David Rieff - In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies

Also by David Rieff

The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century (2015)

Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Sons Memoir (2008)

At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention (2005)

A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (2002)

Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (1995)

The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami (1993)

Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World (1991)

Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists, and Refugees in the New America (1987)

Texas Boots (with Sharon DeLano) (1981)

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College.

Copyright 2016 by David Rieff.

The End and the Beginning and Reality Demands from Miracle Fair, by Wisawa Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak.
Copyright 2001 by Joanna Trzeciak. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is for Dasantha Pillay.

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.

W. B. YEATS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Throughout its gestation, this book has had more and better friends already than any writer could sensibly hope for. It also has a slightly checkered history. In 2009, Louise Adler and Elise Berg at the University of Melbourne Press were kind enough to invite me to write a polemic on political memory, which they published two years later under the title Against Remembrance. In Praise of Forgetting builds on the work I did then, and so I want to thank Louise, Elise, and their colleagues in the name of both books.

In recent years, I have begun spending as much time as I can manage in Ireland. But being a Hibernophile hardly qualifies me as an expert in Irish history and politics, and on those questions I have had the good fortune to have been the beneficiary of the learning and insight of Rosemary Byrne, Kevin ORourke, Cormac Grda, Tom Arnold, Paul Durcan, Denis Staunton, and John Banville in Dublin, and Jim Fahy in Galway. They are of course in no way, shape, or form responsible for the uses to which I have put that learning.

The same disclaimers apply to the tutorial on Jewish history, including on Yosef Yerushalmis work, that my old and true friend Leon Wieseltier has been trying, with what I suspect he would say has been mixed success, to give me for decades now. They also apply to two newer friends, R. R. Reno in New York and Fr. Bernard Treacy in Dublin, who, though their views seem to me to diverge on a number of important issues of interpretation, have both taught me much about the Catholic understanding of the relationship between history and memory. They will be the best judges of the extent to which I have understood them properly, and, to reiterate, any errors I have made are mine alone.

Since the days when I was his student at Amherst College in what now seems almost like another geological era, and was almost forty-five years ago, I have benefited from the learning and friendship of Norman Birnbaum. If I have gotten Lwith, Halbwachs, Renan, and other thinkers on whom I have relied in this book even partly right, this is as much Normans doing as mine, even if, all these years later, Tnnies still defeats me.

And I would have been defeated in the writing of this book without the extraordinary help I have received during the period in which I was researching it from Megan Campisi, and, during the fact checking after it was finished, from Megan and from Elisa Matula.

Finally, I owe the fact that In Praise of Forgetting exists at all to Steve Wasserman, my editor at Yale University Press, whose gift to me it was to make it possible for me to have another bite at the apple of memory and forgetting. Steve and I have known each other practically our entire adult lives. We were young together, middle-aged together, and now we are growing old together. Given that there is no cure for that, I cant think of a better friend with whom to have shared and still be sharing the ride.

ONE

Footprints in the Sands of Time, and All That

L awrence Binyons poem For the Fallen was first published in the London Times on September 21, 1914, six weeks after the Great War had begun. It is sometimes suggested that Binyon, who was a distinguished art historian as well as a poet (he was the British Museums Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings when the war began), wrote the poem in despair over how many had already died and how many more were being condemned to the same fate. But there is no basis for such a reading. Binyon simply could not have known this, if for no other reason than that it was not till the end of the First Battle of Ypres two months later, an engagement at which the majority of Britains prewar professional army was either killed or wounded, that people at home began to realize just how terrible a toll the war promised to exact.

In reality, For the Fallen is a classic patriotic poem, far closer in spirit to Horaces Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is sweet and fitting to die for ones country)an injunction that actually had been graven into the wall of the chapel of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in 1913than to the work of the great British soldier-poets such as Wilfred Owen, who would appropriate the motto for one of his finest poems, but only in order to call it the old lie.

That such prescience regarding what was to come was unavailable to Binyon weeks into the war hardly dishonors him. Too old to serve in the trenches, in 1916 he nonetheless would volunteer for duty as a hospital orderly on the Western Frontno mean commitment. And Binyons poem has endured. As I write this, 101 years after the First Battle of Ypres, For the Fallen remains the quasi-official poem of remembrance, without which virtually no memorial ceremony for the dead of both World War I and World War II in Britain, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand is considered complete. Its fourth and best-known stanza reads:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

In Australia, where the memory of Australians sacrifice during the First World War, above all during the Dardanelles campaign against the Turks in 1915, played an extraordinarily important role in the forging of the modern Australian state, For the Fallen is now known as The Ode of Remembrance. And at many Anzac Day ceremonies, after the fourth stanza is declaimed, it is customary for those present to respond with the words Lest we forget, as if to the invocation at a church service, which in a sense, of course, it is. In doing so, the participants meld the Binyon poem with Rudyard Kiplings far greater poem Recessional, from which the line Lest we forget is taken, a line that, twice repeated, concludes each of its stanzas, as in this, the best known of them: