MEMORY AND HISTORY

(51) Ancient philosophers, such as Plato, Aristotle and St. Augustine, have all been endlessly fascinated by the enigma of memory. How can we have a present representation of something that is past, gone, and therefore absent? And how can we judge memory’s and distinguish it from imagination? While they had thorough discussions of mnemonic phenomena, they did not raise the question of who remembers. While everybody immediately concedes that we all have individual memories of, say, our own childhood, we are going to take the notion of collective memory as our basic unit of analysis here. We take our understanding of it from Paul Ricoeur (2004) and use it to denote a fundamental consciousness of belonging to a group (a nation, a society) that is capable of designating itself in the first person plural – as a we. Groups or nations will naturally have many memories in their stock; memories that give the group its identity; its sense of who we are and how we came to be who we are. There is a quality of “ourness” attached to memories, not just an individual “mineness”. As already St. Augustine noted (1961); memory ensures the temporal continuity. It ties together past, present and future in fluid, intricate ways. The present takes center stage. Sometimes the past is adjusted to suit the needs of the present, and also expectations for the future may be adjusted accordingly.

(52) It is perhaps not surprising that many of a given group’s memories are military memories. One only needs to take a look at elementary and/or secondary school curricula all over the world to see how our collective, national identities are shaped by stories of important battles. History, Ricoeur says, has a fundamental relation to violence. There is no historical community that has not arisen out of war. Such decisive battles Ricoeur calls founding events: they are acts of violence that were justified after the fact by their very age. For example, Norway was united in one kingdom after the battle of Hafrsfjord in 885, and became a Christian nation after the battle of Stiklestad in 1030 – events which are stored in the archives of collective memory, the latter still exerting an influence on the Norwegian selfmaking story. But let us look at a more recent example, the battle of Gallipoli in 1915, during WW1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gallipoli). This battle, which resulted in a decisive Ottoman victory against the British Empire, resonates profoundly among most, if not all, involved nations. Today the ANZAC Day is still commemorated in Australia and New Zealand, as the battle is generally considered to mark the awakening of a national consciousness of each nation, finally to replace their former identities as parts of the British Empire. In Turkey, the same battle is viewed as a defining moment in history. Roughly, this battle paved the way for the Turkish war of independence against Greece and for the foundation of the Turkish republic in 1923, after the victory in the battle of Dumlupinar. In commemoration of this victory, August 30 is celebrated as Victory Day in Turkey.

(53) However, battles or wars need not be founding events to enter into a people’s collective memory and help shape their identity. For example, the charge of the Light Brigade is stored in British archives of collective memories (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_of_the_Light_Brigade). This charge took place during the battle of Balaclava in the Crimean war in 1854. The charge was disastrous; of 673 cavalrymen 118 were killed and 127 wounded. So how did this battle become part of British collective memory, not just the memory of historians or military educationalists? One reason may be that it is immortalized in Tennyson’s famous poem The Charge of the Light Brigade; the poem has made the charge a symbol of warfare at its most courageous and at its most tragic. The last verse goes like this:

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wonder’d.

Honour the charge they made!

Honour the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred!

(54) While Tennyson’s words may convey the false impression that the entire brigade was destroyed, we suggest that the poem functions as a commemoration of the event and the reckless bravery of the cavalrymen, which may explain the continued existence in collective memory of the charge of the Light Brigade (http://www.nationalcenter.org/ChargeoftheLightBrigade.html). When can their glory ever fade, if we keep remembering them? We shall discuss commemoration, the use and abuse of memory and history, in greater detail in the next section.

(55) There is only a small leap from the strong presence in our collective memory of military memories, whether of founding events or not, to the idea that we have an obligation to remember. Intertwined with the duty of memory is the notion of indebtedness: we are indebted to those who have gone before us (Ricoeur 2004). But battles won also means battles lost, and what is glory for some is humiliation for others. Even symbolic wounds are stored in the archives of collective memory. We shall come back to this in a subsequent section.

(56) The relation of collective memory to history is not entirely clear, but the two are not the same. While memory’s aim is faithfulness, Ricoeur says, the aim of history is truth. History is much vaster than memory. There are, of course, numerous historical events that were never anyone’s memories. So what happens when academic history meets living collective memory? History clearly cannot abolish memory, but it can expand, complete, correct or refute it. And this job history does by an active recollection and gathering of data that far outstrip the resources of memory, whether personal or collective. History is active recollection of the past, a reconstruction of past events with a claim to truth. The job of the historian, as we know, is faced with serious epistemological and methodological problems, since history too must represent that which is absent and long gone. At the heart of the historiographical operation we find the process of writing, which among other things has the side effect of creating a distance from that which is represented and thus opening up the possibilities for criticism.

(57) In less philosophical terms, for most historians in a western liberal democracy history is an academic discipline that sheds light upon and analyses the past in order to better understand our present. E. H. Carr famously defines history as “a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past” (1990, p. 30). Most historians would add that this process of linking the past to the present also facilitates the opportunity to learn valuable lessons for the benefit of the future. Pragmatic historians would assert that history is not simply an academic study of the past for its own sake; it can serve as a practical intellectual tool for analysing the present in order to inform the future decisions that will be made by politicians, diplomats, military leaders and others. This is in essence the same argument that underpins the use of history in western military pedagogy. We hope to show that a consideration of collective memory not only broadens the perspective but also may open up for a new understanding of the role of history in military pedagogy.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 866