Political memory is selectively suppressed to erase a history of socialist solidarity.
Evidence
As the metropolitan Left came to shelve its identifications with post-revolutionary societies of Indochina and Southern Africa, that memory, and what it had meant for the oppressed peoples of Asia and Africa, was simply suppressed; the subsequent Gorbachev years were to help that willed amnesia greatly. What remained was the memory only of the failures, the distortions, the bureaucratization; that there had also been other kinds of solidarities no longer mattered. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 57
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: A dense observation about how the metropolitan Left’s memory of the Soviet Union was curated — retaining only failures while suppressing the material support that made liberation wars possible. This is a genuine insight into the politics of historical memory, not merely a factual point.
- XREF: Relates to memory politics and the ideological construction of the past — analogous to discussions of how colonial archives and post-Soviet historiography are selectively preserved. — connects to: Metropolitan leftists suppressed memory of Soviet-backed anti-colonial victories — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 149