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I have no issue with the anti-war aspects of what you wrote. But as an historian, I feel like I ought to write a defense of remembering past injustices. I think there are several grounds for doing so: - I can't speak for Caroline Elkins, but I think that many historians, including myself, believe that every human life that was ever lived has some value and deserves to be remembered, as far as that's possible. As living human being we naturally have a tendency to privilege our present moment and the lives of the humans who happen to be alive alongside us, and there's nothing wrong with that. But it's humbling to realize that there are tens of billions of lives that have faded from memory, but which were every bit as vivid and profound to the people who experienced them as your own life is to you. So I think one core benefit of history is simply in preserving the memories and the experiences of all sentient beings. (This is going to get very interesting in the decades to come when we get better at digitally preserving people's personalities and memories, but that's for another discussion). - There are a surprising number of people in the mainstream of political and cultural discussion who truly seem to believe that the British Empire should be uncritically celebrated. Niall Ferguson being probably the most famous example. This kind of work forces us to confront the fact that the good intentions of some British imperialists were counterbalanced by atrocities and acts of unthinking violence. Caroline Elkins' work is important in the same way that George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" is - it documents cruelties, not to settle scores, but to help us avoid repeating them. - Arguably, more violence and hatred could be incited by failing to remember horrible past events. In other words, if a people have a sense that they've been wronged within living memory, and that as those memories fade, the injustice done to them will be forgotten, this could generate even more distrust and hatred then an acknowledgement and apology. This is a debatable point, but one that makes sense to me from the standpoint of my own life - we tend to get angriest at unacknowledged wrongs. |