Ideology

(68) We all know the pathology of memory from our everyday vocabularies: trauma, repression, return of repressed memories, obsession, and false, implanted memories. Generally, we speak of these mainly as abuses of personal memory, but we shall extend such abuses to cover also collective memory – what we have already alluded to above as wounded collective memories.

(69) The connections between ideology and the abuse of memory and history are many and may occur at different levels. It cannot be our aim here to treat all of these, but to examine some of the ways in which memory can be manipulated for political (or other) purposes.

(70) In some sense this manipulation begins with the forced memorization in school briefly discussed in a previous section. Such manipulation, by which we learn the authorized, official history of our nation, happens in all countries. In Norway, for example, the national curriculum has always been perceived as a nation-building device. Some events are selected to become founding events, other events are thereby ignored. The collective memory of, for example, ethnic groups within a nation-state may differ from the official story, sometimes to a great extent. All memory is necessarily selective and even history as a scientific discipline is selective – historians invariably face the problem that they cannot recount all details. As we have seen, our allegiance to the official story is reinforced by commemorations of remarkable events. It may not be a big step for a political power to impose commemorations and thus abuse and manipulate memory. George Orwell’s observation is profoundly true: “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future” (1949, p.199).

(71) Ideological processes are highly complex; more often than not they remain hidden and unacknowledged. Among the common effects of ideological processes are distortions of reality and justification of the system of power or domination. Let us now re-introduce the notion of a wounded memory and develop it into an argument concerning the abuse of memory and history. Wounded memories, we have suggested, may be stored in the archives of collective memory of those who lost the battles. As far back as in 1389 the Serbs were defeated by the Ottomans in the battle of Kosovo Polje, surely creating a wounded memory at the time. Now, we do not know how prominently such a memory has figured in Serbian collective memory throughout the centuries. What we do know is that it was successfully revived by Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbian nationalists and put to ideological work: to justify war and ethnic cleansing. And for the best part of a decade Milosevic enjoyed solid popular support from the Serbian population as a whole. What kind of mechanisms can be involved in such abuse of memory?

(72) One possible mechanism is the manipulation of the sense of indebtedness; that we are indebted to those who have gone before us (Ricoeur 2004). The duty of memory mayserve to keep up a feeling of being obligated to these others. We may begin to see ourselves as their heirs, so that when we speak about them, speak about the battle of Kosovo Polje, we no longer speak as plain observers. We speak as their heirs: there is a heritage at stake. Admittedly we hypothesize here, having no data about this particular case to employ. But even if our hypotheses should be mistaken concerning the Serbian case, we still think they are reasonable as a general view of how this kind of abuse of memory may occur. We find subtle workings of ideology here, not necessarily as manipulations of power, but as an insidious, unspoken appeal to people’s consciousness to remember and to speak for the victims and their demand for justice and revenge. Our ancestors were defeated, they were wronged, it is up to us to avenge them and set the record straight. A duty of memory that is first imposed from the outside by a clever orator may become internalized and experienced as a moral obligation.

(73) Other possible mechanisms are more easily detected. At the political level ideology operates to justify power and domination. The stories of founding events, of glory or humiliation, feed into the public discourses of national pride, faithfulness to heritage, justice for past victims, fears and grudges against the old enemy who becomes the enemy once again. It does indeed seem that Milosevic was extremely adept at manipulating both memories and fears. Much of the same ideological abuse of memory can be seen in Northern Ireland still today and certainly in the near past. The theme of protestant victory and crushing of catholic aspirations has been exploited by some Northern Irish protestant politicians to justify their hard line stance where any concession to the other side is portrayed as surrender. A selective collective memory is used, perhaps manipulated, to maintain ideas of the catholic population as the past, present and probably future enemy.

(74) What can the historian contribute when faced with such abuses of collective memory? History neither can nor should be a substitution for memory. All groups and nations have a collective memory and an identity fashioned at least partly by the collective consciousness. Some of these memories will be of glory and some will be wounded; both lend themselves to use and abuse. We would like to suggest that the distantiated view of the historian is of vital importance, not only in such cases as Serbia or Northern Ireland, but generally. History may expand the collective memory beyond any actual memory by bringing forth new data, new perspectives, and different vantage points. It may also correct and criticize the memory of a community when a community so to speak folds back upon itself and creates a circle of past and present: the present shapes the past and the past shapes the present. The ways in which the past perseveres in the present is vital to both the memorial model and the historical model. If the past is completely ineffaceable, there is in a sense too much memory and the past will haunt the present. This is something that all militaries on peace-keeping missions should be acutely aware of.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 803