{"id":379,"date":"2018-04-28T16:06:23","date_gmt":"2018-04-28T20:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/?p=379"},"modified":"2018-04-28T16:06:23","modified_gmt":"2018-04-28T20:06:23","slug":"the-issue-of-forgetting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/uncategorized\/the-issue-of-forgetting\/","title":{"rendered":"The Issue of Forgetting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lawrence Weschler\u2019s A Miracle, A Universe <\/em>argues against a society forgetting the hardships and injustices of the past and living in a state of blissful ignorance, suggesting instead that these issues must not be removed from public consciousness; that they should be talked about and remedied as much as possible.<\/p>\n

I would like to echo Weschler\u2019s feelings about mass forgetting using my personal experience growing up in a society that refused to speak about its past and under a government that still discourages them to. The situation does not quite match the South American cases we have looked at in class, but I feel it could provide an interesting perspective on what forgetting can do to a society years later.<\/p>\n

In Lebanon, the country maintains a silence over the civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, and the result is a stubborn resentment over the atrocities of that conflict. Many Christians resent Palestinians (and those that fought with them) for massacring Christian villages up and down the country, while many Muslims and Palestinians resent the Christian party as traitors for its brief alliance with Israel that allowed Israel to enter the country and wipe out the PLO, massacring Palestinians and bombing major cities in the process.<\/p>\n

After the conclusion of the civil war, the government didn\u2019t do anything to give either side any closure, preferring instead to discourage talk of the conflict (for example by not teaching it in history classes) and making talk of the civil war a taboo. The government forced the people to forget when they didn\u2019t want to, and the result, to this day, is a community divided along sectarian lines, silently resenting the hardships they were put through and the war crimes committed against them \u2013 all the while holding onto their hatred of those responsible.<\/p>\n

In Lebanon, the policy of forgetting the past has broken a people that could have been saved with a sustained attempt at reconciliation, and so I totally share Weschler\u2019s opinion: divisions created in times of crisis need to be fixed through acceptance and reconciliation, and forgetting doesn\u2019t help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lawrence Weschler\u2019s A Miracle, A Universe argues against a society forgetting the hardships and injustices of the past and living in a state of blissful ignorance, suggesting instead that these issues must not be removed from public consciousness; that they … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1685,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1685"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":380,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions\/380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}