Mass Dictatorship and Memory as Ever Present Past

Jie-Hyun Lim, Barbara Walker, Peter Lambert

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137289834
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume explores the politics of memory involved in 'coming to terms with the past' of mass dictatorship on a global scale. Considering how a growing sense of global connectivity and global human rights politics changed the memory landscape, the essays explore entangled pasts of dictatorships.

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Introduction: Coming to Terms with the Past of Mass Dictatorship

Jie-Hyun Lim and Peter Lambert

Coming to terms with past tyranny in the ancient democracy of Athens entailed the employment of a rigid strategy. Individual citizens were in fact forbidden to recall the past. Legally enforced amnesia became the tool for guaranteeing reconciliation among citizens and thus enabling them to live together again as a political community.¹ But amnesia is not thus privileged in contemporary democracies. Adam Michnik’s slogan of ‘amnestia tak, amnesia nie’ (‘“yes” to amnesty, “no” to amnesia’) represents one current of thought in coming to terms with the past of communist dictatorship.² The ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ in South Africa tried to preserve memory of the apartheid regime at the expense of what might have seemed to some to be justified retribution – by offering perpetrators ‘amnesty’ in return for their confessions. Such confessions were seen as acts of atonement. The Stockholm Declaration of 2000 made teaching the Holocaust obligatory among EU member countries, while the ‘Platform of European Memory and Conscience’ was established in 2011 as an educational project about the crimes of totalitarian regimes. Indeed, the politics of memory pervade the global community; in Continental Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, they revolve above all around colonialism, dictatorship, genocide, mass killing and the many other forms of oppression that have left deep scars on the societies that they afflicted. For now, at least, it would seem that the memory of mass dictatorship is an ever present past in this global culture of memory.

Thus, the memory of mass dictatorship has become a fundamental political issue in its own right. The realm of this type of memory throughout the world is full of tensions and conflicts: between justice and reconciliation, revenge and forgiveness, the radical solution and the compromise, religious sin and legal culpability, innocence and guilt, remembering and forgetting; between actors and bystanders, passive victims and active perpetrators; and finally, between dissident politicians and post-dictatorial political clients. If there is a single theme uniting the essays collected in this book it is that while the politics of remembering past mass dictatorships seek to push people into making simple binary choices, the historical realities of mass dictatorships are inevitably too complex to be thus accommodated.

The essays that follow also reveal the centrality of the problem of complicity in the politics of remembering mass dictatorship. They reveal how readily political actors have made claims to the status of victimhood in order to circumnavigate potential or actual charges of complicity with ‘mass’ dictatorships. They are enabled in this strategy by the fact that it is easy to blame dictatorial structures for mass suffering and death. Yet structures do not kill. It is individuals who kill. Whole social groups fearing the accusation of complicity have employed similar strategies: in embracing victimhood status, they have sought to evade such accusations, and sometimes also a sense of their own guilt or responsibility. One result of these strategies is to multiply the layers of political, legal and moral complexity surrounding the politics of remembering mass dictatorship. The morally grounded accusations of circumstantial victims may result in discomfort for self-proclaimed victims without actually leading to legal trials. Allegations of complicity may also relate to behaviour in the aftermath of the demise of a dictatorship in the form of charges of collusion in covering up the crimes of the past. Then many collaborators and individual perpetrators, who had lived in hiding behind the cover of the victimised nation, unveil themselves.

Politicians, historians and others have reconstructed the past, realigned their memories, and selectively ‘forgotten’ their complicity, employing strategies that may initially have served the purposes of easing legal or moral recrimination, even perhaps securing public sympathy in the place of opprobrium. These strategies contrast painfully with the true sufferings of Holocaust survivors, for example, who bear unending guilt for their survival while those around them died in vast numbers. Such a comparison may lead us to ask whether complicity and guilt are not indeed simply part of the human condition, and the inescapable consequences of survival under any circumstances. If that is so, then their occurrence and characteristics during and after the experience of mass dictatorship are only heightened versions of ineluctable phenomena.

Two otherwise seemingly unconnected ‘witness statements’ on victimhood and perpetration may shed light on the interplay between them in those particular historical conditions. Writing in November 1945, George Orwell reflected on the fact that whenever he encountered phrases like ‘war guilt trials’, ‘punishment of war criminals’, and so forth, they triggered ‘the memory of something’ he had witnessed ‘in a prisoner-of-war camp in South-Germany’ earlier that year. He and another journalist had been shown round the camp ‘by a little Viennese Jew who had been enlisted in the branch of the American army which deals with the interrogation of prisoners’. His guide was ‘an alert … rather good-looking youth of about twenty-five, and politically so much more knowledgeable than the average American officer that it was a pleasure to be with him’. The guide took him to a group of SS officers who had been segregated from the other prisoners. ‘That’s the real swine!’ he said, indicating ‘a man in dingy civilian clothes who was lying with his arm across his face and apparently asleep’. Then, ‘suddenly he lashed out with his heavy army boot’. He then explained to Orwell that it was ‘quite certain’ that the prone man ‘had had charge of concentration camps and had presided over tortures and hangings. In short, he represented everything we had been fighting against during the past five years’. Orwell, not in the least inclined to doubt his guide, carefully scrutinised this perpetrator of murder and victim of a well-aimed kick.

Had the Viennese Jew gained anything from his act of petty vengeance? Orwell asked himself. There was, he immediately concluded, no enjoyment for the young man, who was rather ‘telling himself that he enjoyed’ his newfound power, and ‘behaving as he had planned to behave in the days when he was helpless’. Orwell attached no blame to his guide: to do so would have been ‘absurd’ and considered the strong probability that ‘his whole family had been murdered; and, after all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a tiny thing compared with the outrages committed by the Hitler regime’. A few years earlier Orwell would surely ‘have jumped for joy’ himself at the prospect ‘of seeing SS officers kicked and humiliated’. The vision was attractive only for as long as one did not have the power to realise it; ‘when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting’. Nowhere does Orwell’s text suggest that he had sought to intervene when confronted with this case of the inversion of victim and perpetrator.

Yet ‘this scene’ was perfectly comparable with ‘much else that [Orwell] saw in Germany’. Perhaps he may have felt deprived of any morally justifiable course of action. Whatever he may have felt about his own role as passive bystander in this one instant, he certainly did own to feeling the unease attendant to sharing a collective British complicity. For the ‘big public’ in Britain was ‘responsible for the monstrous peace settlement now being forced on Germany’, and ‘we’ – the British – had ‘acquiesced in crimes like the expulsion of all Germans from East Prussia’. Thus Orwell, the consistent anti-Fascist and propagandist for the ‘People’s War’ against Nazi Germany, sought to come to terms with his own vengeful past desires which, once put into practice, he experienced only as ‘pathetic and disgusting’. His close inspection of the roles of perpetrator and victim was as sensitive to their instability as it was fully alert to the disproportionality between the SS man’s past commission of violence and present suffering from it. He could even empathise with a bullied and humiliated SS man, a ‘monstrous figure’ who had ‘dwindled to this pitiful wretch’ in need not of ‘punishment’ but of ‘psychological treatment’. He could do so without blinding himself to the far greater injustice suffered by the Jew who had bullied the SS man. And Orwell rigorously avoided the easy option of ascribing all guilt to the defeated Germans and a clean bill of moral health to a victorious democratic Britain.³

As the longstanding Czech human rights activist and president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia Vaclav Havel confessed, his own experience as a dissident taught him that the dividing line between the innocent and the guilty can be much more blurred than was – and very frequently still is – thought to be the case. Thus, according to Havel, ‘the line of conflict runs de facto through each person, for everyone in his or her own way is both a victim and a supporter of the system’.⁴ Nobody was simply a victim; everyone was in some measure co-responsible. If everyone is co-responsible, the question of who should be put on trial is much less clear. Havel’s implicit answer is everyone, and therefore no one.⁵ The firm stance Havel took against the ‘lustration’ process as a way of overcoming the communist past should be understood in this context.

Havel’s insightful argument is related to guilt and innocence, perpetration and victimhood in the context of a dictatorship that, though it had evolved out of Stalinism, was not programmatically murderous. No longer seeking to instil ideological fervour in the population in order to drive forward a utopian agenda, the ‘normalised’ regime in Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring was content with a mere show of public approval, and with the maintenance of its power for power’s own sake. It made few demands on its citizens beyond the appearance of buying in to a handful of slogans that were the flotsam and jetsam of a wrecked Marxist-Leninist project. It might rather be described – to borrow Martin Sabrow’s telling description of the German Democratic Republic at a comparable point in its evolution – as a ‘soft dictatorship’ as well as a ‘consensus dictatorship’.⁶ The ‘social contract’ that the regime offered and the people accepted was in its own way no less morally corrosive for both partners: the rulers and the ruled. The mass dictatorship hypothesis, which posits the collusion of the many in the construction of dictatorship over themselves and others, and which refers to dictatorships that certainly were programmatically violent and ideologically driven,⁷ is nevertheless consonant with Vaclav Havel’s self-reflective position. Here, the moralist dualism that posits a few vicious perpetrators and many innocent victims is called into question because it facilitates the displacement or denial of the historical responsibility of ordinary people.

The dictum according to which ‘structures do not kill, but individuals do’ points to the culpability of large numbers of historical actors. Given its stress on agency, the concept of mass dictatorship does not exonerate ordinary people from historical responsibility and juridical culpability. Indeed, the ranks of mass killers contained not only crazy psychopaths but, crucially, also ordinary human beings – that is to say, normal people. This reality of the ‘banality of evil’ and even the ‘pleasure of evil’ breaks through the moral comfort zone that the image of criminally insane perpetrators brings to us. When Raul Hilberg asked the question, ‘wouldn’t you be happier if I had been able to show that all perpetrators were crazy?’, his implication was that history brings no comfort because those perpetrators are just like us.⁸ Most recently, perceptions of war criminals in the former Yugoslavia have confirmed this insight. Neighbours remember those war criminals as good people who would never have hurt a fly.⁹

This ‘Mass Dictatorship’ volume explores the memory politics involved in ‘coming to terms with the past’ of dictatorship on a global scale. In keeping with the others in the series, the present volume is an experiment in trying to present entanglement – in this case, the entangled pasts of dictatorships viewed in a global perspective. It goes beyond a mere compilation of separate national histories. Instead, it poses a question: can the social framework of memory be global? Remembering is more than a personal act. People construct the memory of inter-subjective pasts through their relations with others as members of society.¹⁰ Memory depends on collective forms of perception, dominant discourses, cultural practices and a variety of other social factors. A growing sense of global connectivity and global human rights politics has brought a profound change to the memory landscape. That has not necessarily meant a de-nationalisation of memory, however. The global public sphere of memory is tense and unstable, marked by competition between de-territorialising and re-territorialising memories. The contributions to this volume combine to present an overview of the landscape of the global public sphere of memory in which the loci of various national memories are confirmed.

Three themes recur with particular persistence in these chapters, though they discuss diverse kinds of memory of modern dictatorship in different places and at different times.

First, there is a shared engagement reflected in the title of the first part of the volume: ‘Entangled Memory and Comparative History’. Both synchronic and diachronic comparisons are applied here, at the level of national memories and within the nation-state framework. This approach allows us to challenge the notion of an absolute binary divide between victim and perpetrator of violence as it has been transposed to the collective level of victimised and victimising nations, and thus to the dynamics of victimhood nationalism. The synchronicity of entangled memories invites exploration of transnational aspects of the production of social memory. Here, the configuration of memory in one nation state is intertwined with that of another, whether friend or foe. The diachronicity of entangled memories implies continuities and discontinuities between mass dictatorship and democracy, and between colonial and post-colonial regimes. National memories of mass dictatorship intersect with memories particular to gender, class and other collectives. Memories are shared, transferred and entangled. The entanglement of memories is the theme of the first part of this volume.

Sebastian Conrad’s chapter deals with highly selective readings of the past. His chapter not only compares West German with Japanese historiographical reflections on Nazism, fascism and imperialism in the years immediately after the end of the Second World War, but shows the way in which each was marked not only by indigenous traditions and impulses, but crucially also by American influences, whether proscriptive or prescriptive. In each case, narratives of victimhood – whether framed in class terms as in the case of Japanese Marxist historians, or in national terms – played a significant part.

Jie-Hyun Lim’s contribution deals with the meeting-point of two elements, namely memories revolving around victimhood and revised versions of nationalist ideologies. Lim calls the highly combustible outcome of their synthesis ‘victimhood nationalism’. All nationalisms begin with definitions of ‘the Other’ – with the generic characterisation of foreigners, aliens, those who do not belong, simply because they are easier to identify than the assumed shared characteristics of one’s own nation. ‘Victimhood nationalism’ does this in spades. For the victims in question are of course not the casualties of natural disasters, but of human agency, so that every identity based on victimhood is predicated on the prior initiative of the bully and persecutor. There are two obvious difficulties with this Manichaean worldview. First, not all victims had exemplary pasts. Second, victims can exhibit an alarming capacity to study and then put into practice their oppressors’ strategies. This is the logic that produced cycles of purges and rehabilitations that originated within dictatorial regimes but outlived them.

Hiroko Mizuno’s study of the functioning of ‘People’s Courts’ in Austria aft...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Coming to Terms with the Past of Mass Dictatorship
• Part I Entangled Memory and Comparative History
• Part II The Dialectical Interplay of History and Memory
• Part III Pluralizing Memories: Fragmented, Contested, Resisted
• Index