Return to history...

It's been awhile. My blog resolution fell by the wayside once the new term started. But there's no reason not to pick it up again, so without further ado...

A new story in RFE/RL's 'Persian Letters' about remembering dead loved ones in Iran reveals 'A Government that's Afraid of Gravestones'. The interesting thing here is the question of who can be remembered, rather than the usual focus on how to remember (or forget). Yes, this is a form of forgetting, imposed from above - the authorities are making it extremely difficult for those whose loved ones were killed during the post-election protests to visit their graves on this last Thursday of the Iranian year, when Iranians traditionally remember their dead. But the fact that a government can tell families that their loved ones are not allowed to be mourned, for political reasons - this must be intolerable. Time will tell whether Iranians will put up with it. But history suggests that those who are murdered rarely go unmourned forever. Just look at the most recent attempt at passing an Armenian genocide resolution in Congress as an example.

In other news, 16 March saw this year's 'Nazi Parade' on the streets of Riga, Latvia. Efraim Zuroff argues in The Guardian that these ceremonies should be banned. Denis McShane, also in The Guardian, agrees and worries about the Tories' alliance with Latvia's For Fatherland and Freedom Party, which supports the event. But we must also take note of the question that's becoming increasingly popular in academia - which was worse, Nazism or Stalinism? I'm not prepared to answer either way, but does it really matter? Both were unjust, oppressive, brutal systems with horrible consequences. Condemning one does not logically mean the glorification of the other. And yet I worry whether it's possible to commemorate defeating Stalin without making an inherently positive assessment of the Nazis, as the juxtaposition to Stalin - is there a way to remember without taking sides? This problem is also exemplified in independent Ukraine, in the debate over Ukrainians as victims of Holodomor versus Ukrainians as perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Finally, watch this space for some book reviews - I've got my eye on Father Desbois' Holocaust by Bullets, Finkelstein's Holocaust Industry (and I plan to re-read Novick's The Holocaust in American Life in conjunction with this, since Finkelstein's controversial book arose out of his critical review of Novick), and Ian Buruma's The Wages of Guilt.