Societies that erase people later celebrate the victims’ lingering culture.

Evidence

Classes are few; they come into being by slow transformations in the mode of production; even emergent they seem perpetually at distance from themselves and have to work hard to be sure they really exist as such. Groups, on the other hand, seem to offer the gratifications of psychic identity (from nationalism to neoethnicity). Since they have become images, groups allow the amnesia of their own bloody pasts, of persecution and untouchability, and can now be consumed: this marks their relationship to the media, which are, as it were, their parliament and the space of their “representation,” in the political fully as much as the semiotic sense. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 746 (#complicates, via linked claim)

National sins, and our efforts to atone for them, can have ironic and unintended consequences for new immigrant populations. In a fascinating study of memory politics in Germany, the Netherlands, and France, Nancy Foner and Richard Alba show how commemoration of the Holocaust, which is meant to foster tolerance and a protective stance toward the rights of minority populations, has actually shored up prejudice against Muslim immigrants, who are widely portrayed as religiously intolerant, homophobic, sexist, and anti-Semitic. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 663 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Celebrating colonized culture can mask complicity with material exploitation — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 139; Killings began with cultural elites to erase communal memory — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and…, 97; Prisons preserve racist and misogynist practices society has nominally abandoned (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Groups become consumable images that erase their own violent histories #complicates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 746
• Holocaust commemoration paradoxically strengthens prejudice against Muslim immigrants. #complicates (0.74) — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 663