The trial is set on a stage in front of the auditorium, reinforcing the theatrical quality. A wall of glass, and behind that glass, a curtain, separates the audience from the participants — judges, lawyers, defendants, witnesses, translators, stenographers, and guards. When the audience files in and sits down in the air-conditioned auditorium, the curtain is drawn. The show begins, the curtain opens, and the actors arrive on stage to assume their places in this pseudo-trial. The guaranteed convictions that will result from this trial, while worthwhile, will only lead to a pseudo-reconciliation with the past. The inequality and injustice that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge still remain, and the unforgivable will not be forgiven. Even the one who asked for forgiveness, Duch, the commandant of S-21, the first one convicted and sent to prison, will not be forgiven. As for the thousands of other Khmer Rouge still alive, many in power or at least in relative peace, and the governments of Vietnam, China, and the United States — none of them will ask for forgiveness, even if they were on trial, which they are not.
But Derrida does not deny pseudo-forgiveness and pseudo-reconciliation a role to play in dealing with the past. It is only that the peace they realize is temporary, an absence of war and violence rather than their negation. Instead of compromise, he only insists on the impossible standard of a pure forgiveness. As unreasonable as it may sound, pure forgiveness is commensurate with the unbearable weight of history’s accumulated horrors and our own individual responsibilities. Why is it possible to murder millions and yet impossible to imagine pure forgiveness or just forgetting? Shouldn’t mass murder be impossible? The fault is our own. There is no one else to blame for the limits of our spirit and our imagination. We submit to the pragmatists, the profiteers, and the paranoiacs who insist that war is part of humanity, our identity. They are half-right but all wrong in believing that we cannot convert the recognition of our inevitable inhumanity into a different kind of realism, a realism that believes we must imagine peace, no matter how impossible it may seem. It is perpetual war that is unrealistic. Perpetual war is madness, engineered in the rational language of bureaucracy and the high-flown rhetoric of nationalism and sacrifice, operating through campaigns that could lead to human extermination. This madness can only be matched by the logic of perpetual peace and the excessive, utopian commitment to a pure forgiveness, which the species needs to survive. If we wish to live, we need a realism of the impossible.
Thich Nhat Hanh, who inspired Martin Luther King Jr., provides another perspective on “the situation of a country suffering war or any other situation of injustice.” Rather than laying the blame on one side or another, he says, “every person involved in the conflict is a victim.” This is obviously a difficult perspective to adopt for those who consider themselves to be victims or the descendants of victims. Nevertheless, “see that no person, including all those in warring parties or in what appear to be opposing sides, desires the suffering to continue. See that it is not only one or a few persons who are to blame for the situation.” But in saying that no one single agent is to blame, he does not absolve us of blame. “See that the situation is possible because of the clinging to ideologies and to an unjust world economic system which is upheld by every person through ignorance or through lack of resolve to change it.” Even more, the duality of conflict itself, the either-or of war and hatred, is illusory: “See that two sides in a conflict are not really opposing, but two aspects of the same reality.” Increasingly, Vietnam and America appear to be part of the same reality. Once symbolic of Cold War division, these two countries now participate in the onward march of global capitalism, military-industrial complexes, the dominance of self-interested political parties, the survival of nation-states, and the perpetuation of power for the sake of power. What, then, was the war good for, if in the end all that will happen is yet another war? “See that the most essential thing is life and that killing or oppressing one another will not solve anything.”19
What Jacques Derrida and Thich Nhat Hanh ask for, what Immanuel Kant and Martin Luther King Jr. call for, is both simple and difficult, the need to challenge the story about war and violence that so many find easy to accept. This story says that we must resign ourselves to the necessity and even nobility of war. By now war and violence are certainly a part of human identity, but identity is not natural. It can change, if we tell another kind of story and seize the means of production to circulate such a story. This story foresees a just rather than unjust forgetting, pivoting on just memory and pure forgiveness. As philosopher Charles Griswold says, “resentment is a story-telling passion,” which can be addressed through another kind of storytelling driven by forgiveness, “which requires changes in resentment’s tale.”20 Griswold, like Thich Nhat Hanh, argues that “unchecked, resentment consumes everything and everyone, including its possessor.”21 Forgiving others and letting go of resentment is an act both for others and for oneself. As Avishai Margalit says, “the decision to forgive makes one stop brooding on the past wrong, stop telling it to other people.”22 Only through forgiveness of the pure kind, extended to others and ourselves, can we actually have a just forgetting and a hope for a new kind of story where we do not constantly turn to the unjust past.
This is why storytelling specifically and art in general inhabit such an important place in this book. Storytelling allows us to tell a different story about war and its relationship to our identity. In this way, storytelling changes how we remember and forget war. The moving documentary The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) makes explicit how storytelling addresses betrayal and resentment. Betrayal happens at least twice in this film about a Laotian family whose father fought with the royalists and the Americans during the war. First, the Americans betrayed their Laotian allies and abandoned them to the communists. The father is sent to reeducation and his family become refugees, forced to flee to a ghetto of New York. Second, the father betrays his family when, after being released from reeducation, he finds another wife. The dual betrayals nearly destroy his first wife and children emotionally, sending them into poverty and tearing apart the family. But the eldest son, Thavisouk Phrasavath, is befriended by a young filmmaker, Ellen Kuras, and together they film the family’s story. The ending of the story is not exactly happy. After Laotian gang members murder Thavisouk’s half-brother, the son of his father and his other wife — the killing one of the war’s long-term repercussions, as Lao turn against Lao with violence — Thavisouk and his father begin a fragile reconciliation. The father acknowledges his culpability in the war, when his job was to call for American bombings. “Indeed, I regret what I have done,” the father says. “I collaborated with the Americans to bomb my own country to save it. I was part of great destruction of my country with foreigners. Indescribable destruction.” Thavisouk gets married, becomes a father, and returns to visit Laos, where he reunites tearfully with two sisters left behind—“the heaviest sorrow” for his mother — but who he cannot take with him to America. “I run between what I remember and what is forgotten, searching for the story of our people whose truth has not been told,” says Thavisouk. “As we move further from the Laos of our past, we are travelers moving in and out of dreams and nightmares. What happens to people in our land, a place we call home?”