The politics of memory
On our minds: When is history a political act? (Always.) |
 | | Earlier this month, the former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison.Moises Castillo/Associated Press |
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As New York Times readers, you've doubtless been aware of the extraordinary 1619 Project — The Times Magazine's special issue devoted to the 400-year legacy of slavery in the United States. Amid the overwhelmingly positive responses, particularly from readers, you may have noticed some pockets of anger on social media. |
We've seen variations on this kind of reaction before. In the summer of 2013, Guatemala City was so fraught with tension that it seemed as if a sneeze might trigger a detonation. The reason was the criminal trial of the former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt and his deputy, José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, both in the dock for crimes against humanity and genocide. |
Inside the courtroom, drama centered on the testimony of survivors of Guatemala's long and brutal civil war. But outside of it, the country focused with fury on something else: the politics of historical memory. |
"No hubo genocidio!" — there was no genocide — became the rallying cry of those who insisted the former generals should not be convicted. |
It was a political argument, not a legal one. Despite the two men's unpopularity, despite the facts that were laid out with carefully planned precision in the courtroom each day, many in the country were outraged at the notion that Guatemala could be placed in history's dark pantheon of genocidaires. How dare the court place Guatemala alongside Nazi Germany and Rwanda's Hutu power movement? Those countries, the argument went, were bad. Guatemala was not. Therefore this version of the past must be a false, activist narrative, one designed to shame the country and taint its legacy rather than present a fair version of the truth. |
If that sounds familiar, perhaps it is because it is a near-mirror of many of the arguments made by commentators who felt angered and hurt by the 1619 Project. |
Reckoning with past atrocities can stir up shame and a kind of cognitive dissonance. It's not just that we don't want to see national heroes and other beloved members of our "team" — people and institutions we have been taught to revere and identify with — as capable of monstrous acts. It also threatens our sense of a just world. If people can commit atrocities but still go on to be revered, that suggests the world is unjust; that we cannot trust history's calculus of who is a hero and who is a villain. Or, for that matter, trust our own. |
Have you ever visited Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's famous Virginia home? It is beautifully designed and carefully gardened, high on a hill in a spectacular setting. Touring it was perhaps the most macabre experience Amanda has ever had. |
To pay for that house and the time to sit in his well-appointed rooms tinkering with brilliant ideas, Jefferson enslaved hundreds of human beings, including at least four of his own biological children. To fill it with treasures, he used people — families — as collateral for loans. |
To settle the debts that his profligate lifestyle incurred, his estate sold nearly all of those enslaved people after he died. Families were divided, some permanently. Husbands and wives separated. Children taken away from parents. |
That was a monstrous act, by Jefferson's own standards. He wrote at the time that slavery was a "moral and political depravity," an "evil," a "hideous blot" on the new nation. He thought it should be abolished. But he lived in luxury and comfort, and did not free the people he had enslaved. |
The tour was essentially an opportunity to experience the rooms and gardens from that perspective. Slavery, brutality and oppression were all mentioned in every room. But the focus was still on the beauty and culture they contained. |
American history, at least in the standard teaching, has been like that Monticello tour. It acknowledges slavery, but tends to make it a secondary consideration, ranked somewhere below the accomplishments and ideas of those who used slave-derived wealth to build a new country. |
That's universal, particularly after a conflict or atrocity. People don't want to acknowledge that their national heroes and icons might have done terrible things, that their heritage might be a source of something other than pride. |
It is true, then, when the critics claim that remembrance like the 1619 Project is a political act. It is, for the same reason that Tamil families remembering family members killed in the civil war with the Sinhalese-majority government is a political act; and that people in Spain petitioning to have victims of fascism exhumed from mass graves is a political act; and that counting Hutus murdered by Tutsi forces during and after the Rwandan genocide is a political act, and that acknowledging genocide happened in Guatemala is a political act. |
All of those memorials, all of the reckonings they might trigger, are political. But that's only because forgetting is a political act too. |
| "Whiteness is a fiction because race is a fiction, but I hope the last few days have reminded people that the social status of American Jews of European descent as white is conditional and therefore revocable." |
- Timothy B. Lee — our former colleague when we worked at Vox, now a writer at Ars Technica — reflects on our big story on how YouTube radicalized Brazil. Mr. Lee reaches a conclusion that was once considered extreme or unreasonable among tech journalists and experts but is gaining more attention. "YouTube should stop making algorithmic video recommendations," he writes. "The current approach — in which an algorithm tries to recommend the most engaging videos without worrying about whether they're any good — has got to go." Mr. Lee added in a tweet, "In the 20th century it would have been considered insanely reckless for the local newspaper or TV station to lead with the story that would get the most readers/viewers without any concern for whether it was accurate. But that's what YouTube has been doing for the last decade."
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- Speaking of YouTube. Joanna Schroeder, a writer, traces the step-by-step progression by which social media, particularly YouTube, trains previously apolitical teenage boys to develop alt-right, white supremacist views. It's a series of steps that the platforms make very easy to go down, and that will look awfully familiar to anyone with teenage sons.
- Falko Ernst, a Mexico analyst for the Crisis Group, offers The Guardian some thoughts on the latest in what he calls "Mexico's avocado wars." Mr. Ernst had helped us report an earlier story on that conflict, in which powerful avocado growers had raised militias to defend from the drug cartels and to effectively secede from the state. (See also our newsletter on the town ruled by the avocado barons.) At the time, Mr. Ernst predicted that the experiment in avocado feudalism would lead to some dark places, and he was right.
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