HARMFUL MEMORIES?

David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2016) ("[O]n what basis other than the narcissism of the living or a reckless disregard for history and logic could anyone seriously suggest that even the most coherent and solid of the [nation] states that now exists will still be around in anything like the same form in another thousand years, to two, or three?" "The reality is that no intelligent person believes anything of the sort.  Id. at 6-7. From the book jacket: "The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana's celebrated phrase, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' Today, the consensus that it is immoral to forget is nearly absolute. And yet is this right? David Rieff . . . insists that things are not so simple. He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, 'inoculate' the present against repeating the crimes of the past. He argues that rubbing raw historical wounds--whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces--neither remedies injustices nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a meal option--sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it might be more moral to forget." From the text: "I do not claim that forgetting would be an appropriate response in cases where justice or forgiveness (or both) are a realistic alternative, as in many cases, including some grave and seemingly intractable ones, they will be. But the ultimate metric here should not be the ideal by the probable, or at least the feasible. Bismarck's celebrated remark that no one should look too closely at the making of sausages or laws surely applies even more forcefully to peace settlements. When it is possible, by all means let societies remember, provided of course--and this is a very big caveat indeed, and one those convinced that remembrance is a moral imperative consistently underestimate--remembering does not engender further horrors. But when it is not possible, then, to paraphrase the slogan of the anti-Vietnam War movement of the late 1960s, it may be time to give forgetting a chance, which is another way of saying that it is time to give politics a chance and idealism a rest." Id. at 101. Sometimes I wonder--putting aside whether 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned repeat it'-- whether those who remember the past are highly likely to get it wrong, or at least learn the wrong lessons, and, thereby, increase the likely of not repeating the past but of doing something far worse.).