About thirty years ago, a rapidly growing body of historical scholarship on memorialization, monumentalization and collective memory underscored an additional area of inquiry: processes of active forgetting, of “silencing the past”.1 Up to that point, collective memory and forgetting were regarded largely as automatic and natural processes. What was remembered was important, what was forgotten was marginal. It was easier to recognize that national and collective memory was a hugely active, agentive and contested process once historians began to see that as something to investigate through research.
Forgetting took a bit more thinking through. One kind of institutional or collective project to suppress memory was visible in the archive when you went looking for it because it was so programmatic, so instrumentally self-conscious. But finding those traces often led to a case of failed silencing, a sort of Streisand Effect: when communities, institutions and governments have very focused and deliberate projects intended to make people forget, they are almost inevitably engaged in some form of suppression, and the visibility of suppression very nearly ensures that whatever they want forgotten will instead be more comprehensively remembered.
I think that’s even true when there’s a highly coordinated effort by powerful interests that intends to misremember or silence memory who are careful to leave no transcripts or visible signs of their determination to do so. It’s readable nevertheless, because that sort of silencing takes action and the actions outline the invisible design. Public speech that produces private or anonymous reaction, people testifying to or focusing on something that happened within organizations who are there one day and absent the next. You can see it when you’re researching, it’s a kind of sharp or interruptive end to conversations, statements, visible activity that has a kind of unnaturalness to it, a craft, a design.
What’s harder to read and understand are processes where an event, an experience, a highly visible moment that involved hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people, that was highly public and commented on, just seems to quietly ebb out of sight, like a full wash-sink slowly drains away and then suddenly at the end there’s a sucking sound and some soapy froth and residue around the edges. You think to yourself as you work: surely this can’t have been forgotten just naturally! But there aren’t any of the diagnostic signs of suppression, of instrumental will.
That opens to investigation a vast domain of silence as active and agentive, but not noisy or the coercive work of one group of interested people against others. People forgetting because it is strategic to forget, for now, what you can’t do anything about, but somehow holding memory in reserve until another day arrives. People forgetting because it is an easier way to deal with their own mistakes than admitting them. People forgetting because it simplifies an experience so complicatedly unresolved and multitudinous that it could never be narrated clearly in the first place. People forgetting not because they are afraid of the powerful, but because remembering would force them to unleash their own power on others, would make them know what they’d rather not know. People forgetting because remembering hurts too much.
In so many of those cases, the option to remember is there somehow. Forgetting is often not outright erasure. I sometimes think of it as being about splitting what you know into a cypher and then hiding the decryption key somewhere in culture, in texts, in material objects. Waiting for the madeleine whose smell pulls it all back into shape.
And yet, a great many events of importance are erased, even to those who lived them, such that a historian can surprise (provoking both dismay and delight) by recounting what has been lost. Or sometimes they are always on the edge of being emembered continuously, but with such a diminished affect that their memory provokes nothing but wistful curiosity.
Today I am thinking about this because I am wondering how people could ever forget the murder and kidnapping of thousands from their homes on October 7th 2023. Or the many-times-more thousands of murders of people with bombs in Gaza in the months since then.
Or the deaths and wounding of people in Lebanon from exploding pagers and other communication devices both yesterday and today.
Never forget has been a global commandment since the world came to grips with the Holocaust. Forget or else has been the order of many states towards persecuted minorities even in the face of that post-1945 demand. The Turkish government has consistently hectored the rest of the world over any memorializing of Armenian genocide.
And yet, even in recent world history, some violent and traumatic experiences are neither urgently remembered nor insistently suppressed. There are borders and territories that could be the focus of national or regional campaigns of remembrance with a revanchist vision. The nation-state of Mexico could constantly engage in memory projects intended to push to the forefront of public attention the territories it lost to the United States in a war whose unabashed purpose was conquest. No one has forgotten that this happened. That history is materially everywhere, in place names, in food, in the everyday lives of people. It can show up as anything but a surprise in innocent popular entertainments, like The Mask of Zorro. And yet it is also shockingly the focus of overwrought campaigns of forgetting. I grew up in California, and while every civics class and history class I had from first grade to twelfth grade readily acknowledged that California was once indigenous, then Spanish, then Mexican, and then not, that was never told to us as a history of aggressive conquest, of dispossession, or of a need to remember. Nobody ever talked about the Spanish ownership of Rancho San Pedro or asked us to remember the names of the men involved or their lives as forerunners of life in the South Bay of Southern California (admittedly, perhaps, because it was a huge legal mess before the United States claimed ownership over the whole territory). Even when people fought for Latino rights—with an insistence on the deep history of presence and belonging that ought to make that an incontestable demand—they were not doing persistent memory work to recuperate the specifics of that past time, nor were they using it to stoke a revanchist demand to be returned to Mexico. It took Donald Trump’s 2016 rhetoric about Mexico to provoke some Mexicans to consider a lawsuit to nullify the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as a retaliation rather than a remembrance.
At least some of the time, peace takes people coming to the conclusion that they need to forget, whether that’s because they can’t win or because undoing what happened in the war would require new kinds of violence and violation in the present. And yet, coming to that conclusion is often a brutally hard thing. It feels like letting enemies prosper despite the harm they did. It feels like an invitation to still more evil futures rather than a healing of the past.
Every time a combatant inflicts harm on their enemies they increase the improbability of forgetting. A conflict that cannot be forgotten or forgiven because of the magnitude and intensification of harm is a conflict that is increasingly locked on only one possible end: annihilation of everyone on one side. If we are today debating whether a particular assault or tactic is “genocide”, it is at least in part because the rest of the world sees in the conflict now underway a reasoning that leads nowhere but genocide. There is no one left today who remembers with revanchist anger the Etruscans, or who proposes to revive Carthage to confound its destroyers. Almost no one claims a remembered tie to the Pannonian Avars even when historians suggest they might have both genetic and sociohistorical links to them. They’re just gone.
This is the tipping point in Coppola’s Godfather films, which the titular character wants to avoid: once the war between rival families starts, it can only stop with everyone on one side being dead, but none of the combatants really understand just how many people “everyone” really represents until they recognize how many unforgettable acts they will suffer from and commit in the process. It’s Tessio, it’s Fredo, it’s Michael’s entire family life and sense of future aspiration.
The danger of unforgettability is what gets lost in perpetual talk about whether this-or-that action by Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, the United States or other states involved in the region will in and of itself cause “escalation”. It seems plain to me that much of the Israeli leadership wants escalation at the moment, because they’d rather take attention away from Gaza and keep a promise to make northern Israel inhabitable again. But they also plainly want to claim that if and when there is escalation, they did not escalate. That is they who suffered an unforgettable outrage (which plainly is not “daily rocket attacks”) which must be unforgettably avenged. That’s a hard claim to make in the days that follow such a memorable demonstration of how long you have been intricately planning the execution of your enemies. I mention the Godfather films in part because it’s a nearly cinematic act of revenge and provocation.
Which is part of what makes something unforgettable even in the face of a willingness to leave it behind. Wars are full of battles and violence that even those who were wounded forget in their particulars. The barrier to putting it all behind you is lower when it’s just another ordinary day on the front lines, one of a thousand tiny brutalities. But when people know that for every day to come, they and their children and their children’s children will always be asked: why did you do that? Or: how did you survive? Whom did you lose? Then it may be impossible to do the work of losing memory, no matter how essential that is to the victory that comes with real peace, to the achievement of a settled matter that is safely behind the living.
As with all things in this conflict, to criticize the latest act of unforgettable violence is always to provoke the rejoinder: this is but a retaliation for the last one. We did not start this, but we will finish it. When you realize that there are only two peaces possible in this case or any other: everyone agreeing to forget, or so many people being dead that there is no one left to remember, then you realize that it is not a question of who did what to whom first. It is that the most unforgiveable thing is the next unforgettable one.
See for example Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 1995; David William Cohen, The Combing of History, 1994.
So many important ideas here. So much to think with and about. Thanks, Tim.