What brings peace? And what brings justice? I've been told to forgive and forget. Other people claim to forgive but not forget.
When it comes to history the question of forgiving and forgetting seems to presuppose that all the people involved have an equal amount of power. To continue the cliches, however, it is the winners who write history.
Do not confuse forgetting with erasure.
When I learned about World War II in American history, I learned about the Holocaust. I learned that the Germans killed lots and lots of Jews and we must never forget, or else it will happen again. But what about the things that I did not learn from my American history class? Did they forget to teach me that the Nazis modeled many of their tactics after the US eugenics movement? Did they forget to teach me that the US turned away a boat of Jewish children because the US didn't want them either? Did they forget to tell me that the concentration camps also held queer people, political resistors, Jehovah's Witnesses, and other "undesirable people"?
And what about Asia? Did my high school history teachers forget to teach me that it was a world wide war? That millions of people died when Japan invaded China and that the Japanese tortured people to death in Nanjing? Did they forget to tell me the Korean women were kidnapped and raped by soldiers everyday as part of army morale? Did they forget to tell me exactly what the aftermath of an atomic bomb looks like? The flesh that melts and the health problems that persist.
No. Someone erased these histories. I could not forgive or forget because some one did not want me to know. Perhaps we must also ask when history is complicit with evil.
The things my history teachers did not tell me abound.
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