Governments promoting forgetting from "summary" of Remembering to Forget by Barbie Zelizer
This book examines the implications of governments promoting the idea of forgetting in order to protect national interests. It looks at how governments can use techniques such as censorship, amnesia, and rewriting history in order to control the narrative of the past, and how these strategies affect public memory and remembrance.- Governments strive to provide citizens with a sense of security by creating policies such as memory erasing laws, in some cases to promote forgetting and ensure public order.
- These memories are seen as obstacles that could impede cultural unity, so governments will often try to encourage their citizens to forget certain events or occurrences that harm collective memories.
- A government can use many tactics, such as legislation, education, media campaigns, and even subsidies and rewards, to promote an agenda where things are willingly forgotten.
- Even if historical episodes are not completely forgotten, states can selectively bring them to the forefront of national discourse when it suits them, while simultaneously forcing others into obscurity.
- Widespread official concealment of episodes through rewriting school textbooks and history books contributes to a distorted understanding of the past among future generations.
- At times, enforced public oblivion can serve justice; yet on most occasions, there remains potential costs associated with self-protecting nations desperately seeking to tell preferred versions of their stories.
