Collective Memory and Our Unacknowledged Past

This country is suffering from self-inflicted selective amnesia…

…and it’s not going well…

Me, a bit later on

Your memory is uniquely and intrinsically yours. It’s a record of personal experience, a trace of where you’ve been, what you’ve seen, what you’ve felt. It’s your idea of what your life means, and of who you are. The experiences you’ve had play a huge part in forming and reforming your identity throughout your life – but memory is also unreliable. We don’t always retain the little details, and as time passes, our memories warp and fade, and we forget. Those things you did and don’t remember, they’re still apart of you; you still did them, and maybe someone else will remember that part of your life-story even if you forget it. The memory fades, but the things still happened and continue to shape who you are, even if they no longer shape who you think you are. As you remember and forget, you build up an idea of your identity, and as others remember and forget parts of you, they form their own ideas of who you are, as their own ‘memory’ of you.

Memories can be used to construct descriptions of the past. Stories that would otherwise be lost are recorded and kept, significant in their own particular way.

Let’s take the historian Urvashi Butalia as an example. She was raised by parents who had experienced the Indian Partition of 1947, and felt that traditional history writing focused too much on high-level politics, forgetting the stories of normal people. Butalia tried to rectify this in some way by conducting hundreds of interviews with family-members, friends, and strangers on the street, whose experiences and memories of Partition she then recorded.

A train taking people to Pakistan during the Partition of India, 1947

Her book, ‘The Other Side of Silence’, tells us about the guilt of her uncle, Ranama, who stayed where he was born as his home became Pakistan. He changed his name and religion, and assimilated to this new way of life with his mother, while the rest of his family made the journey to India together. The family felt betrayed by Ranama’s apparent abandonment of his Hindu Indian culture and heritage, and they cut off communication with him. Meanwhile he, a stranger in his own home, lived a life of secret guilt.

There are a number of personal testimonies in Butalia’s book about the personal heartache and hardship of living the Partition, whether that be an experience of terrible violence, a bereavement or loss, a feeling of essential homelessness, a confusion of identity… these are the human debris of an enormous humanitarian disaster that stripped people of their lives and their homes in an environment of extreme and violent anguish. Because they are derived from people’s memories, the stories are not necessarily factually accurate and in that respect they’re unreliable, but their purpose is not to detail historical ‘fact’; they add a richness and a texture to history-writing that is often missed. What actually happened to real, ordinary people? How did it make them feel? Not just what happened, but why, and how, and to whom? Historians use memory to fill in the personal, emotional, human gaps that more ‘traditional’ political or economic historians are prone to forget.

Some autumn leaves just because they’re pretty and why not

As people share their own memories, and the stories they’ve heard from others, a ‘collective memory’ is formulated. In essence, tapestries of interwoven, individual stories develop into an agreed conceptualisation of the past, which then becomes a community’s ‘memory’ of events. This can be accidental or very deliberate. Informal discussions between individuals can contribute towards a community’s collective memory in an unconscious way. In contrast, through ritual ‘rememberings’ (memorials), we make ourselves remember things we think are important. Just as important as the things we remember are the things we forget, and also the ways in which these processes happen. Sometimes a community’s forgetting can be like very deliberately pruning a plant, removing parts which are unhelpful to the strength of the whole, other times it’s as natural and subtle as the falling of autumn leaves.

Every community has some form of collective memory which plays a part in the identity of the whole, binding them together. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same per person, but there will be images, metaphors, events that are replicated similarly in their minds. As a nation, Britain very deliberately holds on to the memory of the First World War as a time of national sacrifice, tragedy, suffering, and ultimately glory. Very strong emblems characterise the way in which we deliberately memorialise this history. For example, when Brits think about the First World War, we might think of the symbol of the poppy, or of black-and-white photographs of trench warfare, perhaps an image of a muddy monochrome soldier smiling, or the sound of explosions. We all ‘remember’ it and have roughly agreed on the place that the First World War has as part of our national identity. Yet the vast majority of us never actually experienced it. As a culture and as a society, we’ve retained these tropes, we’ve kept them as important to us. Remembering in itself is an act of patriotic respect, a memorial of those lost that we never met. In this way, we annually and ritually remember things it’s impossible for us to personally ‘remember’. We hold on to images, tropes, symbols, and ideas that become our collective memory of the First World War.

The First World War is a useful event to commemorate because of the way it plays into national identity. We take time as a country to spend time thinking about steps millions of soldiers took in defence of Britain; this we can equate to their defence of us, our homes, our nation. The First World War was also a victory for ‘Britain’, so memorial services implicitly celebrate British military strength. Remembering the sacrifice that soldiers made becomes an act of patriotic pride, confirming a sense of national identity, and serving to uplift the institutions of Britain. In this way, collective remembering/memorial serves a national, political purpose, and strengthens the imagined community, i.e. this idea of ‘Britain’ and a ‘British’ identity.

A First World War memorial in Bury

In the same vein, while we remember things that bind us together in collective pride, we forget the bits of our past which threaten the strength and integrity of our community. For Britain, our ‘memory’ of ourselves does not match up with most of the world’s ‘memory’ of us. For many societies across the globe, the dominant legacy of Britain is one of imperialism. The peoples that rose up against British colonial exploitation remember vividly their struggle against the forces of oppression; it’s central to their collective identities. For nations forged in the battle for independence against a colonial power, the memory of subjugation and victory against it is one that is useful to keep alive, helping to form and consolidate a national identity.

However, this particular, colonial narrative is less comfortable for the British. It’s something we cannot (or rather, definitely should not) take pride in, something rather a lot of us would quite like to strategically forget. Yet the imperialism that defined our relationship with great swathes of the world for centuries remains a huge part of our national identity; it doesn’t go away just because we don’t like to acknowledge it. Trying to forget this uncomfortable memory will not change the past, just as an individual’s attempts to block out a cringe-worthy or traumatic incident doesn’t mean the memory affects them any less.

One of the things that we do as a country to try and cover up this uncomfortable collective memory is focus on one which paints us in a better light. In this country, we obsessively remember the Second World War. If Trump or some other vaguely despotic leader does something dysfunctional, comparisons to Hitler are made. You turn on the Yesterday/History Channel, there is a really good chance that they will be talking about the Nazis. When young and in school, most of us were made to morosely reflect on the scale of the suffering, death and torture committed in the 1930s and 1940s, and feel the true weight of humanity’s capability for evil. Not just in lessons, but in assemblies, school trips, projects, on the telly, children are brought up to know about the Holocaust, and to remember it again and again.

The poignant and evocative Holocaust memorial in
Berlin, Germany, for the Jewish people killed
at the hands of Nazis

Of course, there are a multitude of reasons why remembering the Holocaust is culturally and socially important. This was a tragedy on an enormous scale, and those who died at the hands of the Nazis deserve commemoration. We can learn important lessons from the way in which this persecution happened: about racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, political intolerance, and the evils that can come about through unchecked prejudice and hate. Furthermore, the fact that Hitler came to power in a democracy shows us that we must continue to be vigilant, as something similar could happen again in our own societies. The Holocaust is also within living memory in our own country and nearby; survivors continue to tell us their heart-wrenching stories, their pain still very much alive.

However, the Holocaust is not the only horrible thing to have happened in history – far from it. The world can be a pretty disgusting place, and there are so many tragedies which we simply don’t talk about. We only ever remember concentration camps in the context of the Nazis, when they were invented by the British in South Africa during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1900-1902). Furthermore, while Britain was fighting Hitler, our ally the Soviet Union also had labour camps, called ‘gulags’; Orlando Figes estimates that they imprisoned up to 25 million people there from 1929 to 1953. Even today, concentration camps are alive and well: China’s Xinjiang ‘re-education’ camps have been imprisoning Muslims, some Christians, and various other supposed enemies of the Chinese Communist state since 2014.

In terms of just general tragedies that happened in the last century, there are countless horrendous occurrences that we just don’t talk about. Here are a few pretty shocking examples:

Between 1914 and 1923, the Armenian Genocide saw the mass extermination and mass expulsion of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians from the Ottoman Empire.

Between 1955 and 1975, American and South Vietnamese troops killed up to 3.8 million Vietnamese people, and it’s unknown how many of these people were soldiers and how many were civilians.

The Korean War, with North Korea and China vs. South Korea and America 1950-53, saw 3 million war fatalities, with a higher proportional civilian death toll than the Second World War.

The Partition of India displaced between 10 and 12 million people from their homes in 1947 and prompted the largest mass migration in written history, all in an environment of horrific violence.

The human debris of Partition violence in the streets of Calcutta

All of these tragedies happened within the last century and most of them are still within living memory. Yet, in comparison with Hitler and the Nazis, they are rarely talked about.

Why do we, then, as a nation, focus so much on Nazi Germany above the countless other horrors and tragedies which humanity has inflicted on itself in the last century? Well, it is partially because of the things I mentioned earlier – lessons about racism, discrimination and prejudice, the threat of it happening again, the fact it’s within living memory and fairly close to home – but it’s also because, in the story about Hitler and the Nazis, the British are the goodies. Churchill and our grandparents and great-grandparents are the ones who stopped nasty ole Hitler, and as we all reflect on how really really awful Hitler was, we celebrate their incredible victory and revel in our patriotism. In this way, our obsession with the Holocaust serves a nationalist purpose, helping to cement in the greatness of Britain in our collective memory.

Henry VIII, his favourite wife, Jane Seymour, and their son, who would become Edward Vi

This nationalist obsession isn’t just something that we do accidentally, it’s manufactured into our school system. We learn what the government wants us to learn, and so the curriculum serves the state’s political agenda. The content of history lessons for the vast majority of British school children, up to GCSE level, is telling. When we learn about various kings and queens, we tend to learn about how great, strong, brave, and British they were, like how Henry VIII shaped this country’s religion by breaking from Rome, or Elizabeth I fought off the Spanish Armada with her people behind her. The Industrial Revolution shows kids how wonderful we were, pioneers in industrial and technological innovation. For topics like crime or medicine for a thousand years, the teleology makes present-day Britain look great, as we say, ‘look how far we’ve come’. And then there’s the surefire focus on the world wars of the twentieth century: the First World War, when good old Blighty fought off the Germans; the Second World War, when we defeated Hitler and the Nazis; and the Cold War, when America and the West (including, surprise surprise, Britain) were eventually victorious against the Communist Soviet Union. All this is very selective, abridging history lessons to teach kids what’s really important. And what’s so important that all children in this country must know? What’s the overriding lesson that all of these topics have in common?

We teach children that the British are the goodies.

We teach children that the British are always the focus of the story, the most important, the protagonists. When we learn about wars, we learn a very Eurocentric narrative; the focus is on Europe and America, despite the fact that those we learn about are all very much World Wars. When learning about the First World War, no one is told, for example, that 1.3 million Indian troops died fighting for Britain and her colonies, hoping that making the ultimate sacrifice would help gain India her independence. First World War campaigns in North Africa are ignored completely, and all the focus goes on the European trenches. When learning about the Second World War, the spotlight is fixed on the Battle for Britain, Blitzkrieg, and Dunkirk, with Churchill cast as the glorious leader that inspired a nation with speeches like that one he did about fighting on the beaches. The fact that the Soviet Union and China suffered the most fatalities, most of whom were civilians, or that Churchill refused to divert resources during the Bengal Famine in 1943, instead blaming the “foul race” of Indians for “breeding like rabbits” and letting 2 million people starve… these features of the Second World War are generally brushed under the rug. When learning about the Cold War, one looks at the arms race, and the ideological conflict between Capitalist America and the Communist Soviet Union, rather than the intimately-linked, imperative, widespread struggle for freedom and decolonisation in the Third World, mainly against Britain and France.

Evil, angry Hitler standing with a raised, clenched fist in direct comparison with stoic, confident, almost smiling Churchill – waxwork displays at Madame Tussauds, London

The British grow up ignorant of their country’s true global legacy. We think that it was all victory, and standing up to baddies, and how awful the Germans and Russians were, and are never really taught about the intricate history of British colonialism. The English are especially ignorant; we don’t even know about how we persecuted the Welsh and the Irish for hundreds of years. Brits don’t learn about how the American founding fathers fought against British imperialism in the eighteenth century for the freedom of the 13 American colonies. We don’t learn about how we took over India and large swathes of Africa in the nineteenth century and enforced systems of exploitation there. We don’t hear much about the slave trade, or how we either stifled industry in the colonies to prevent competition, or used them as a cash machine at the expense of natural resources, leaving lasting damage especially to Africa. When we did encourage trade and industry in Africa, Africans were only allowed to participate in unskilled, poorly-paid, hard labour, while we Europeans took the well-paid positions and profited from their gold, diamonds, and minerals. Or what about infrastructural neglect; how, while we may have built a few hospitals, schools, roads, and railways, these were all catered to European needs: in Kenya, roads were built to link economically profitable regions with the sea, facilitating imperial money-making and military domination, and completely ignoring the north. Meanwhile, out of 64 hospitals in 1930s Nigeria, 12 catered to 4,000 Europeans, while the other 52 were for over 40 million Africans. Or how this was all entangled with ideas of race and the superiority of the ‘civilised’ Europeans, seemingly legitimising brutal colonial regimes. In short, we used our colonies for our own financial and military gain with very little regard for the people living there and, since losing them, we’ve tried as hard as possible to forget our colonial past. (Not that we don’t still have colonies, because we do, just not on the same scale and not in the same way.)

A calming, rather incongruous picture of some giraffes in Kenya to give you a momentary break from all the heavy stuff

What I’m getting at is that, as a country, we deliberately remember very selective sections of our past. The collective memory of the British involves our victories and our triumphs, our strengths and our achievements. Meanwhile, we try to forget all the nastiness which paints Britain as an evil, exploitative, imperialist power. Our collective memory is selective: that doesn’t negate the importance of the less comfortable parts of our national history. They may not bind us together in pride, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

The far right in this country are fuelled by a lot of nationalist pride. They thrive on the fantasy of glorious, imperialist Britain, previously ruler of the world, and potentially able to conquer it all over again. Caucasian Britain, who won those wars against the evil foreigners, for some seems better off without immigrants from far-away lands where they’re probably as awful as our ancient enemies. Wonderful Britain apparently singlehandedly triumphed again and again, against the Germans, and against the Lefty Russians, and will continue to triumph as long as we don’t have too much meddling from outsiders. Glorious Britain, who was the richest country in the world, definitely did it all by herself, and would totally be able to go it alone, without any nasty European trading partners, or terrible immigrants working in our NHS! This is Britain, the greatest country in the world, and we can do anything!

I’m not going to patronise you by bothering to explain in detail how completely wrong and utterly misguided these beliefs about our country are, but suffice it to say that our historic strength and victories have been consistently due to outside help, whether given by America and our European allies, or taken from our empire. The legacy of trying so desperately to forget all the terrible things this country has done, remembering only her victories, and forgetting that these were shared, feeds into the ferocious patriotism and xenophobia of the far right. The EDL and extreme Brexiteers claiming Britain for the ‘British’ have been subtly poisoned by ‘patriotic’ historical abridgement, so that the only thing surpassing their arrogance, bigotry, and hate, is their overwhelmingly ignorant pride.

An EDL demonstration in Rotherham, May 2014 – notice that the English flag reads “lest we forget”

That’s the problem with collective memory; just like personal memory, it’s not always reliable. It can be warped, and changed, and manipulated by ourselves and by outside forces, with really detrimental effects. Faced with a past as repugnant as ours, Britain desperately obsesses over that time we were the goodies, hoping that everyone gets distracted and it all just goes away. But forgetting doesn’t erase the past. We once controlled a quarter of the earth’s landmass, and the many peoples whose societies we ruined are not about to forget the legacy of our colonial domination, no matter how long we bury our collective head in the sand.

This country is suffering from self-inflicted selective amnesia…

…and it’s not going well…