Still relevant 20 years later

Narratives and words matter. Watching the Floyd trial and the persistence of Trump’s Big Lie in the US, it’s important to realize how important truth really is. Here we have chronicles of dealing with various travesties. It’s a slow read, but it matters.

An insightful and at times harrowing look at how countries that have experienced wars and catastrophes or committed grave crimes against humanity (or sometimes both) deal with or fail to deal with the memory and reverberations of those events. The author examines Germany in the wake of Nazism, post-collaborationist France, post-slavery America, post-Apartheid South Africa and several other case studies. The analysis is both penetrating and personal; why have I never heard of this author before? While I generally dislike first-person narratives in works of history or social analysis, Paris is so strong a writer and insightful an observer that I did not find this detracted from the experience.

"It is now a truism (although it didn't used to be) that every revolution of history inevitably distorts because it is the product of an individual researcher's choices, emphases and points of view." With this caveat on page 322 (hardback edition), Erna Paris masterfully describes her own dilemma in writing this book.

As a Jewish historian, Ms. Paris begins with the Holocaust and Germany and, inevitably using this as both yardstick and bottom line, begins to analyze selected targets of liberal wrath, those violators of "Western values" of tolerance and human rights. All the politically correct villains of the 1990s are here: Holocaust deniers, Serbs, Japanese who bewail Hiroshima while denying the Rape of Nanking, white racists in South Africa and the Mississippi Delta.

Conspicuously absent are others that could also well serve as examples of mythology and its deadly effects on the living. For one, the founding myths of Zionism, in deadly link to the ongoing repression and war of the Occupied Terr - well, you know where I mean. This particular choice might pull a few more bricks out of Holocaust mythology, as officially interpreted by Israel, than even Ms. Paris might dare. The shadow of truth, lies and history over Northern Ireland might have been raised; but as a Canadian subject of the British Commonwealth Ms. Paris might have felt that example wouldn't clearly demonstrate the superiority of Western values. True also, I suppose, for Central America, where the shadow of past injustices lingered long in present-day violence - helped along by "the West." Well, then, the Hindu-Moslem communal violence of India might also have been a fitting choice, but too culturally remote for demonstrating the human universality of Western values. Yes, there's just too many of these darn examples out there, so better to stick with those that give the author the high ground.

But a high ground has value only when an author doesn't use it for a urinal. Typical of Ms. Paris' approach is her 1990s demonization of Serb myth-makers and Slobodan Milosevic. Repeating all the cliches of Serb villainy and touting the West's moral irreproachability (the Rambouillet negotiations merely "failed," with no explanation as to why), our virtuous selves were left no choice but to finally bomb to demonstrate our commitment to tolerance and human rights. The fact that Serb mythology, especially regarding Kosovo, is a virtual template for Israel's take on Jerusalem and the West Bank is noted but ritually ridiculed. One should expect such shallow convenience from popular scribes, as well as ignorance of the Balkans: atrocities in the 90s were not some throwback to the Nazi era, to be conveniently explained by Holocaust terminology, but to the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, where the same tribal passions and bloody deeds were enacted and recorded by Western observers deserving far more recognition than Ms. Paris' one-dimensional effervescence.

To her credit, however, Ms. Paris does take on the "Goldhagen Thesis" of German collective responsibility for the Holocaust, treating it as self-righteous posturing that only discredits Holocaust survivors and their sponsors. (However, if Ms. Paris' address to an audience of survivors carried the same smug tone evidenced throughout her book I can see why they virtually egged her off the podium.) Exploitation of the Holocaust for personal axe-grinding and political gain are certainly to be decried. So is an oblivious inability to apply the lessons learned to one's own and one's self.

How do societies “move on” from atrocities?

Rich, moving, well-researched and personal. While painful in many places, I found it hard to put down. Having described experimental solutions drawn from examples such as Nuremberg, The Hague, South Africa and elsewhere, Paris ultimately prescribes paths to take us forward from the many atrocities of the past, present and future.

An unforgiving account of history. Exceptionally hard to read, but necessary.

Very long book it seems. Chapters were all long and she provided a lot of detail. Found that she went on and on sometimes.