A more inclusive memory of war is also an outcome of the struggle to build what the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs called collective memory, where individual memories are made possible by memories already inherited from the communities to which we belong, which is to say that we remember through others.12 The critic James Young revises this through his model of collected memories, where the memories of different groups can be brought together in the reassuring style of American pluralism.13 Any potential dissent between these groups and their memories is tamed by a “ritual of consensus” that is the mythical American Way, says scholar Sacvan Bercovitch.14 Whether we speak of collective memory or collected memories, these models are only credible if they are inclusive of the group by which they are defined, however great or small. So it is that a call for war is usually accompanied by a demand that the citizenry remember a limited sense of identity and a narrow sense of the collective that extends only to family, tribe, and nation. Thus, the inclusiveness of the American Way is, by definition, exclusive of anything not American, which is why, even today, American memories of the war usually forget or obscure the Vietnamese, not to mention the Cambodians and Laotians. Those who are against war call for a broader human identity that would include those we had previously forgotten, hoping that such expansiveness will reduce the chances of conflict.
This desire to include more of one’s own or even others runs into problems both personal and political, for neither individual nor collective memory can be completely inclusive. Total memory is neither possible nor practical, for something is always forgotten. We forget despite our best efforts, and we also forget because powerful interests often actively suppress memory, creating what Milan Kundera calls “the desert of organized forgetting.”15 In this desert, memory is as important as water, for memory is a strategic resource in the struggle for power. Wars cannot be fought without control over memory and its inherent opposite, forgetting (which, despite seeming to be an absence, is an actual resource). Nations cultivate and would monopolize, if they could, both memory and forgetting. They urge their citizens to remember their own and to forget others in order to forge the nationalist spirit crucial for war, a self-centered logic that also circulates through communities of race, ethnicity, and religion. This dominant logic of remembering one’s own and forgetting others is so strong that even those who have been forgotten will, when given the chance, forget others. The stories of those that lost in this war show that in the conflict over remembrance, no one is innocent of forgetting.
While the fight between the powerful and less powerful over the strategic resources of memory and forgetting can be fevered and even violent, more often it is a low-intensity conflict where the state and its supporters fight with both conventional and unconventional methods. The authorities control the government, the military, the police, and the security apparatus with its surveillance mechanisms and counterinsurgency techniques. These authorities — politicians, oligarchs, corporate and intellectual elites — also influence much of the media directly or indirectly. They possess tremendous persuasive power over academics, universities, pundits, think tanks, and the educational apparatus. In general, these authorities have firm control of the war machine, with the ethics of remembering one’s own being the binary code that makes the machine run, dividing the world into us versus them and good versus bad, the more easily to build alliances and target enemies. Meanwhile, through rituals, parades, speeches, memorials, platitudes, and “true war stories,” the citizenry is constantly called to remember the nation’s own heroes and dead, which is easier to do when the citizenry also forgets the enemy and their dead.
Those who resist war foreground a different ethics of remembering others. They call for remembering enemies and victims, the weak and the forgotten, the marginalized and the minor, the women and the children, the environment and the animals, the distant and the demonized, all of whom suffer during war and most of whom are usually forgotten in nationalist memories of war. In the struggles that take place within and between nations over the meanings of war and the justifications for them, those who resist war and remember others fight for the imagination, not for a nation. In the imagination new identities can arise, alternatives to national identities and the identities that nations attribute to their wars. But while remembering others may be admirable to some, this mode of memory can also be dangerous or deceptive, for remembering others can simply be a reversal, a mirror, of remembering one’s own, where the other is good and virtuous and we are bad and flawed. These competing ethics of remembering one’s own or remembering others are simple ethical models of memory. What I look for and argue for in this book is a complex ethics of memory, a just memory that strives both to remember one’s own and others, while at the same time drawing attention to the life cycle of memories and their industrial production, how they are fashioned and forgotten, how they evolve and change.16
Art is crucial to this ethical work of just memory. The writing, photography, film, memorials, and monuments that I include in this book are all forms of memory and of witnessing, sometimes of the intimate, the domestic, the ephemeral, and the small, and sometimes of the historical, the public, the enduring, and the epochal. I turn to these works of art because after the official memos and speeches are forgotten, the history books ignored, and the powerful are dust, art remains. Art is the artifact of the imagination, and the imagination is the best manifestation of immortality possessed by the human species, a collective tablet recording both human and inhuman deeds and desires. The powerful fear art’s potentially enduring quality and its influence on memory, and thus they seek to dismiss, co-opt, or suppress it. They often succeed, for while art is only sometimes explicitly nationalistic and propagandistic, it is often implicitly so. In this book I examine a spectrum of artistic work on war and memory, from those who endorse the values of the powerful to those who seek to subvert such values. Even given how many artists are complicit with power, I remain optimistic that in the centuries yet to come, what people will remember of this or any other war will most likely be a handful of outstanding works of art that resist power and war (as well as a history book or two).
Both memory and forgetting are subject not only to the fabrications of art, but also to the commodification of industry, which seeks to capture and domesticate art. An entire memory industry exists, ready to capitalize on history by selling memory to consumers hooked on nostalgia.17 Capitalism can turn anything into a commodity, including memories and amnesia. Thus, memory amateurs fashion souvenirs and memorabilia; nostalgic hobbyists dress up in period costume and reenact battles; tourists visit battlefields, historical sites, and museums; and television channels air documentaries and entertainments that are visually high definition and mnemonically low resolution. Emotion and ethnocentrism are key to the memory industry as it turns wars and experiences into sacred objects and soldiers into untouchable mascots of memory, as found in the American fetish for the so-called Greatest Generation who fought the so-called Good War. Critics have derided this memory industry, seeing it as evidence that societies remember too much, transforming memories into disposable and forgettable products and experiences while ignoring the difficulties of the present and the possibilities of the future.18 But this argument misunderstands that the so-called memory industry is merely a symptom of something more pervasive: the industrialization of memory. Industrializing memory proceeds in parallel with how warfare is industrialized as part and parcel of capitalist society, where the actual firepower exercised in a war is matched by the firepower of memory that defines and refines that war’s identity.