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There are some collective
memories that people decide to forget because they are so sad;
natural disasters that cause many deaths might be one example. But
there are others, such as civil wars, that people forget because
it is the only way they can hope to live in peace with their neighbours
once again. Such acts of forgetting are a choice made by the people
directly concerned, even if they often make it unconsciously.
But there is another form of collective forgetting
that is not the people’s own choice. It is the kind where
ideologically driven regimes decide to “cleanse” people’s
memories of events that cast their rulers in a bad light. In such
cases, we are dealing with falsification of the facts, pure and
simple, the “Orwellian” manipulation of collective
memory.
By wrapping entire episodes of a country’s
history in a veil of silence, the ruling class hopes to make succeeding
generations forget that the privileges that it enjoys today were
often conquered with
fear and blood. Also, by erasing official memories of any facts
that belie the nation’s status as a democracy, the ruling
class also probably hopes to make people forget acts of repression
that took place within this nation, or sad wars of conquest from
which they emerged the losers.
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