i dont see any disagreement bor.
i think this thread quite interesting and am pleased to see it developing.
at the same time, i find it strange in its focus and problematic in its relationship to questions of judgment in real time, which i take to be an eminently political question.
i do not understand the separation between the actions/events listed here and the political. i dont understand it conceptually (putting on my historian's hat for a moment) and i dont understand it practically.
allow me to be cynical for a moment.
without politics, remembering the past is like collecting rocks--so you have another atrocity sitting on your self--you get to take it down and play with it from time to time. perhaps you can congratulate yourself on having a better atrocity collection that someone else has. perhaps having an adequately large atrocity collection makes you that you have somehow resolved a moral dilemma.
personally, i find it kinda creepy, like a kind of naive rememberance makes you into a consumer of atrocity.
this is parallel to proust's lovely description of reading the newspaper:
Quote:
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That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the last twenty-four hours, the battles which cost the lives of fifty-thousand men, the murders, the strikes, the bankruptcies, the fires, the poisonings, the suicides, the divorces, the cruel emotions of statesmen and actors, are transformed for us, who don't even care, into a morning treat, blending in wonderfully, in a particularly exciting and tonic way, with the recommended ingestion of a few sips of cafe au lait.
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the other function of an atrocity collection is to provide triggers for speculations about how the collector would have reacted in that situation from the past.
of course, looking at atrocity x or y from within a fundamentally different frame of reference makes the question of judgment simple--sitting in my chair in my livingroom in the u.s. in 2006, i am sure that i would not have participated in atrocity x or y. and i am fairly sure that this same response would be shared by every spectator. closing a book on stalin's attempt to subdue the ukraine through famine, you say "whoah. that was bad. i would not have done that."
but this is to fundamentally mis-state the problem: if everyone at the time viewed genocide from the vantagepoint of an expost facto spectator, there would in all likelhood have been no genocides. so the above says everything about ex post facto spectatorship and nothing at all about how one might make judgments--or might have made judgments--from within a shifting ideological context within which the objective of genocide would have been normalized.