions between historialization and demonization; increased desire to force an end to ongoing discussions about the past and the officially sponsored "cult of dismay" (p. 128); and the eradication of Nazi past and the "mise-en-scene" of its memorial spaces. After the war, the camp site, after all, had been used as a refugee camp; had withstood attempts to demolish the erstwhile crematorium; had been subject to attempts by the German bureaucracy to tableplans for a memorial altogether; and was finally established, albeit replete with Christian symbols of solace and reconciliation and thus a "clean-cut ambiance" (p. 151) unlikely to evoke memory of the horrors perpetrated on the site.
However, Reichel's analysis of the procedures leading in each case to the establishment of memorials (be they in the East or the West) ultimately runs the danger of unduly stressing the outcome over the ambivalences and complexities of the process itself. In other words, Reichel's account adequately explains the ideological and political force fields within which memorials exist, but it remains unsatisfactory in elucidating the intra-societal pressures that bear on the very thought of remembering and memorializing the Nazi era and the Holocaust. Undoubtedly, memorials "have" been erected; this outcome, however, should not blind the reader to the fact that these memorials had to be discussed and constructed in the face of an increasing societal desire to what Germans call "einen Schlussstrich ziehen" and by attitudes, especially from within the Kohl administration, to further that desire. Kohl's dictum of the "grace of [his] late birth" and the Kohl-Reagan handshake at Bitburg are telling examples of that desire. Reichel is not unaware of these developments. However, by interpreting them as merely one element in the complex interactions of public memories, he seems to evoke the impression that a desire to gloss over the past and the attempt to keep its memory alive exist in equal measure. The record number of incidents of right-wing violence against foreigners and Jews; the recent electoral success of the DVP in Saxony-Anhalt (and tendencies in the CDU to make "crime and immigration" a central issue of the national elections last month); and the increasing tendency to collapse the particularity of the Nazi crimes and their victims into officially sponsored remembrance for all the "victims of war and the reign of terror" (thus the inscription on the "Neue Wache" in Berlin) all seem to indicate, if not a distinct desire to gloss over the past, at least an unwillingness to engage questions of how the past continues to influence the present and of what official position to assume "vis-a-vis" representing the Nazi era.
These reservations, however, do not detract from the merit of Reichel's book. Despite the somewhat too indiscriminate application of the interpretive matrix discussed above, the book does achieve a discussion of the "culture of memory," in both the East and the West, that is remarkably nuanced, even-handed, and informative. After finishing "Politik mit der Erinnerung", no reader will ever be able to look at a German memorial without being aware of the distinct processes of remembering the specific, partial truths about Nazi Germany that have found expression in the specific artifact. James E. Young has written that "the best memorial to the fascist era and its victims in Germany today may not be a single memorial at all - but only thenever-to-be-resolved debate over which kind of memory to preserve, how to do it, in whose name, and to what end".[2] While Professor Reichel's book may be somewhat insensitive to what this reviewer considers to be increased tendencies towards the silencing of that very debate, the fact that it does chronicle the establishment of a large number of memorials in the first place provides a counterweight of sorts. It remains to be seen whether this establishment of memorials and the literal "making concrete" of memory will prove sufficient to stem the tendencies towards normalizing the Nazi past.
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Closer to home, would we ever be guilty of selective memory ?
http://www.alternet.org/story/17435/
Dictators R Us
By Noam Chomsky, AlterNet
All people who have any concern for human rights, justice and integrity should be overjoyed by the capture of Saddam Hussein, and should be awaiting a fair trial for him by an international tribunal. An indictment of Saddam's atrocities would include not only his slaughter and gassing of Kurds in 1988 but also, rather crucially, his massacre of the Shiite rebels who might have overthrown him in 1991.
At the time, Washington and its allies held the "strikingly unanimous view (that) whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his country's stability than did those who have suffered his repression," reported Alan Cowell in the New York Times.
Last December, Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary, released a dossier of Saddam's crimes drawn almost entirely from the period of firm U.S.-British support of Saddam. With the usual display of moral integrity, Straw's report and Washington's reaction overlooked that support. Such practices reflect a trap deeply rooted in the intellectual culture generally -- a trap sometimes called the doctrine of change of course, invoked in the United States every two or three years. The content of the doctrine is: "Yes, in the past we did some wrong things because of innocence or inadvertence. But now that's all over, so let's not waste anymore time on this boring, stale stuff." The doctrine is dishonest and cowardly, but it does have advantages: It protects us from the danger of understanding what is happening before our eyes.
For example, the Bush administration's original reason for going to war in Iraq was to save the world from a tyrant developing weapons of mass destruction and cultivating links to terror. Nobody believes that now, not even Bush's speech writers. The new reason is that we invaded Iraq to establish a democracy there and, in fact, to democratize the whole Middle East.
Sometimes, the repetition of this democracy-building posture reaches the level of rapturous acclaim.
Last month, for example, David Ignatius, the Washington Post commentator, described the invasion of Iraq as "the most idealistic war in modern times" -- fought solely to bring democracy to Iraq and the region. Ignatius was particularly impressed with Paul Wolfowitz, "the Bush administration's idealist in chief," whom he described as a genuine intellectual who "bleeds for (the Arab world's) oppression and dreams of liberating it."
Maybe that helps explain Wolfowitz's career -- like his strong support for Suharto in Indonesia, one of the last century's worst mass murderers and aggressors, when Wolfowitz was ambassador to that country under Ronald Reagan.
As the State Department official responsible for Asian affairs under Reagan, Wolfowitz oversaw support for the murderous dictators Chun of South Korea and Marcos of the Philippines. All this is irrelevant because of the convenient doctrine of change of course. So, yes, Wolfowitz's heart bleeds for the victims of oppression -- and if the record shows the opposite, it's just that boring old stuff that we want to forget about. One might recall another recent illustration of Wolfowitz's love of democracy. The Turkish parliament, heeding its population's near-unanimous opposition to war in Iraq, refused to let U.S. forces deploy fully from Turkey. This caused absolute fury in Washington.
Wolfowitz denounced the Turkish military for failing to intervene to overturn the decision. Turkey was listening to its people, not taking orders from Crawford, Texas, or Washington, D.C.
The most recent chapter is Wolfowitz's "Determination and Findings" on bidding for lavish reconstruction contracts in Iraq. Excluded are countries where the government dared to take the same position as the vast majority of the population. Wolfowitz's alleged grounds are "security interests," which are non-existent, though the visceral hatred of democracy is hard to miss -- along with the fact that Halliburton and Bechtel corporations will be free to "compete" with the vibrant democracy of Uzbekistan and the Solomon Islands, but not with leading industrial societies. What's revealing and important to the future is that Washington's display of contempt for democracy went side by side with a chorus of adulation about its yearning for democracy. To be able to carry that off is an impressive achievement, hard to mimic even in a totalitarian state.
Iraqis have some insight into this process of conquerors and conquered.
The British created Iraq for their own interests. When they ran that part of the world, they discussed how to set up what they called Arab facades -- weak, pliable governments, parliamentary if possible, so long as the British effectively ruled.
Who would expect that the United States would ever permit an independent Iraqi government to exist? Especially now that Washington has reserved the right to set up permanent military bases there, in the heart of the world's greatest oil-producing region, and has imposed an economic regime that no sovereign country would accept, putting the country's fate in the hands of Western corporations.
Throughout history, even the harshest and most shameful measures are regularly accompanied by professions of noble intent -- and rhetoric about bestowing freedom and independence.
An honest look would only generalize Thomas Jefferson's observation on the world situation of his day: "We believe no more in Bonaparte's fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain's fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations."
And it is not just recent events that get filtered
Selective Remembrance of Post-Cold-War History
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_41_15/ai_57748160
Paul Gottfried
Thanks to Washington Beltway conservatives, the 10th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet empire has given rise to celebratory events and publications. From a gala dinner last May arranged by the American Conservative Union to a Heritage Foundation-sponsored study of Cold War heroes by Joseph Shattan, Washingtonians are watching the past return as selective commemoration.
The problem with the latest Cold War hero lists is methodological, as well as moral: They tell more about the current conservative quest for centrist or Cold War liberal respectability than they do about who did more than someone else to defeat communism. Thus, we end up talking less about architects of Cold War victory and more about whom Beltway centrist conservatives would like to put into their political pedigree.
Not surprisingly, Ronald Reagan makes it onto every movement conservative short list of who won the Cold War. As a serf-described conservative president, and as someone who pushed the Soviets into ruinous competition with U.S. military expenditures, Reagan continues to shine as a Cold Warrior. He also is a sufficiently contemporary national figure so that he remains a familiar name even to those younger than 30, unlike such mid-century conservatives as, say, Robert Taft and Richard Russell.
Give Shattan's new book, Architects of Victory: Six Heroes of the Cold War, credit for picking former German chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967) as an anticommunist great. By the time Adenauer became head of the government in 1949 (much to the unease of Harry Truman who favored his socialist opponent), his outspoken dislike for the Nazis had led to his imprisonment and near execution, while his sharp tongue and social conservatism caused the occupying Allied forces to distrust him. As chancellor, Adenauer built close alliances with both France and the United States, and he resisted any temptation to seek the reunification of his country under Soviet auspices. This option remained open into the early fifties, as Stalin worked to neutralize Germany. Adenauer, however, remained loyal to the anticommunist Western side, knowing that this meant the indefinite postponement of German reunification.
Shattan picks Pope John Paul II as another one of his Cold War heroes for his defense of human rights and religious freedom, and for his ties to the Solidarity labor movement in Poland. While the pope may be an admirable man, with fans in moderate conservative circles, it may be questioned whether he played a more decisive role as an anticommunist than a recent predecessor now termed "reactionary." Into the early fifties the now fallen-from-journalistic-favor Pope Plus XII had hurled pastoral attacks against the godless communists and had threatened to excommunicate those Catholics who might support the enemy with their votes. Catholic intellectuals on the anticommunist right (many of them converts) applauded these papal positions.
Two of Shattan's heroes featured in neo-conservative hagiography, Winston Churchill and Truman, were both far less consistently anticommunist. Contrary to the impression created by Shattan and by Claremont Institute guru Harry V. Jaffa, Churchill was rather erratic in this matter. Nor did his anticommunism fit the now prescribed form of waging crusades for global democracy. In the 1920s Churchill's dislike for the communists invariably was linked to a defense of Latin fascism, as in his 1927 interview with the New York Times in which he praised fascism's triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism and held it up as the necessary antidote to the communist poison.
At the outset of the Cold War, it was not the ousted Churchill but his Labour Party opponents in power, Clement Atlee and Ernest Bevin, who resisted the Soviet takeover of Europe. And, despite the speech delivered in Fulton, Mo., in 1946 about the "iron curtain descending," Churchill shamelessly had appeased Stalin during and after the war -- from hiding Soviet atrocities committed against England's Polish allies to collaborating in the return of Soviet refugees to Stalin in Operation Keelhaul.
Churchill's consistent shortsightedness and stupidity in dealing with the Soviets was chronicled by one of Shattan's other heroes, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago presents Churchill as someone too clever by haft who ends up being gulled by Stalin. While this unkind judgment may go too far, it also seems excessive to treat the British leader as a prescient and steady Cold Warrior.
As for Truman, it should be stressed that he was in office two years before he put into place a strategy of even partial resistance to the Soviets. Radical socialist Bevin had taken a stronger stand against the Soviets in the Balkans in the fall of 1945 and again during the Berlin crisis. Despite the inadvertent tributes that a generation of revisionist leftist historians bestow on Truman as a crazed anticommunist, there is little in his record to suggest such a persona. During the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, Truman cooperated with the Soviets to whitewash their joint aggression with Hitler under the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and he only quite reluctantly removed those suspected, with some justification, of being communist agents from the administration he had inherited from Franklin Roosevelt. Throughout his presidency Truman went on defending Alger Hiss as a patriotic public servant who had been framed by the Republicans.
Conservative organizations in this celebratory season typically exclude from their pantheon of anticommunist heroes not only the explicitly socialist Bevin but everyone on the authoritarian right who killed, maimed or suppressed communists. Although Francisco Franco, Syngmam Rhee and Augusto Pinochet all seem to have been formidable anticommunists, these resourceful dictators have been shoved down the Beltway-conservative memory hole. Who wants devastating anticommunists on one's list if their names will embarrass George Will by evoking the stench of fascism? Needless to say Churchill's longtime infatuation with the real article can be stuffed down the same memory hole.
A striking illustration of this manipulated history is the disparate treatment accorded two prominent anticommunists: one a celebrated New York journalist preoccupied with Israeli geopolitics, the other an Asian religious leader lavishing funds on anticommunist causes and publications. While both clearly have spoken out against communist tyranny, the religious benefactor has done so more consistently. His own anti-Communism had been fortified by his suffering of beatings in a North Korean prison camp, whereas the other figure had changed his mind politically, after being decidedly soft on the communists for many years.
Significantly, the benefactor -- the Rev. Sun Myung Moon -- spent hundreds of millions to fund publications and conferences throughout the eighties which empowered anticommunist intellectuals of all stripes. As is well-known, in 1982 -- at a critical moment in the Cold War -- Moon founded the Washington Times, which gave Reagan administration officials their only media soap box in left-leaning Washington. Less well-known is that from 1980 on Moon financed hundreds of academic seminars throughout Latin America that helped turn the tide of opinion in venues where the fight against communism was a hot war.
Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary, and his family certainly have made use of Moon's publications. Without offering invidious judgments, it would seem that the benefactor in question did and suffered as much for anticommunism as the editor whose family he subsidized. Nonetheless, the way these two have been presented in conservative publications would give no clue as to the historical reality. Moon and his followers have been taken apart as religious fanatics in Heritage Foundation's Policy Review, the Weekly Standard and the American Spectator. Never, to my knowledge, have these publications mentioned him as a dedicated anticommunist, let alone one who devoted his life and substance to defeating communist ideas and tyranny. By contrast, Podhoretz has been celebrated in Encounter, the Weekly Standard, the Washington Times and National Review (and, of course, in Podhoretz's own magazine) as a courageous hero of the Cold War. Good for Podhoretz, but why the difference? Most fulsome of all is the review essay in National Review devoted to his virtues and to his book of reminiscences about his social spats in New York, Ex-friends. Podhoretz is depicted as engaging in the epic conflict of his century between decent freedoms and totalitarianism, a collision worthy of Thucydides.
Note that the subject of this conflict had not spent a single moment near a gulag or Asian prison camp or been drafted to fight in a shooting war. He was at cocktail parties trading snubs with I Lillian Hellman and other boozed-up Stalinoid scribblers.
There are social reasons to account for this imbalance in historical memory. Moon is disliked by swarms of liberal journalists who claim to fear that he may brainwash their kids as the head of an allegedly dangerous cult. Most conveniently of all, Moon has continued to subsidize even some groups that ridicule him, providing they are believed to be anticommunist or sympathetic to religious discussions. Cold War celebrants therefore have material incentives to ignore Moon and to play up the anticommunist accomplishments of their friends. The tale that hangs thereby is that only a true naif would expect historical truth to be served by the present ritual of Cold War commemoration.
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Are things getting better ?
http://www.alternet.org/story/36743/
Political Amnesia Is the Enemy By Danny Schechter, MediaChannel.org
We all know, all of us in America anyway, that Memorial Day weekend marks the start of summer. It's about the downtime ahead, the vacation that's coming, the shutting down of the serious in anticipation of fun in the sun.
Officially, it is also about honoring the dead, and there will be parades by veterans and flags flying on TV newscasts. Most of it is set in the present with little referencing of the past or memory itself.
Memories work on us on every level, especially when they slip out of mind. A memory exhibit at San Francisco's Exploratorium museum touches on the usual: "You get to school and realize you forgot your lunch at home. You take a test, and you can't remember half the answers. You see the new kid who just joined your class, and you can't remember his name. Some days, it seems like your brain is taking a holiday -- you can't remember anything!"
But memories are not just individual properties. Societies have memories, or should. And our news world and information technologies could or should have the capacity to keep us in touch with our collective memory, our recent history, the only context in which new facts find meaning.
I like to joke about my own "senior moments," but cultures have them too -- and often, not always by accident. In our culture, it is often by design. The frequent references we hear to "political amnesia" is not just commentary but an allusion to a social pathology, a deliberate process of actually disconnecting us from our past and history.
The blogger Billmon writes: "I don't know if it's a byproduct of decades of excessive exposure to television, the state of America's educational system, or something in the water, but the ability of the average journalist -- not to mention the average voter -- to remember things that happened just a few short months ago appears to be slipping into the abyss. "If this keeps up, we're going to end up like the villagers in "One Hundred Years of Solitude," who all contracted a rare form of jungle amnesia, so virulent they were reduced to posting signs on various objects -- 'I AM A COW. MILK ME' or 'I AM A GATE. OPEN ME' -- just so they could get on with their daily lives."
A 1991 science fiction film called Total Recall pictured political amnesia, in the words of Michael Rogin as "an essential aspect of the 'postmodern American empire.'"
A book by Andreas Huyssen takes another tack, arguing, "Rather than blaming amnesia on television or the school, "Twilight Memories" argues that the danger of amnesia is inherent in the information revolution. Our obsessions with cultural memory can be read as re-representing a powerful reaction against the electronic archive, and they mark a shift in the way we live structures of temporality."
But whatever the causes, the consequences are truly frightening. When 63 percent of young people can't find Iraq on a map after three years of war and coverage, you know that the institutions that claim to be informing us are doing everything but.
Our amnesia about recent developments seems to be induced and reinforced by the very fast-paced entertainment-oriented formats that we have become addicted to as sources of news and knowledge. They keep us in the present, in the now, disconnected from any larger ideas or analytical framework. No wonder some studies find that news viewers rapidly forget what they have just seen. That is what is intended to happen. No wonder, as Jay Leno shows when he contrasts a photo of a cultural icon with an elected official, that the public recognizes the former, not the latter. We recognize Mr. Peanut, not Jimmy Carter. More people vote for the best performer on American Idol than for our presidents.
The architects of TV news know this from their market surveys and studies. It is this very media effect that they hype to lure advertisers to their real business: selling our eyeballs to sponsors, not deepening our awareness. Depoliticizing our culture is a media necessity in a society driven by consumerism. Every programmer knows the drill. It's a market logic called KISS: Keep It Simple and Stupid.
A national curriculum, "Lessons From History," on the teaching of the past realizes that this phenomenon threatens democracy, warning, "Citizens without a common memory, based on common historical studies, may lapse into political amnesia, and be unable to protect freedom, justice, and self-government during times of national crisis. Citizens must understand that democracy is a process -- not a finished product -- and that controversy and conflict are essential to its success."
So even as this dialectic is deplored, it is, sadly, quite functional.
"We're forgetting the past," says historian Howard Zinn, "because neither our educational system nor our media inform us about the past. For instance, the history of the Vietnam War has been very much forgotten. I believe this amnesia is useful to those conducting our present foreign policy. It would be embarrassing if the story of the Vietnam War were told at a time when we are engaged in a war which has some of the same characteristics: government deception, the killing of civilians through bombing, scaring the American people (world communism in that case, terrorism in this one)."
So on Memorial Day and in the season ahead, think of how to encourage remembering, not just about the dead but for the living. Our future depends on how we understand the past. Political amnesia is the enemy in our ADD culture.
Please don't forget. Oh, too bad, you already have …
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How memory changes with circumstances
http://www.slate.com/?id=2061757
Muhammad Ali How the Greatest became an Islamic teddy bear. By David Plotz
Muhammad Ali is the Dalai Lama of the post-9/11 world—the beatific sweetheart we call on to sanctify every important moment. He is always available to symbolize, well, whatever the heck you want.
The Champ, who may be the world's most famous Muslim and the world's most famous American, is certainly the world's most famous Muslim-American, and he has been using that status for the good. He made news last week by pleading, in Allah's name, for the release of kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Hollywood executives have recruited Ali to headline a PR campaign to show Muslims that the United States opposes terrorism, not Islam. On Sept. 21, Ali was the all-star among all-stars at the 9/11 celebrity telethon—a Muslim teddy bear insisting that the religion of the prophet means peace. The December release of the biopic Ali prompted still more Ali worship, as did Ali's 60th birthday celebration on Jan. 17 and his lighting of the Salt Lake City Olympic torch at the start of its cross-country relay.
Since Ali's Parkinsonism was revealed about 15 years ago, the dazzling, scary, draft-dodging, anti-American, Nation-of-Islam-embracing, racial-invective-spewing, sexually promiscuous, savage, gorgeous, hilarious boxer has been reinvented—and has reinvented himself—as a catch-all holy man, a "saintly, ethereal force," as one writer dubbed him.
He has become a full-time global do-gooder. The Greatest has taken medical supplies to Cuba and food to African children; he campaigned to cancel Third World debt; he traveled to Iraq on the eve of the Gulf War to beg Saddam Hussein to release a few American "human shields"; he negotiated a prisoner exchange between Iraq and Iran; he visited Vietnam with American families searching for MIA relatives; he has raised money for Parkinson's, muscular dystrophy, and many other diseases; and he has committed countless acts of private generosity for people in need—a few grand here, a nursing home saved there, pretty soon we're talking millions of dollars. Presidents, the United Nations, and Amnesty International, among many others, have showered him with medals.
If Ali were, say, Jesse Jackson, his indiscriminate activism would have branded him a self-aggrandizing, short-sighted opportunist undermining America. After all, Ali has cheerfully given photo ops to Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein—Hussein in a time of war. His food giveaways have been photo ops for Global Village Market, a soy meat-substitute marketing company that pays him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to use his image. But because Ali is Ali, his favors only serve as evidence of his big heart.
Why does no one lay a finger on the Champ these days? It is the unmanning of Ali that has made him angelic. Parkinson's has stolen all that made Ali vital. It has robbed the Louisville Lip of his lip, taken the speed from his lightning feet and the strength from his mighty arms. Meanwhile, the kind of Islam he has embraced—a pillowy, warm-hearted universalist Sunnism—has diminished (at least for his white audiences) his racial identity. Ali, who once embodied the black supremacist dementia of the Nation of Islam, has become transcendently nonracial, much more an icon of Islam than of black America.
It is by losing all that made him threatening to the establishment—his quick tongue, his physical might, his black power—that he has been welcomed in the American living room. Emasculated, he is heroic. The less like his grand and contentious old self he is, the more he is revered. The rough edges that remain—the self-aggrandizement, the constant telling of ethnic jokes (A favorite: "What's the difference between a Jew and a canoe? A canoe tips.")—are written off as cute.
Ali also appeals so widely because he can be admired in so many contradictory ways. He is cherished as one of the 20th century's greatest talkers: the Lip, a low-comic Tennyson, the father of rap. And yet he is adored too as an inarticulate monk, whose forced silences seem eloquent and whose words are (supposedly) rich with meaning because they are so rare.
He is celebrated as one of the most brutal boxers in history, and as a peacemaker. No pantheon of black rebels is complete without him, but he is now venerated for his universalism. Leftists recall him as an anti-American dissident who fought the U.S. government over the draft, yet he has become patriotic, even jingoistic. He is at once the greatest of all entertainers and an icon of contemplative spirituality. He is admired for his joyful, fun-loving hedonism but also for his asceticism.
He symbolizes both physical perfection and the ravages of disease. (Whenever he throws a slow-motion jab these days or mumbles a word, hard men weep.) He is idolized as a champion, the three-time heavyweight king but also as a loser, whose most heroic moment was his defeat at the hands of Joe Frazier. Like the Bible, Ali can be turned to any purpose you choose. He contains multitudes.
This is why it is fruitless to try to find the essential Muhammad Ali, a task that has preoccupied writers since he was Cassius Clay. Ali is uninterested in principles or ideas—Islam, his very squishy version of it, is the only one that has stuck to him. Ali's basic philosophy is the soft touch. Everything is a random act of kindness. A friend asks him to do it. He is touched by a particularly sweet letter from a needy fan. Someone visits his house and needs help.
There is no consistency to Ali's work, no sense that it matters beyond the moment of kindness. He doesn't follow through. Ali's good intentions often have dismal consequences. He happily handed out food to Africa's needy but seems indifferent that Global Village Market gave only 5 percent of what it claimed to charity, according to a Montreal Gazette investigation. He doesn't care that Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein got more out of Ali's visits than those Ali was helping. He hands out cash to folks he knows will squander it, just to make them happy.
This is where Ali and the Dalai Lama differ. The Dalai Lama, for all his happy-go-lucky spriteliness, is obsessed with a particular, very real cause. All his work and all his smiles are aimed at freeing Tibet. But the Champ has no higher goal. He revels in the adulation and appreciation of those who see him. What matters is the instant that brings joy into someone's life. Ali is a saint—a saint for a short-attention-span world.
That’s all folks,
Colin
