Speak, Memory

Lebanese journalist Amal Makarem is heading an effort to make her compatriots remember their war, which lasted between 1975-90. According to an AFP wire report, she laments: "Thirteen years afterwards, communities still live in total separation, rejecting each other, blaming each other. It is a real time bomb."

According to the story: "Plans for a reconciliation project materialized when Makarem and a nucleus of independent lawyers, writers, journalists and sociologists launched the action in 2001 with a highly-acclaimed seminar held at the UN House here…They plan to establish an association and to set up an archive center and a museum with data, objects and pictures from the civil war."

Makarem accepts "we don't have a clear-cut situation in Lebanon: those who say they are victims were at some point torturers, and vice versa… But if at least everyone would admit his wrongdoings in public, then it is at least a first step toward reconciliation."

The effort has received backing and financing from the European Union "as part of necessary reconciliation efforts to back stability in Lebanon," said Francisco Acosta, the first secretary of the EU delegation in Lebanon.

I'm not one to disagree with my friend Francisco, but the larger ambition in Makarem's project, no matter how admirable in theory, is terribly wrongheaded in fact. For one thing, she misses the point that Lebanon was able to emerge from the war precisely because people from the country's different religious communities were allowed to have different readings of their conflict. Reconciliation, in contrast, implies somehow imposing a unified reading, which would only exacerbate tensions, since everyone would differ over what to agree on.

Second, Makarem and her associates are operating on the basis of an idea that has in recent years become quite popular: that of psychological "closure." Conflicts, it seems, have to be brought to a serene end, or else a country will continue to live, to quote her, on a time bomb.

That's absurd. For all its problems, Lebanon is nowhere near a new civil war, and the fact is that conflicts do not necessarily require imposed closure to be gotten over. People can go on living their lives as individuals quite happily, even if the collectivity remains divided.

That may seem a paradox, but it is one that has allowed Lebanon to prosper in the post-war period, and that has kept it relatively free in a sea of autocracy. Memory is laudable, and Makrem's plans for a museum are fine; but only if the Lebanese are allowed to get what they want out of it, as individuals. She should forget reconciliation and focus, instead, on simply prompting memory.

Comments

[Ron Hardin]

If it weren't for misunderstandings, we'd never be able to agree on anything.

[Chuck]

Jeff--

I responded to your original question ("Does anyone know how the civil war is treated
in current government school textbooks in the
South?") on the basis that the assumption underlying the question was that southerners might want "their side" of the story told, at least to some extent. Under this assumption, "southerners" actually means *white* southerners whose families have lived in the south for at least a few generations--other groups are perfectly happy with the winner's version and see no reason to rock the boat. However, white people with deep family roots in the south are very much a minority these days in almost any area, and they have essentially zero representation on textbook selection committees at any level. Anyway, the bottom line is that people who want the complete story of the war told because of their regional heritage (as opposed to academic or other motives) are relatively few and politically impotent.

[Larry]

The Civil War Problem of today isn't the old-family white folks who want their side of the story told, it's the folks on the other side who want to make the story all about slavery and prohibit the display of Confederate battle flags and the singing of "Dixie." (See the recent Democratic flap over Dean's remark that he wanted to reach out to people with Confederate Flag bumper stickers on their pickups.) This is exactly the kind of suppression/ homogenization practiced so regularly in places like Northern Ireland where the "oppressed" losers can regularly tie the winners in knots by staging a parade in memory of some 600 year-old battle.

That's why Lincoln and Grant's post Civil War decisions to let most of the defeated soldiers keep their flags, firearms, and votes was so radical. It said, "We won, but you're still people and we respect you as such." WWII produced somewhat the same effect through devices like the Marshall Plan and allowing the Japanese to retain their emperor.

Several years ago I attended the 50th anniversary of Victory in Japan Day at the Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg, Texas. When the local high school band marched by, nobody even noticed that all the bass drums had "Yamaha" stenciled on each side.

[Jeff Smith]

Surely the experience of the U.S. South in the
post-civil-ware period is a useful guide here.
No common "reading" (can I use that term if I
am not all dressed in black?) was ever imposed
and "closure" was reached solely by a combination
of the fact of time and economic growth in the
south distracting people from worrying and whining
about past wrongs.

A society where people worry about slights that
are more than a couple of years old, whether at
the individual level or the social level, is a
broken society.

Jeff

[brendan]

I think Markin is making a kind of "error of composition." When two individuals are have a conflict it is usually resolved with some type of agreement that both parties were wrong in some way. "Well, you did that wrong, but I admit I did this wrong."

When you are dealing with large groups, such a resolution is not possible. When looking at the US Civil War, I think it is obvious that were would still be fighting if we had to agree on common narrative for the war. More than a century later, there is still not a common narrative for what happened.

[brendan]

Curses! Beat me by two minutes.

[Jeff Smith]

Sorry Brendan 🙂

I have the advantage of being in the UK at the
moment, and thus five hours ahead.

I like the post - it has got me thinking.

Does anyone know how the civil war is treated
in current government school textbooks in the
South?

Jeff

[Chuck]

Jeff--

Just like anywhere else, history is written by the winners. The War Between the States was all about rich white plantation owners struggling to preserve their "right" to enslave other human beings, period. Alternative explanations and complicating factors don't make into public school textbooks, which are, after all, approved by the government.

[Jeff Smith]

Chuck -

Yes, but textbooks are typically approved by
*state* governments, not the federal government.
Thus, it might make sense for a textbook company
to have two versions of a U.S. history text,
one for Southern states and one for Northern
states.

Jeff

[Charles Oliver]

Well, the textbooks I've seen, especially at the high school level focus more on battles and dates. There's not a lot of discussion of slavery at all. It's something to be glossed over.

[Jean Bart]

Hmm, the history of the Civil War, etc. was largely written by the losers well into the 1950s. Historiographically speaking, the "lost cause" vision of the war dominated intellectual discourse (with the exception of the likes of DuBois and a few others) until that time.

[Jean Bart]

Indeed, the "moonlight and magnolias" narrative is still common enough that it is not difficult to find on the web, etc. - for example, just look at Lew Rockwell's commentary on the war, the Confederacy, etc.

[Jean Bart]

For some great monographs on history and memory see:

Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1995).

Foster, Gaines M., Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South (New York: Oxford UP, 1987).

Winter, Jay, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995).

Steinlauf, Michael, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1997).

Kerwin Lee Klein, "On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse," Representations, 69 (Winter, 2000), 127-150.

Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (English edition, 3 vols; New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996).

Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth Century America (Princeton, NJ., 1997).

Robert Moller, "The Search for a Useable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany," American Historical Review, 101 (Oct., 1996).

Rousso, Henri, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1991).

[Jean Bart]

And:

Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

[R C Dean]

How can anyone post on Lebanon's civil war and current situation without mentioning Syria?

Is it just a coincidence that Syria runs the joint, and that it is in Syria's interest that Lebanon be composed of communities still live in total separation, rejecting each other, blaming each other. It is a real time bomb."

Is anyone talking about kicking Syria the hell out of Lebanon, or is it perfectly okey-dokey for Lebanon to become a Syrian, for lack of a better term "occupied territories." Why the outrage over Israeli occupation of territory from which attacks on Israel have been staged, and not a peep about Syrian occupation of Lebanon, which I don't recall being used as a staging ground for attacks on Syria?

[ed]

"...history is written by the winners."

Clich? alert!
Clich? alert!

[kevrob]

...Northern Ireland where the ?oppressed? losers can regularly tie the winners in knots by staging a parade in memory of some 600 year-old battle.

Good point, Larry, but a bad example. The Orange Order marches around the UK-governed parts of Ulster every July in memory of William of Orange (Protestant) who beat King James (Catholic) at the Battle of the Boyne. This would be a little like the Grand Army of the Republic holding a march through the whiter parts of the old Confederacy to commemorate Appomatox Courthouse.

[Bruce]

Indeed, after the Union Army ceased its occupational role in the South in the Post War period, most people moved "on" to work about other things than their devestated country. Unless of course you weren't white, in which case life became impossible and slavery virtually reinstated, in pratice, if not in law. There was a good reason that millions upon millions of Southern's fled north in the next 80 years: reconciliation was a sham and a tragic one, in which the losers' losers' had no say, and would have to suffer much more blood before they could.

- Bruce, North Carolina

[Bowman Rob]

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DATE: 05/20/2004 06:19:34
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