What are We Choosing to Remember?

history and memory

Welcome back to a new, much more irregular and abstract history class. I realize it might be more important at this time to talk about historical concepts and how they operate rather than individual events on their own. I’m also taking a lot of theory-based classes which I don’t really understand so this is sort of an attempt at legitimizing it (like when I yell “PANOPTICON” whenever I roll through a stop sign for Foucault). One of the things that really deterred me from going into teaching right now was how I remember the curriculum, which I somewhat talked about in my last post. The reason WHY the curriculum sucks is a case of memory and controversy, or what we’re choosing to remember. To make it super clear, I’m going to tie this to World War II (because I work at a museum) and American intervention in the Middle East. Before I talk about those, here’s a question: what do we generally choose to remember in our daily lives? Don’t think about specifics, just think about concepts. It’ll be important later (spoiler alert).

Living veterans of World War II, the Holocaust, and the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki are hard to find. This makes sense, it’s been 80 years since the end of the war (officially September 2, 1945). This makes understanding the war increasingly difficult. Relying only on textual evidence is a severely flawed way of research. We’re lucky to have oral histories from survivors to furnish the topic in education, but are these being used? Americans historically hate talking about the bombs. Whenever they get brought up they come with a question: did we need the bombs to win the war? I feel strongly that the bombs were not dropped to actually accomplish anything but rather to show American military prowess as a finally “that’s what they get” kind of thing. Happy to take questions on that. I also think that when most Americans learn about the bombs, they aren’t learning about the real affect they had. The Americans were bombing the two cities left after years of war. It was a bombing of civilians. Harry S. Truman famously said the bombs would “spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam”¹, but what would he call the aftermath? The documentary Atomic People from PBS came out only last year. It brings a mostly untold story of US cruelty to an American audience. I watched it and learned really horrible things. Can you imagine going to school and learning all of your classmates are dead? What about having a relative who survives, but then dies months later after coughing up a black substance? The bombing has had lasting effects on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki regions which include countless health problems. The complicated part, however, is that the atrocities committed by the Japanese army are also rarely taught pre-Pearl Harbor. Prior to WWII, the Japanese were involved with the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). The Nanjing Massacre (The Rape of Nanjing) occurred in 1937, well before Americans had any stake. The war crimes are extensive. As just one example: there was a contest to see who could kill one hundred people first with only a sword. The list is very long and worth looking into. You can read a brief summary about it here. This is on top of Unit 731 (which started in 1936) in which mostly Chinese (but some Korean and Russian) people were tortured in the name of science. I say in the name of science because they really didn’t achieve legitimate scientific findings at all. They were entirely about torture. More on that here. The point of mentioning Nanjing and 731 is that history and memory are tethered and complicated. Atomic People does not talk about what the Japanese army was doing, and in some ways it doesn’t need to. A six-year-old should not be held responsible for the actions of the government. However, we shouldn’t look over what exactly the “other side” was doing. This is important because most Americans do know that the US was in part fighting Japan in WWII, but they rarely know what Japan was actually up to. Pearl Harbor is just a very small slice in the history and buildup of WWII. Atomic People can exist because enough time has passed where Americans are ready to hear who was really harmed by the bombs. What happens when Americans aren’t ready?

In some ways, war in the Middle East started after 9/11, in others it started in 1979. These are considered separately, but they are also intertwined. Americans are still not ready to talk about the Iranian hostage crisis, or rather not talk about it in detail. Regular readers know how I feel about Argo. That was made in 2012 and perpetuates a narrative in which all Iranians are evil in the face of the American hero Ben Affleck. Great movie, zero stars for accuracy. The point of that reminder is to ask is America ready to talk about the truth of the hostage crisis? Is it too recent? The hostage crisis was, to simplify, the start of a new orientalism in which America (and the entire Western world) established a narrative where ALL Iranians (later lumped into anyone in the Middle East) are against democracy and out to destroy America. An anonymous source (I didn’t ask if I could share this), who was under ten during the hostage crisis, said kids used to hold up their thumb and say “I walk”, then their pointer “I run”, then the middle “Iran”. This I think sums up how widespread the anti-Iranian sentiment was. Again, this too is complicated. Iran isn’t blameless. The hostage crisis was legitimately scary. The problem I have is that an assumption was made about ALL Iranians. Media depictions encourage this story in which Iran as an entire nation was truly evil. Argo did it 30 years later. This is why I wonder if America is ready to talk about it? The post-9/11 war in Iraq complicates things further. So does the ongoing war in Gaza.It’s the same problem. Why are we so set on lumping all citizens in a region with the choices of a terrorist group? Can Al-Qaeda be associated with every single person in the Arabian Peninsula? Of course not. Let’s talk about two modern examples now. During the Iraq War, Americans maintained a prison at Abu Ghraib (referred to as Abu Ghraib). American soldiers committed acts of sexual, emotional, physical, and psychological abuse on the prisoners². They even documented it in truly astonishing, graphic photos. The crazy part is, the soldiers are smiling! They think it’s funny! I don’t get the joke. The first time I read about Abu Ghraib, I was grossly ashamed. Not only did I have no idea about what we were even doing in Iraq (this really all happened when I was like two) but the truth was kind of hard to find. The soldiers involved, and their involvement couldn’t be denied because the photos are there, did not get nearly as shamed as they should have been. Lynndie England, one of the photographed soldiers, stated that “we all agree that we don’t feel like we were doing things that we weren’t supposed to, because we were told to do them. We think everything was justified, because we were instructed to do this and to do that”³. I want to drive home that she doesn’t think she did anything wrong. Sabrina Harman, the photo for this post, has countless images of her smiling among piles of dead bodies. The crazy thing is that she also had a positive relationship with many Iraqi natives. She bought one family a refrigerator. She often gave out toys to the local kids⁴. Even with something so clear-cut (the torture of Iraqi prisoners), it’s still complicated. Objectively, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib are war crimes and significant human rights violations. It doesn’t matter what you think the prisoners may have deserved. What matters is that the events of Abu Ghraib demonstrate that the American military is openly committing war crimes and they feel limited shame (as an organization) about it. Of course, schools aren’t teaching about American war crimes. That would make us look bad! The result, however, is that we remember the Iraq War differently because we aren’t considering what actually happened.

Now I’m finally coming back to the question I asked in the beginning: what do we choose to remember? I personally try to forget about the time I was the only person who didn’t get invited to a birthday party in fifth grade. I talk about it, but I try to forget it because I don’t want to remember that feeling. This same concept can be applied to history. People naturally don’t want to be uncomfortable. They don’t want to hear about the time American soldiers made prisoners rape each other in Iraq. Keeping it far away from memory means we don’t need to feel discomfort in the political actions of our nation. Discomfort is not a good enough reason to avoid a topic, especially an important one. We can balance the bad side of America with the positive achievements we’ve made as a nation. There’s a way to talk about the shameful past actions of the country without demolishing its merits. Now, it’s been made apparent the far-right government disagrees. The 1776 Commission is one example of this. They don’t want people to learn about the bad things Americans have done because then they’ll realize all the flaws with the modern nation. Sometimes I sound like a conspiracist but I promise I’m not. Republicanism thrives on keeping people miseducated or even better uneducated. This is why history is being cleansed in states like Florida. I want to leave you with one more question that I don’t really have an answer to: what happens when we truly forget?

1. https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/august-6-1945-statement-president-announcing-use-bomb

2. https://www.hrw.org/report/2004/06/09/road-abu-ghraib#6505

3. https://archive.ph/20080119121523/http://news4colorado.com/topstories/local_story_132222538.html#selection-873.37-873.244

4. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/03/24/exposure-5?currentPage=all