It’s a central tenet of liberal thinking and liberal politics that facing one’s own country’s history is an activity necessary to the mental health of the people.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the chronicler of Soviet oppression, said on his return to his native soil in 1994 after 20 years in exile that “national reconciliation is a great thing and much needed, but there cannot be national reconciliation without spiritual cleansing.”
Solzhenitsyn was an uncertain liberal: but in this he agrees with a paid-up member of the liberal intelligentsia, Ian Buruma. In his Wages of Guilt, he contrasted the German assumption of responsibility for Nazi atrocities with the stuttering response of the Japanese to their war guilt, writing that “when society has become sufficiently open and free to look back, from the point of view neither of the victim nor of the criminal, but of the critic, only then will the ghosts be laid to rest.”
Russia, flexing old imperial muscles, now sees history as a weapon in the neo-imperialist armory.… Seguir leyendo »
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