SCHNAPPER
429
When the task of memory is too often invoked or imposed, it can
work in ways that are perverse, in the sociological sense. Historical col–
lectivities also have a need to forget. How can we deny that the mem–
ory of Nazi horrors has prevented us from clearly recognizing and
analyzing those of other totalitarianism of the twentieth century? Even
today-at least in France-comparisons between them can be taken as
scandalous. Must we truly remind ourselves that the very act of com–
parison implies the notion of difference?
If
Nazi totalitarianism were
identical to its Soviet counterpart, there would be no call to compare
them; it is precisely because there were differences as well as similarities
between them that a comparison may be instructive, both intellectually
and politically. The memory of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis
impedes us even to this day from clear analysis of that undertaken by
Communists.
If
we define genocide as the massacre of individuals
because of who they are rather than because of what they have done,
then the murder of the kulaks or the bourgeois is no different in nature
from the murder of the Jews. Can one help being born into a bourgeois
family?
In
the still-valid formulation of Anne Apfelbaum, one memory
contains another hidden within it.
If
the memory of Nazi genocide, rightly perpetuated for decades by
Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers, Jewish institutions, and the state of
Israel, continues to prevent us from comprehending the nature of the
Communist system, this does not mean that it should keep us today
from assimilating the massacres in the former Yugoslavia or in Rwanda.
The trials of the last surviving war criminals or collaborators of the
Vichy regime should not prevent us from resisting those who continue
to undermine the rule of law, in France or elsewhere. We have sympa–
thy and affection for those "fools of memory" for having undergone
struggles that give their lives a tragic nature, or because their parents
underwent such struggles and they take these on out of a sense of loy–
alty. Politically though, we must not fight only an already-defeated
enemy while remaining blind to what is happening before our eyes. His–
tory moves on, and evil takes new forms. There is no call to ignore new
incarnations of evil in the name of memory or to obscure the dangers of
the moment-even the most justified of memories. The dead must not
prevent the living from carrying on with their lives.
There is also, in the words of Renan, in the style of his age, an oblig–
ation to forget. Forgetting is necessary and inevitable; every historic
nation was conceived in violence. Nations are born of wars and of the
submission of various peoples to a common authority, but does this
mean we should review the events of thirteenth-century Occitany and
