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Our contemporary culture of commemoration
takes for granted that memory prevents murder. If people died in such
large numbers, it is tempting to think, they must have died for something
of transcendent value, which can be revealed, developed, and preserved
in the right sort of political remembrance.
The transcendent then turns out to be the national. The millions of
victimes must have died so that the Soviet Union could win a Great
Patriotic War, or America a good war. Europe had to learn its pacifist
lesson, Poland had to have its legend of freedom, Ukraine had to have
its heroes, Belarus had to prove its virtue, Jews had to fulfill a
Zionist destiny. Yet all of these later rationalizations, though they
convey important truths about national politics and national psychologies,
have little to do with memory as such. The dead are remembered, but
the dead do no remember. Someone else had the power, and someone else
decided how they died. Later on, someone else still decides why. When
meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is
that more killing would bring about more meaning, |