Wealthy nations can forget wars while poor nations inherit their explosive residue

Evidence

Like most forms of pollution, cluster bomb and landmine pollution is only semirandom. Just as in Western nations toxic waste sites tend to be placed near poor or minority communities, so too unexploded ordnance pollution is concentrated in the world’s most impoverished societies, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Laos, Somalia, Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam, Somalia, Nicaragua, and El Salvador among them. Because the burden of lethal war residues is unevenly distributed between wealthy and poor nations, the physical liberty to forget the wars themselves is also unevenly distributed. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 690

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels slow-noise chapter and ch11’s globally-distributed environmental racism; also ch8’s ‘corporations relocate while communities cannot.’ — connects to: War damages persist for generations in bodies and land beyond official victory — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 585; Uncounted slow-violence casualties skew how wars are remembered and planned — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 44; Nations selectively forget negative historical events to sustain national identity (+2 more)
• SEED: The ‘physical liberty to forget’ frames the whole dispersal-of-memory argument — usable in an article on how toxic memory is outsourced to the poor.

Broader Connections

• Superpowers wage wars abroad through proxies rather than their own troops #expands (0.80) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 187
• Uncounted slow-violence casualties skew how wars are remembered and planned #complicates (0.75) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 44
• Overseas bases ease the waging of foreign wars and make war likelier #expands (0.75)
• Nations selectively forget negative historical events to sustain national identity #qualifies (0.72)