POLICTICS OF MEMORY

POLITICS OF MEMORY

POLITICS OF MEMORY

Introduction

The politcs of memory is the political means by which events are recalled and noted, or discarded. The terminology addresses the function of politics in forming collective recollection and how remembrances can disagree markedly from the objective truth of the events as they happened. The leverage of government on recollection is seen in the way history is in writing and passed on.

Memories are influenced by political and heritage forces. Government policies and communal directions, as well as popular culture and communal norms leverage the way events are remembered. In one example, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder instituted a politics of recollection for the lifetime born after war. His principles echoed the conviction that there was no reason to extend the guilt of the past and that the time had arrive for getting past the negative historical experiences. It has furthermore been attached with the construction of identity

What is a political act?

Here, the vintage state is the stasis, the civil war, and the new state is the homonoia, consensus. To produce the transformation one has to see the “opportunity”, the “occasion”, the “right moment” (or kairos), at the moment of krisis, by an act of distinction and judgment, which marks the crisis, the critical moment, like in medicine, when the decision between fatal outcome and healing is produced. This krisis is in the event the decree of amnesty, a dated text which, like it is stipulated with regard to the TRC, proposes “a firm cut-off date”, a before and an after (Report). Apolitical proceed par excellence is the one which organises, literally, to devastate the devastation, and to make the evil irreversibly become a larger good. We could suggest some versions of this. (Rawson 2010, 88)

Cyprus

The two sides in the confrontation in Cyprus sustain widely divergent and diverging recollections of the events that split the island. The period selective memory is directed by psychologists to people pain from head wounds who keep some recollections, but have amnesia about others. Societal trauma, such as conflict, appears to have a similar affect. Recollections that are formed out of a phenomenon widespread to numerous nations traumatized by war and repression, may be remembered in fundamentally distinct ways by persons who skilled alike events. (Ebon 2004, 88)

The selectivity may also serve a political reason, for example to support the assertions of one assembly over a competing group. Cyprus is a poignant ...