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pan:
what you say above might obtain if what was at stake in revisiting the often very ugly past was as much an exercise in simple moralizing as its inverse, the one-dimensional heroic narratives--to think this way, you have to assume that the aim of the heroic version is some kind of Uplift, some kind of National Pride or other such nonsense: from there it is simple to invert the whole thing and arrive at the conclusion that one looks to the ugliness (or more neutrallly the complexity) of history as an exercize in self-flagellation.
i think this position as shallow as that of the Heroic Narrative--it uses the same arguments, is embedded in the same logic.
you elaborate a similar--but even more reductive--interpretation of the motives of those who might undertake such a look into the past.
what if one of the reasons to undertake an investigation of the holocaust--say--which is an enormously difficult topic to go into affectively for anyone, really, with overwhelming violence compounded by problems of how you write about that violence--is not simply to inflict guilt on people like yourself, but to understand something more complicated, and more worrisome on the order of how was this possible? you will find very little in the way of answers to this kind of question if you remain at the Great Men level of history---to my mind the central question lay in the engineering of consent, in the various ways the nazis were able to bend bourgeois common sense, using the topoi of nation and exploiting anti-semitism, to create something approaching a kind of collective assent to atrocity--one that operated so efficiently as to enable a significant segment of the german population of the period to at once know and not know that something horrific was going on around them.
this kind of analysis would not be about making you feel bad--were i writing it, i would not care at all about that type of response--i find it little more than a refusal to look and a refusal to think--rather it would be about how particular types of claims, elaborated in contexts not that different from this one that we live through, using mass media, exploiting notions of nationalism, of national unity, looped into racism became a basic condition of possibility for genocide.
genocide in this case was but one aspect of an authoritarian system of governance that imposed a single frame on its population, eliminated systematically opposition internal and where possible external, propped itself up with the rhetoric of self-righteousness and national mission.
history is not made by Great Men. it is made by masses of people, every day--these people make thier history in and through particular frames of reference--political power resides in controlling that frame of reference--the consequences of particular types of control can be appalling--but it is also possible that those who consent to this type of outcome do so on "moral" grounds, with the effect that they might see and not see what is happening--they might see and not care because they oppose for whatever reason something in or about those people who are being killed in great number.
to my mind, you would examine the holocaust in significant measure because you would want to make sure--as sure as you can--that nothing remotely like it would happen again.
something parallel would obtain for almost any history that moves away from the Heroic Narratives and into the horror that often--too often--lay around figures in these narratives.
it is not about making you feel bad.
and even if it was, there would be no consequence to it.
because history is more than a sentimental narrative that enables you to look back on the Great Men who were acting in particular, ambiguous situations so that you can pretend that ambiguity begins and ends with the lives of Great Men and so is no longer something for you to worry about. judgements about the present are shaped in situations of enormous ambiguity. to pretend otherwise is to set yourself up for disaster. which you may prefer, if you can feel good about yourself along the way.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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