Remember: The Cost of Forgetting
Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink"
Remember: The Cost of Forgetting
History shows us that societies that fail to honestly confront (and teach their children about) their darkest chapters are, more often than not, doomed to repeat them. Germany’s unflinching confrontation with its Nazi past—through education, memorials, and legal accountability—stands in stark contrast to Japan’s reluctance to fully acknowledge its wartime atrocities, or to America’s halting efforts to address our legacy of slavery (and the ongoing “Lost Cause” Confederate mythos) as well as the (ongoing) genocide against this continent’s Indigenous peoples.
The consequences of this collective amnesia are all around us, from the Confederate flags on January 6th to the new efforts to strip science and history from our schools. When we fail to teach children about the horrors of the Holocaust, for example, anti-Semitism resurges. When we allow Confederate monuments to stand unchallenged, white nationalism finds fertile ground. When we call January 6th “legitimate political discourse” (as multiple Republican elected officials have done) rather than the attempted coup that it was, we prepare the soil for the next, potentially successful insurrection.
Memory is not passive; it’s an active, ongoing process, because it’s the foundation of our present and shapes our future. As philosopher George Santayana famously noted, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”23 But just remembering isn’t enough: we must draw the right lessons, form the true conclusions, and pass along the honest truths to our children from history.
The most dangerous form of forgetting isn’t complete amnesia, it’s sanitization, where historical atrocities are stripped of their horror and repackaged as noble struggles (as is being done today and has been done for over a century around the Civil War) or unfortunate mistakes (like the way we deal with the lies that led us into Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan). We see this in “conservative” attempts to rebrand the Confederacy as a fight for “states’ rights” rather than to preserve slavery, or in textbooks, stories, and even movies and TV shows (remember the westerns of the mid-twentieth century?) that minimize the genocide of Native Americans as an “unfortunate” consequence of “westward expansion.”
I remember well back in the 1980s when we’d moved to Atlanta from New Hampshire, our first time living in the South. Over dinner one night I asked our son, then in public elementary school, what he’d studied in school that day. “We learned about the War of Northern Aggression,” he told Louise and me to our slack-jawed amazement.
This selective amnesia and its promotion across our nation’s social and political culture isn’t accidental. It’s a deliberate strategy by the beneficiaries of white supremacy and genocide to avoid accountability and perpetuate the systems that help them retain their own power. As journalist Jelani Cobb notes, “When we speak of history, we’re not speaking about what happened in the past. We’re talking about who has the power to define what happened.”24
Authoritarian movements understand this power all too well. Their first target is almost always historical truth, banning books, removing “uncomfortable” topics from school curricula, and attacking archives and academic freedom. The world saw it in Germany, Spain, Italy, and Japan in the run-up to World War II, and is seeing it now in Russia, Hungary, and—tragically—here in the United States. They know that controlling the past is essential to controlling the future. As Hitler wrote in Chapter 10 of Mein Kampf, “The victor will never be asked if he told the truth,” and as he later said in a 1935 speech at the Reichsparteitag, “He alone, who owns the youth, also seizes the future.”
Resisting this erasure requires commitment to what I learned when I lived there in the 1980s, what modern-day Germans call Erinnerungskultur: a “culture of remembrance” that actively preserves memory of historical crimes and treats them not as ancient history but as living warnings. This includes
· Creating and preserving memorials to historical atrocities
· Supporting honest education about our darkest chapters
· Recording and amplifying the testimonies of survivors and witnesses
· Establishing truth and reconciliation processes
· Holding perpetrators accountable regardless of time elapsed
As Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel reminded us, “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”25 And we must bear that witness not to wallow in guilt, but to make absolutely sure that “never again” is a lived reality instead of just an empty slogan.
The American experiment has always been, at multiple levels, a contradiction: founded on principles of freedom while practicing slavery, promising equality while enforcing segregation, celebrating democracy while denying the vote to millions. But what has kept our American experiment—the first in the history of the civilized world—alive is our willingness, however halting and imperfect, to confront these contradictions and nonetheless (or even because of them) strive toward that more perfect union that our Constitution’s preamble promises.
Those familiar with my comments know that I have been vigorous in defending Israel from the libelous charge of genocide, but what I say next will brand me, by some, as an antisemite. A word I dispute and would like to discuss)
The Zionists in Israel, supported by Christian Zionists in the U.S. are in the process of violently dispossessing their Arab and Bedouin neighbors in the west bank and doing the same in south Lebanon.
This is atrocious and cannot be allowed to stand, but apparently the world is intimidated into silence because of the charge of antisemitism and the holocaust.
This is how the past controls the future, it is also ignored to control the present.
Every citizen, every occupant, of the United States, except native Americans lives on and enjoys stolen land, but that is also true of Britain and Europe, even South Africa, where the original inhabitants the Khoisan, were displaced violently by the Bantu.
In England, the Celts displaced most of the Brythonic peoples, who in turn were ethnically cleansed by the Anglo Saxons and Jutes, who in turn were displaced by the Normans
It is the history of the world, the difference is that there has been a shift in values and attitudes in some, to the point where in some the behavior is unacceptable, but in others it is condoned if not lauded.
Greed, power, the need for safety and security justified by ideology, and religion is an ideology, a sectarian one.
There is no salvation or redemption of the human condition, we are condemned to eternal conflict and oppression.
The past is both used and ignored to justify the present. Putin uses a mythical and manufactured history to justify the war on Ukraine, Americans ignore their history to justify their lifestyle.
Both Jew and Muslim Arab justify their behavior and position by recourse to a mythical and manufactured history.
I lived in VA in the mid 90's. My daughter went to a public middle school. They studied the Civil War in a history class. When the obvious result was the defeat of the South a 14yo cried because he had always been told the South had won the war. The same county refused to take the Confederate flag down from the court house. Sad and scary. There is a whole part of our country that are delusional. And armed to the hilt.