It is important to remember as much history as possible, since it gives us an understanding of the range of human activity, and the outcomes of pursuing particular policies. The mistake is to take it personally.
It's not the memory that is the problem, but the collectivist mentality. I "remember" a lot of history but I know better than to associate myself with dead people of the past or to hold my contemporaries responsible for anything that happened before they were born. Sounds easy enough, right? Apparently not when you have pack animal genes and a bunch of politicians eager to exploit it to their benefit.
It is not enough to remember; you must also understand and learn from history.<p>The memory of World War Two does not make Germany and Japan my enemies. On the contrary, it shows why we MUST be friends.
I take the stance of my Jewish friends, when they say never again. That's what history is suppose to teach us, NEVER AGAIN! Yet we still have not worked out how to make that happen for all these government based power plays. All power needs to be distributed far and wide so that no one has power. That's a very good way to ensure people can't bring harm to others at every level of society/.
This topic is the subject of Kazuo Ishiguro's book "The Buried Giant" where a long-married couple explore medieval England to understand why everyone has forgotten their history, and discover that it was probably for the best.<p>Never thought that would be on-topic at HN.
This shameful piece could have only been written by someone who has forsaken their own human condition, reducing their sense of purpose in life to the biological imperative to “survive”. In the interest of “surviving”, people can do all sorts of dishonorable things, like adopting a servile attitude with those who covet (or, even worse, have already stolen!) what is rightfully yours, while turning a blind eye to the plight of your own kind. Fortunately, throughout history, there have always been people with a sense of duty to the collective to which they belong, and will prioritize that duty over opportunities for self-advancement. So not all hope is lost.
<i>He who controls the past controls the future</i><p>What this guy is getting at, in a necessarily stupefying way to confuse and tire the reader, is that we should remember certain events and not others. No doubt the lists of things to be forgotten and propagated will be determined by people as enlightened as himself. But on that count he's calling for the <i>status quo</i> making the article that much more dull.
The gist of this article is misleading. Instead of forgetting, one should be ruthlessly open, but also meta about memory. There is a relatively new historical research area, that shows how important historical events are remembered, not what really happened. It is phenomenological, interested about how people really feel. In modern geography, you have the same strain of imagined spaces. How is Kosovo as a place? The power of that place over the real administrative boundaries. Combined with the other major boundary of reality time, we can be very meta about this and establish a better understanding of our discourse. I think it is better to fight ignorance than openly practice it.
The book "Delete - The virtue of forgetting" comes here to my mind. It deals about the inability of content on the internet to "rot"<p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/30/remember-delete-forget-digital-age" rel="nofollow">http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jun/30/remember-d...</a>
There's a lot of flexibility as to what you can focus on. If some group attacked your ancestors you can build up a grudge against the group and want to fight back or you can resent war and try to stop that in general. Both positions tend to get campaigned for by political groups.
The problems in the article are not problems of history, rather they are problems of people who refuse to learn from history. People who refuse to learn are doomed, whether they have history or not.