Anyone who has seen war face-to-face knows what it smells like and tastes like and feels like and weighs. It’s impossible not to wear it and let it cover you in the evening. Whoever knows this reality, whoever has survived this primitivism, knows that peace will hardly come through the path of truth and justice, but rather through resignation to suffering and a predisposition to oblivion.
In 1932, a few months before Hitler came to power, Einstein asked Freud if there was any psychological cure for man’s inclination to war. Freud replied that there was no cure for war and that only collective wisdom could temper each individual’s instinct for destruction.
That wars do not heal implies that we have to move on with what they leave us and it is precisely the management of this pain, of accumulated grievance, destruction and death, that determines our behavior as individuals and, likewise, that of our political and social leaders.
Wars are still alive when they are said to be over. “Neither forget nor forgive” is a popular slogan that forces us to remember, that is, to perpetuate the trauma through collective memory. We are told that remembering atrocities will prevent us from repeating them, but this is not the case.
Remembrance keeps wounds open, and bleeding wounds are powerful political weapons.
We preserve Auschwitz to honor the dead and condemn Nazism. It is our obligation because Xoà happened in secret and forgetting the extermination camps would mean the definitive triumph of Nazism. It would be inhumane.
The memory of Auschwitz, however, has not prevented other wars in Europe. It did not avoid the Balkans and it has not avoided Ukraine. Moreover, the memory of the trauma, manipulated by Putin, encouraged the invasion. That maybe he didn’t justify it to Russian society by saying that the Nazis ruled Ukraine?
Netanyahu compares Hamas to the Nazis. Beguin did the same with Fatah, the main PLO party, during the First Lebanon War in 1982. Eleven years later, in the Oslo Accords, Rabin signed peace with Fatah, but not from oblivion , but from the continuation, that is, from the obligation to continue forward, keeping Israel away from the war.
How did Europe overcome Nazism? With more oblivion than justice. What does France remember about collaboration with the Nazis? What do you remember about the Vichy collaborationist regime and the continuity of Vichy in the IV and V republics?
Adenauer’s Germany, father of the European Union, allowed the crimes of Nazism to go unpunished for twenty years. 8,200 German soldiers left Auschwitz alive, but the Frankfurt trials (1963-1965) tried only 22 suspects out of the 800 who were investigated. There were six life sentences and twelve sentences ranging from three to ten years in prison. Two defendants were acquitted and two others died before the trial.
In the Netherlands, half a million people (5% of the population) collaborated with the Nazis. The judiciary investigated 300,000 and tried 65,000. The vast majority received sentences of less than ten years in prison. There were 152 death sentences, but only 40 were carried out. Documents from those trials will not be made public until 2025. Those affecting people who are still alive will remain secret.
The Spanish transition was a pact to forget. Criminals were not tried. On the contrary, they were amnestied.
Peace, many times, requires the impunity of murderers, and politics, when it must be practical, when it must build to move forward, must have little memory and a lot of ambivalence.
It is necessary to preserve the historical truth, but not to misrepresent or glorify the past. Nationalisms, however, do the opposite, distort and glorify, fill the landscape with martyrologies, drug the memory to the point of turning it into a children’s tale. They abuse defeats because they know that they unite more than victories. They also keep the memory of collective oppression alive because it feeds victimhood. Victims, after all, can justify their crimes based on the harm they have received and the accumulated resentment, and this is how the circle of violence is kept moving. That is why it is so difficult to live with peoples and nations that mythologize their victimhood.
Those who have suffered a war want to forget. They want criminals tried and convicted, but then they want to forget. They need the silence to be able to live over the guilt, the pain and the shame. There is no other way forward.
The day the guns fall silent in Gaza, there will be no peace, no justice, no truth, as there has been at the end of so many other wars.
This holy trinity, this triangle of light, barely exists. It is most likely that the silence that hides the truth and obstructs justice will spread over the armistice. It will be a failure similar to that of Bosnia and Ukraine, but one necessary to preserve life. This is the paradox of our evolution as social beings.
Life, as any witness to war knows, makes its way through crimes and the extreme fragility of the breath that sustains it. It is a miracle that we should be happy about. Carrying paradoxes and not stones, which is how we move forward.
