COMMENTARY: Attempts to control the way we remember history are a sign of hypernationalism, writes JulieLindahl. Our democracy is in trouble.
When I think about the moment we are in, my thoughts return to a book bound in green linen. It was the only thing my grandfather, a Nazi and SS officer stationed in eastern Europe throughout WWII, left to his son.
To be sure, it is a curious thing to leave to your son, but in my own experience of being a member of this family, it was an effort to cleanse one's legacy by turning attention to military strategy and the land, rather than the human cost of war.
Among people like Carell and my grandfather, it was precisely this truth that was to be relegated to a memory void. If most Germans omitted the Holocaust from their remembrance of WWII today, Germany would be a very different place than it is. It would be a country of festering grievances for “all that was lost,” as my grandmother put it, and a society that by its self-victimization would be a democracy in danger, a destabilizing force in Europe and the world.
From this point of view, Vladimir Putin is Russia’s master revisionist, who, by all accounts, sat in grand isolation during the pandemic underlining and annotating texts to construct arguments designed to stoke a sense of grievance and self-victimization among the Russian people. Thus, Nazis in Ukraine must be stopped from persecuting Russian speakers and threatening Russia itself, and the Ukrainian state is an artificial entity that deprives Russians of what is historically theirs.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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