Remembrance: Never again means now

The "Gate of Violence" with the bronze sculpture of the kneeling Jew, by Manfred Werner - User:Tsui - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=892933

Yesterday, as I was taking care of two unwell dogs, and lying in bed with Meg la loca, I came across this video.

Do watch to the end. It is very informative, and takes you on a journey. And the subtitle to this piece comes from its final words.

It prodded me to think of the role of memory and forgetfulness. Of how we as human beings valorize ourselves, make ourselves to be heroes, and bury any inconvenient truths which we cannot face.

What applies to Austria's post-war history applies equally to we in the United States. And I'm thinking specifically of how we have commemorated—or failed to commemorate—our history with slavery.

Much like post-war Austria wanted to portray itself as "Adolf Hitler's first victim", rather than a willing accomplice in his crimes, we have competing narratives in this country about the Civil War.

In the South, for decades, the narrative was about the "Lost Cause". The war wasn't about Black chattel slavery, but about freedom and liberty, about a struggle against tyranny from an oppressive central government. In the victorious Union, the picture painted is of a noble, almost holy cause to free the slaves, who would enjoy the fruits of the American bounty.

Of course, the South rebelled precisely because it wanted to keep its "peculiar institution." And the North's racial attitudes were not much different than those in the South; Black people were not seen as equals to whites. White migrants saw freedmen as economic threats. Read up on the 1863 Draft Riots in New York City, as Irish immigrants violently opposed drafting into the Union Army, attacking Black New York residents and burning down their property.

Again, it's a sad truism that societies are loath to deal with their dark pasts. The crimes we have here are multifarious. Slavery. Extirpation of the Native populations. Anti-migrant bigotry. Oppression of women. The Monroe Doctrine and gunboat diplomacy. In many ways they are balanced out by the good this country has done in the world, especially in the two world wars. But one cannot accept only the valorous parts of one's history. Acknowledging the darkness is not wallowing in it. It is not an effort to "bring down" society. It is a needed part of any social structure, so that its members can learn and improve from what went before.

Donald Trump is moving to align the historical institutions he has under his control with extreme right wing ideology, where the United States is and always has been a "Republic of virtue". All its actions have been God-ordained and for the betterment of humanity. Any blemishes are mere detours on the road to righteousness, and should not be accentuated. 

This comes from people—and, sadly, it is a large percentage of our fellow-citizens—who know subconsciously that what beliefs they hold are at heart wrong. That they know they are looked down upon by decent society, but do not and cannot deal with that cognitive dissonance. The Lost Cause arose because the South was ravaged by Union troops, defending a slavery they had to give up. The beneficent Union masks the fact that a decade after the war it stopped any effort to reform the South, and left the freedmen to toil in near-slavery, all in service of a greater national project. No one is innocent.

Never again is now. Because "never again" means that we must have honest and clear-eyed assessments of our past. And in these days, where fascism has arisen in the countries which both originally defeated it, and in the countries which dragged the world into the inferno, we must be clear: We cannot solve a problem without naming it. Hatred is the problem. Bigotry is the problem. Grievance is the problem. People who see a changing world as an existential threat are the problem.

"Well, that's not what I believe." No? Are you sure? I remember white Democrats, before Barack Obama had even been sworn in, already lamenting that he would not be up to snuff. No, perhaps you don't say the N-word. But you are formed by a culture in which the denigration of anyone non-white and non-cisgender male is baked in. If you don't examine yourself, how do you know what you do or don't believe?

We must remember both the good and the bad, for that is the only way humanity will progress. Unless we have a clear, clinical view of the past, our present and our future will always fall off the rails. "Never again" becomes a dead letter unless we study all of history in all of its complexity, and not just attach ourselves to comforting stories. And we can never cease the struggle. Too many in the West thought that liberal democracy was an unassailable order; we now see how wrong that was. Now we have to fight the same battles again, because we got complacent, and because we got bored. 

"Never again" is active. And passivity will doom us to live through the same times which engendered that two-word assertion.