Entangled Alliances

It’s perhaps a truism that if you want to understand a country, you need look no further than the way it teaches history.  Most countries are engaged in subtle yet constant processes of constructing a meta-narrative which legitimates the regime and institutions of the present.  In France, for example, the Revolution (of 1789) is appropriated as good solid secular republicanism (which is a hazy proposition at best), while the socialist Paris Commune is excluded, remembered only in the “group memory” (rather than the national, or “collective” memory) of a few pilgrims who trudge defiantly each May to the tombs of the fédérés in the Père Lacahise cemetery.  Equally, the German notion of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) has been a crucial one in the post-war generational evolution of the nation’s self-image and has had implications for Germany’s affinity for European identity, the generational conflict of ‘68 and resurgent nationalism around the time of the 2006 World Cup.  Drawing on history lessons, the tempting contrast is, of course, between a Germany racked with “guilt” and a Japan defiant about its wartime actions until very recently.  The way in which collective memory treats events in a country’s history is, then, an enlightening insight into the way in which it is evolving in the present.

Take a fascinating and often harrowing account in this week’s New York Times about modern-day Cambodia:

As it struggles to leave its past behind, Cambodia today suffers from a particularly painful generation gap: those who survived the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, and their children and grandchildren, who know very little about it.

photo credit: Strevo

Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge killed around a fifth (most likely around 1.8 million) of the Cambodian population, engaging in radical social engineering which, in its persecution of anyone with the slightest education and its emphasis on a purely agrarian social model, not only had a massive human cost, but also social, economic and cultural consequences which will be felt for decades to come.  That, as the NYT article reports, 80% of under-30 year olds (who make up 70% of Cambodia’s population) know “little or nothing” about this period clearly has massive implications, generationally and in terms of an historical healing process.  Despite the ongoing trials of Khmer Rouge figures, under UN pressure, the Prime Minister, Hun Sen is clearly a proponent of historical oblivion: “[he] once proposed that Cambodia “dig a hole and bury the past.”*

[...] the Khmer Rouge period has not been taught in school, causing some teachers who are survivors to feel orphaned by their students.

A new high school text book that discusses the Khmer Rouge years has been prepared, but it will reach only a portion of the country’s students

This attitude seems to reflect that prevalent in Germany immediately following the war, and perhaps the desire to forget is understandable.  But the disbelieving laughter of children who play with the skulls in the erstwhile Killing Fields must come as a final, devestating blow to those who suffered one of the most abhorrent acts of the bloodiest century in human history, but who thought perhaps, that some solace might at least be found in the final verdict of history.  With the latest trials a seeming irrelevance in national discourse, any hope of “Truth and Reconciliation” seems far off, and in failing to come to terms with the past, we risk alienation and, inevitably, the repetition of tragedy in the future.

I say we, for if the twentieth century has taught us anything, it is that genocide can happen almost anywhere, and that the international community is woefully slow to act.  Forgetfulness (if not ignorance) is stark even with regard to evil at its most manifest: a poll of British schoolchildren last month showed that only 37% knew that 6 millions Jews died in Europe’s Holocaust.  Those children at the back of Cambodian classrooms are not unique, and we must strive to ensure that meta-narratives do not blot out unpalatable aspects of history, especially in a globalised age where history is far from a national construct and in which modern-day cases of genocide make a brief foray into national dialogue before being overshadowed by pressing domestic concerns.

Nor should we allow the Holocaust to become trivialised through misappropriation of language  (a post-modern phenomenon I think is all to common – consider for example, the ubiquity of the word ‘rape’ in contemporary youth parlance).  A piece by Dr Dvir Abramovich, Director of Jewish studies at the University of Melbourne, makes this point quite well and provides some telling examples, although his argument does betray a lack of nuance in equating the poignant and delicate film, Life is Beautiful, with a build-it-yourself LEGO concentration camp .  

photo credit: _L_U_C_A_

Contrary to Abramovich’s assertions, the value of a film like Life is Beautiful is in its original, personal and challenging presentation of the events of the Final Solution.  In constantly demanding honesty, in whatever form available, and in never shying from confrontation with unpalatable aspects of history in an increasingly global process of shaping collective memory, we can only improve the chance that the leaders of tomorrow will be more likely to act when evil inevitably strikes once more.

*Update: for an in-depth academic study of collective memory and the Cambodian genocide, see David Chandler, ‘Cambodia Deals with its Past: Collective Memory, Demonisation and Induced Amnesia’ in Totalitarian Movements and Political Regions, 9:2 (June 2008).