In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies
By David Rieff, Yale University Press, 160 pages, $25
“It was like the sound of rain, the sound of firebombs dropping,” Keiko Utsumi remembers. She is an elderly, dignified Japanese woman, retired as a nurse and a midwife, impeccably dressed in a beige linen blazer in the sweltering Tokyo summer heat. Late in the Second World War, during the spring of 1945, she was 16 years old, put to work at a military factory in the port city of Yokohama, just south of Tokyo. During one of the United States’ incendiary bombing raids, she recalls huddling in a bomb shelter all night, terrified, watching the inferno of wooden houses all around. When she emerged into a scorched wasteland the next morning, with the ground so hot it melted her shoes, she saw the dead: “They were all black, all burnt.”
Seventy years after the end of the war, Utsumi met me in central Tokyo last August to tell her story. Remarkably, she had never discussed her terrible experiences with anyone. “When I was leaving the house this morning,” she said, “and told my son I’d be in an interview about the war, my son asked, ‘You were in the war?’...”
This kind of stoic quietude may seem odd, even unhealthy, to many, accustomed to ventilating the most mundane experiences, with no incident too banal to be rehashed. But respect for such forbearance is at the heart of David Rieff’s insightful and humane new book.
“In Praise of Forgetting” is about our collective memories: how we remember our national histories and argue about our shared past. Rieff contends that these collective remembrances are self-serving, often fraudulent and frequently dangerous. Sometimes, he thinks, we would be better off simply forgetting the grudge-filled chronicles and getting on with living our lives. He admires the suggestion of a Northern Irish writer that the next memorial to Irish history should be “raising a monument to Amnesia, and forgetting where we put it”.
Rieff recoils at the conceit that memorialisation is a moral and political duty, as well as a personal one in “our therapeutic age”. To the contrary, he says, remembering is ultimately futile, since all societies will — like the mortal individuals who make them up — eventually crumble to dust. To those who hope that remembering the Holocaust might help avert future atrocities, he retorts that this is “magical thinking”, pointing to subsequent extermination campaigns in Bangladesh, Cambodia and Rwanda.
Instead, he warns that all too often, collective memory “has led to war rather than peace ... and to the determination to exact revenge rather than commit to the hard work of forgiveness.” For Rieff, national remembrances are almost always political, sometimes imposed by victorious armies, at other times drummed up by manipulative politicians seeking to fabricate an epic past to legitimise their present-day intentions. He provides a depressing abundance of examples where toxic memories fuel atavistic hatred: among Iraqis; Israelis and Palestinians; radical Islamists across the globe; and Hindu chauvinists rallied by the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.
This is no abstract dread for Rieff, a distinguished journalist known for eviscerating American and European failures in Bosnia and later for thoughtfully questioning the value of international humanitarian organisations. Having been an eyewitness to Yugoslavia’s collapse, he understands the grotesque realities of ethnic strife and power politics with stark clarity. He disgustedly recalls visiting a Serb nationalist politician in Belgrade who, as the war raged in Bosnia, venerated the Serbian guerrillas of the Second World War, while one of his aides portentously handed Rieff a piece of paper reading “1453” — the year when the Ottoman Empire conquered Orthodox Constantinople.
Worse, Rieff worries that memory could not just spark violence, but prolong it. In order to end a war, or get a dictator to yield power to democrats, it’s often necessary to negotiate with murderous leaders who will demand their own amnesty — blotting out their own past cruelties to assure future peace. (Nuremberg, the preferred precedent of human rights lawyers, is almost always the wrong example. It was only after a hard-won unconditional victory that the Allies could put Nazi Germany’s rulers on trial, but most wars don’t end so decisively.)
While Rieff would prosecute war criminals whenever feasible, he rejects the legalistic “absolutism” of those human rights activists who insist on justice above peace or other worthwhile political goals. He prudently warns that Chile’s return to democracy could have been scuttled by a Spanish warrant for the arrest of the military dictator Augusto Pinochet. And in Bosnia, he convincingly argues that the injustice of a Dayton peace agreement that spared the bloodstained Slobodan Milosevic was still far better than continuing a ruinous war.
Rieff makes a powerful case for reconciliation and compromise, and exposes how politicised nationalist histories are. Lucidly deploying historical examples and literary references, he himself seems to have forgotten nothing. But in a book packed with pugnacious argument, he only implicitly offers rules for when to remember and when to forget. It’s a delicate matter asking victimised peoples to turn their backs on their grievances; Japanese rightists only further offend Koreans by proclaiming that they need to get over their wartime suffering. And the pursuit of justice, while risky, doesn’t always derail peace processes: the Dayton peace deal proceeded even though a United Nations war crimes tribunal had indicted the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.
No absolutist himself, Rieff isn’t against all remembrance. He believes that we are morally obligated to remember the Holocaust, and praises war crimes trials and truth commissions in Europe, Latin America and South Africa. He vigorously argues that there is a duty to debunk whitewashing about the Armenian massacre, British and French colonial massacres, Imperial Japan’s sexual enslavement of women from Korea and other Asian nations, and the Srebrenica massacre. (The fact that Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, is defiantly promoting the crackpot slur that Hitler was somehow a kind of Zionist “before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews” demonstrates that some history lessons are still necessary.)
It’s one thing for people to settle and move on; it’s another to get them to forget. Although Mao Zedong’s regime worked to normalise China’s relationship with postwar Japan, including discreetly fixing the blame for the Second World War on a small clique of militarists, today’s Chinese leadership has had little difficulty in whipping up a broader popular rage against Japan. After Croat fascists slaughtered Serbs and Jews in the Second World War, Yugoslavia’s postwar Communist dictatorship nevertheless promoted an amnesiac “brotherhood and unity”. Yet the bad old memories lingered long enough to provide nationalist tinder for Milosevic to exploit in the 1990s. Not all of us have the grace of Keiko Utsumi.
Rieff’s book feels painfully relevant for today’s sour populist mood. As powerful leaders in China, Russia, India, Japan and elsewhere are energetically promoting their own fractured takes on their history, he punctures their pretensions. Donald J. Trump’s chest-thumping version of America’s 20th-century experience — “We saved the world” and then “we saved the world again” — is unusual only in its brainlessness. This rich book provides a field guide to a more decent politics of forgiveness, in which Trump and Trumpism may one day be mercifully forgotten too.
–New York Times News Service
Gary J. Bass, a Princeton professor, is the author, most recently, of “The Blood Telegram”. He is writing a book about the Tokyo war crimes tribunal.
