Constructs of Control: Politics of memory
Politics of memory is the organisation of collective memory by political agents- which events are remembered and recorded, or discarded. Eventually, politics of memory may determine the way history is written and passed on, hence the term politics of history, commonly associated with the totalitarian state which uses propaganda to impose a specific version of history with the goal of eliminating competing perspectives about the past. (source: wikipedia)
Chinua Achebe, the prominent Nigerian novelist and essayist said in a 1994 interview with the Paris Review, “There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
History is indeed written, memorized and passed along by the winners. This way of version control, in one way, distances the winner’s legacy from the bloodshed and crimes that earned the win. This article beautifully explains why even after a brutal history of colonial rule, suppression, massacres and loot, a good percentage of British think that colonial empire was only a good thing, and a source of pride.
“In public memory, redemptive myths about colonial upliftment persistently mask the empire’s abysmal history of looting and pillage, policy-driven famines, brutal crushing of rebellion, torture, concentration camps, aerial policing, and everyday racism and humiliation. Balance sheets attempt to show that the “pros” — trains, dams, the rule of law — outweighed the “cons” — occasional violent excesses, racism”
Infact, the colonial history has been conveniently deleted from the curriculum.
Another, more insidious version of this is holocaust denial (source) which, in a way, empowered the perpetrators with a free pass from the oblivious supporters
“Trucks of Zyklon B were labeled with Red Cross symbols and victims were told that they would be “resettled”. Douglas also cites the Posen speeches as an example of denial while genocide was ongoing, with Himmler referring to the Holocaust as “an unnamed and never to be named page of glory”. Denial of the mass murder of gas chambers, according to Douglas, repeats the Nazi efforts to persuade the victims that they were actually harmless showers”
On the other hand, since the phenomenon has already crept in the cult culture, there are conspiracy theories haunting us till date- and there is no way of denying or accepting anything completely, leading to a gaslighted population, hopeless to ever retrieve the correct version of their history.
Many genocides are yet to find acceptance by the masses, who simply can’t find or believe these accounts of genocidal history, simply because the perpetrator didn’t let it be written (source)
Our collective history is rigged with innumerous successful attempts of selective propagation of memory, to such degree, that the collective memory of our generation is a massive log of confusion. For the sake of fair information transfer and commemoration of our race, this has to stop. One way to do this, is, starting now, we collectively take ownership of what goes into the logs and what doesn’t, and we preserve it to the last man that owns that memory.
We at Xcerpt are committed to preserve the present aspect of our collective memory- to crowdsource the pieces of information floating as news, and validate them on-the-go before engraving into our mass memory. For all who own that piece of validated memory, are the mascots of legacy of our times.
