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.
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
