this is really, really interesting, actually and i'm glad you brought it up. i took a course in WWII (which is kind of my time period) from the preeminent japanese historian in the us. it was eye-opening, because we looked at the history of the war in a completely different way than i have ever been taught before - each week, we looked at how the war affected/interacted/etc. with a different country. we started with germany and ended with the us, but in between we did everything from france to ethiopia to japan to singapore. it was absolutely fascinating. i did a project on Unit 721 (man, i think that's it), which was the japanese equivalent of mengele's concentration camp experiments - except worse, if you can put this stuff on spectrum. i mean, they were fucking twisted
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the thing is, we tend to ignore the pacific war. (do you know how many times the war has been renamed?
I've never even been sure that the Pacific war should be considered part of Hitler's War, because it wasn't at all, politically. It was just one of those confluence of events things. And WWII is Hitler's War.
That's another question, too: we don't want to forget history, but to what uses are we putting it, so that the memories are doing some good for the future? For instance, right now what's the story that's really being told about "the greatest generation," and to what end?
how can we counteract the concept of collective forgetting, and create collective remembering, in an age of personal history.
To do any good, I think it would have to be collective, in that an entire society would have to come together to remember collectively. Then again, that sort of thing builds incredibly strong bonds, but it also fosters nationalism is all it's lesser forms. Double-edged sword and all that.
I think that might be part of the question, though: what if you didn't have family who died in the Holocaust? Do we get to carry the Rwandan genocide as part of our personal history, if we have no Tutsi relatives? Etc, etc.
It's complicated, obviously. I do think it's important to understand how large historical events have effected you (and your family) personally. And I think that it is important to understand how a genocide has effected society.
But there's no question that losing family in such an event -- especially if you're a member of the group that was specifically targeted -- is a different kind of involvement.
...we remember normandy, we like to think we were fighting the evil of hitler and saving the jews.
One of the reasons for this is that the West had to downplay the contributions of the Soviets and the Eastern Europeans, who were suddenly the enemy. Most Americans still believe that the US "won" the war in Europe all by itself with no help from anyone else.
I've known about this for a long time. I've read books on the subject. My children owned a very moving picture book by Allen Say (I believe that is the author's name) on the subject.
It is one of the most shameful things this country ever did and I am truly sorry for your family's pain and suffering.
To answer your question though - one big difference is the government didn't move to exterminate the Japanese Americans. What they did was shameful and I am sure plenty of people died, but the idea behind it wasn't to systematically murder people.
I'm sorry, I may have been unclear: my grandfather was interned by the Japanese in Indonesia. He was a member of the Dutch military fighting in the Pacific war.
I've just been researching Japanese 'hell ships' and reading accounts by Dutch survivors, actually. I continue to be astounded that the extent of the horror is not taught in schools today. It should be, it must be, taught, as all of the atrocities of war should be acknowledged
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The scale and the horribleness of what was done to a group that had already been systematically discriminated against make it stand out in particular. To be turned against by ones' own countrymen, to be hunted across nations in a systematic military campaign, is horrific and unique in our time.
Right, which is why a piddly little thing like being a run-of-the-mill prisoner of war for three years doesn't seem quite so interesting or important.
On the other hand, the only parts of the Holocaust that are actually unique were the scale and the level of obsessive organization; many, many times have groups that were already marginalized been hunted and massacred, even in this century, and to similar extents. It was just that the Nazi kept really good records and had really good mass transportation to move people on a scale unimaginable even 30 years earlier that makes them stand apart. (Which is in itself rather horrible -- that as an event it's not as unique as we would like it to be.)
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I've never even been sure that the Pacific war should be considered part of Hitler's War, because it wasn't at all, politically. It was just one of those confluence of events things. And WWII is Hitler's War.
That's another question, too: we don't want to forget history, but to what uses are we putting it, so that the memories are doing some good for the future? For instance, right now what's the story that's really being told about "the greatest generation," and to what end?
how can we counteract the concept of collective forgetting, and create collective remembering, in an age of personal history.
To do any good, I think it would have to be collective, in that an entire society would have to come together to remember collectively. Then again, that sort of thing builds incredibly strong bonds, but it also fosters nationalism is all it's lesser forms. Double-edged sword and all that.
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If you lost family in the holocaust, no one - truly - will be offended if you call it part of your personal history.
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But there's no question that losing family in such an event -- especially if you're a member of the group that was specifically targeted -- is a different kind of involvement.
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One of the reasons for this is that the West had to downplay the contributions of the Soviets and the Eastern Europeans, who were suddenly the enemy. Most Americans still believe that the US "won" the war in Europe all by itself with no help from anyone else.
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It is one of the most shameful things this country ever did and I am truly sorry for your family's pain and suffering.
To answer your question though - one big difference is the government didn't move to exterminate the Japanese Americans. What they did was shameful and I am sure plenty of people died, but the idea behind it wasn't to systematically murder people.
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Right, which is why a piddly little thing like being a run-of-the-mill prisoner of war for three years doesn't seem quite so interesting or important.
On the other hand, the only parts of the Holocaust that are actually unique were the scale and the level of obsessive organization; many, many times have groups that were already marginalized been hunted and massacred, even in this century, and to similar extents. It was just that the Nazi kept really good records and had really good mass transportation to move people on a scale unimaginable even 30 years earlier that makes them stand apart. (Which is in itself rather horrible -- that as an event it's not as unique as we would like it to be.)
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