One striking thing about the recent brouhaha over Kerry’s military awards is that it reopened wounds and domestic conflicts related to the long dormant Vietnam War. While the extreme leftist position, which held the American soldiers, government, and the country as a whole jointly responsible for the war faded in recent years, a replacement view that the soldiers fought honorably in a hopeless cause replaced it. This latter view permitted reconciliation between veterans and their society, without requiring an endless debate on the hypothetical prospects of victory. Even so, competing views of the nobility of the cause existed up to the present that did not mesh directly along political lines. Especially those not alive at the time, maintained the war was winnable and was lost for lack of will. Others said it should never have been fought. But the recriminations of veterans largely disappeared . . . to our collective benefit.
History is not a linear thing. Old wounds can reemerge years, decades, even centuries later at the slightest provocation. For Serbs, the 14th Century Battle of Kosovo might have easily happened yesterday. For blacks, the sins of slavery remain more prominent today, even though no slaves are present within living memory and institutionalized racism of “Jim Crow” largely disappeared in the mid-1960s.
The problem with certain “lessons of history,” is that they become an albatross for contemporaries, preventing reconciliation and progress, requiring old fights to be refought under the logic of the vendetta. The lives of Palestinians and Israelis, most prominently, remain intertwined by these kinds of equally vital conceptions of history, which fuel an identity of victimhood.
One necessity of social peace between groups is a certain kind of forgetfulness, which disgards the notion of hte past as a “morality play.” Such a transcendence of the traditional drama carries with it a risk, no doubt, of losing one’s identity. Conservatives are naturally skeptical of these calls for “moving on.” But for Americans especially, this kind of replacement of identity with a hopeful focus upon the future and a new “self-made” identity is part of our national mythology. Can conservatives deny that the shedding of old and historical identities permits erstwhile enemies to live in social peace in America’s polyglot urban centers?
Nietzsche writes in the Use and Abuse of History:
This is a general principle: each living being can become healthy, strong, and fertile only within a horizon. If he is incapable of drawing a horizon around himself and too egotistical to enclose his own view within an alien one, then he wastes away there, pale or weary, to an early death. Cheerfulness, good conscience, joyful action, trust in what is to come–all that depends, with the individual as with a people, on the following facts: that there is a line which divides the observable brightness from the unilluminated darkness, that we know how to forget at the right time just as well as we remember at the right time, that we feel with powerful instinct the time when we must perceive historically and when unhistorically. This is the specific principle which the reader is invited to consider: that for the health of a single individual, a people, and a culture the unhistorical and the historical are equally essential.
A range of intractable conflicts from race relations, to the place of the Vietnam War, to the prospect of peace and reconciliation in the Middle East all depend upon a certain type of “forgetfulness.” When to remember and when to forget is the hard part.
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