Connexions Other Voices - December 17, 2017 - Collective Memory and Cultural Amnesia

December 17, 2017

The December 17, 2017 issue of Other Voices, the Connexions newsletter, focuses on Collective Memory and Cultural Amnesia.

Our society is obsessed with the short-term present. It devalues memories and the past. That’s the nature of capitalism, especially the speeded-up hypercapitalism of today. The past is useless: profits are made by getting rid of the old and replacing it with something new.

Certainly this applies to commodities, which, as Marx taught us, are both the incarnation of value under capitalism, as well as the embodiment of capitalist values. Commodities (whether or not they take a physical form) have to be destroyed or made obsolete so that new commodities can be sold.

The need to eclipse the past also applies to ways of living. For the sake of increased profits, steady jobs have to be eliminated and replaced with precarious work. Unions have to be ground down and where possible destroyed. Farmers practising traditional agriculture have to give way to industrial farming, or be forced off their land. Culture has to be packaged as a product so it can be bought and sold.

This ceaseless enterprise of social engineering works best if people can be made to forget that things once were different. Collective memories of unionized jobs with benefits, air you could breathe and water you could drink without being poisoned, times when you could live your life without being spied on by the government and the corporations – such memories are dangerous. It’s best if people forget that such things ever existed.

Even more dangerous are collective memories of resistance -- times when people got together, and fought for their rights, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. The very idea that things were different in the past, and could be different in the future, is perilous because it gives people dangerous ideas.

Official society, including the mainstream media, busily carry on their daily work of fostering social amnesia, focusing on the present and the trivial, while erasing the past by misrepresentation or neglect. Certainly neither media nor governments have any interest in having people remember the lies that were used to justify past wars and past crimes. Recycled lies (including promises of a better future) work best if people don’t remember how often the same false tales have been told in the past.

But there are those who do remember, and who work to preserve and share our collective memory. They do their work for different reasons, in different places.

Sometimes the impulse is nationalist or even racist. Those who live on conquered or stolen land rarely care to remember much about how the land came to be theirs. They prefer collective myth to collective memory.

But they have to contend with the collective memories of those who were displaced. From Canada to Palestine, from South Sudan to Burma, people are working to document their stories and bring them to the attention of the world. In such instances, and others, the burning impulse is truth: to tell what happened to us.

Other initiatives and projects -- Connexions itself is an example -- see historical memory as a way of contributing to the struggle for a different world. For us, knowledge of history is subversive, and remembering can be a form of resistance. To understand how we can change society, we have to understand it. That means understanding where it -- where we -- came from.

When we know and understand more about those who came before us lived and fought, we can gain a deeper understanding of how we can best live and fight.

In this issue of Other Voices, the last of 2017, we share some stories about people’s struggles to use collective memory as a form of resistance and a tool for creating a better world.

Other Voices is available by email, or you can see it online at www.connexions.org/Media/CXNL-2017-12-17.htm

Past issues are available at www.connexions.org/Media/CxNewsletter.htm



For more information contact:
Ulli Diemer
Editor
Connexions
Phone: -
Website: www.connexions.org/Media/CXNL-2017-12-17.htm

Website: www.connexions.org/Media/CxNewsletter.htm