Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (3 page)

Both memory and forgetting are subject not only to the fabrications of art, but also to the commodification of industry, which seeks to capture and domesticate art. An entire memory industry exists, ready to capitalize on history by selling memory to consumers hooked on nostalgia.
¹⁷
Capitalism can turn anything into a commodity, including memories and amnesia. Thus, memory amateurs fashion souvenirs and memorabilia; nostalgic hobbyists dress up in period costume and reenact battles; tourists visit battlefields, historical sites, and museums; and television channels air documentaries and entertainments that are visually high definition and mnemonically low resolution. Emotion and ethnocentrism are key to the memory industry as it turns wars and experiences into sacred objects and soldiers into untouchable mascots of memory, as found in the American fetish for the so-called Greatest Generation who fought the so-called Good War. Critics have derided this memory industry, seeing it as evidence that societies remember too much, transforming memories into disposable and forgettable products and experiences while ignoring the difficulties of the present and the possibilities of the future.
¹⁸
But this argument misunderstands that the so-called memory industry is merely a symptom of something more pervasive: the industrialization of memory. Industrializing memory proceeds in parallel with how warfare is industrialized as part and parcel of capitalist society, where the actual firepower exercised in a war is matched by the firepower of memory that defines and refines that war’s identity.

Thus, the Pentagon’s war of attrition in Vietnam was matched by Hollywood’s
Apocalypse Now
and its entire celluloid campaign to refight the Vietnam War on global movie screens. This campaign foreshadows how the “shock and awe” of U.S. bombing during the Gulf War was equaled by the spectacular quality of American media coverage with its global saturation. The American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have begun to receive the same propagandistic treatment, if the success of films such as
Zero Dark Thirty
and
American Sniper
are any indication.
Zero Dark Thirty
views CIA torture and the killing of Osama Bin Laden through the eyes of a CIA agent, encouraging the viewer to empathize with the CIA, while
American Sniper
is about a soldier who killed 160 Iraqis, an experience seen not only through his eyes but through the scope of his rifle. No matter the horrors that Americans may see on their screens—the beheadings, the suicide bombings, the mass executions, the waves of refugees, the drone’s eye view of war—the viewers who are not physically present at those events are anesthetized into resignation, into watching the news as an awful form of entertainment. This, too, is the “society of the spectacle” of which theorist Guy Debord spoke, a society in which all horror is revealed and nothing is done on the part of the average citizen to resist it.

If we look at a spectacular war movie such as
American Sniper
in isolation, it appears to be a part of a memory industry, but if we look at that movie as a part of Hollywood, and Hollywood as a component of the military-industrial complex, then we see an industry of memory in operation. The ultimate goal of this industry is to reproduce power and inequality, as well as to fulfill the needs of the war machine.
¹⁹
The technologies of warfare and memory depend on the same military-industrial complex, one intent on seizing every advantage against present and future enemies who also seek to control the territory of memory and forgetting. But a military-industrial complex does so not simply or only through a memory industry based on the selling of baubles, vacations, heritages, or entertainment. The memory industry produces kitsch, sentimentality, and spectacle, but industries of memory exploit memory as a strategic resource. Recognizing that the memory industry is only one aspect of an industry of memory enables us to see that memories are not simply images we experience as individuals, but are mass-produced fantasies we share with one another. Memories are not only collected or collective, they are also corporate and capitalist. Memories are signs and products of power, and in turn, they service power. Furthermore, just as countries and peoples are not economically at the same level, neither are their memories. As Barbie Zelizer notes, “everyone participates in the production of memory, though not equally.”
²⁰
One sign of this inequality is that while the United States lost the war in fact, it won the war in memory on most of the world’s cultural fronts outside of Vietnam, dominating as it does moviemaking, book publishing, fine art, and the production of historical archives.

But even identifying the sites of industrial memory is not enough to show how the strong industries of strong countries will find more receptive audiences and consumers than the weak industries of weak countries will. Language itself becomes a circuit through which industrial memories circulate, so that English-language products are more accessible than Vietnamese ones, or at least much more likely to be translated, while American memories are varnished with a kind of coolness that Vietnamese memories do not yet possess. Even Korean memories of the war—South Korea having been America’s most important ally—travel more fluidly on the international circuitry of commodification and desirability. Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia are much weaker powers, and as a result, their memories usually have, at best, local and national distribution and impact. When those weaker memories are exported internationally, it is almost always on art circuits that have limited reach, or in the closed worlds of diasporic and exilic communities. Those communities cannot amplify the memories of their homelands, for when they produce memories in their adopted countries, the memories remain mostly invisible, inaudible, and illegible to those outside the communities. So it is that in a shooting war’s mnemonic sequel, smaller nations and weaker peoples are outmatched because the aftermath is not fought only on their territory, where they have some advantages, but throughout the world, where they have many disadvantages.

By drawing attention to how industrial power exploits remembrance, a project such as this does not simply add even more memories to the surfeit of memories. This surfeit occurs often for traumatic events, and it happens not because the past has been worked through too much but because the past has not been worked through enough. A just memory suggests that we must work through the past or else be condemned to act out because of it, as Freud says.
²¹
But while this is true enough, it is also still not enough. Only sometimes can the past be worked out solely through therapy or individual effort, since the conditions of the past are often beyond the individual, as is the case with war. Given the scale of so many historical traumas, it can only be the case that for many survivors, witnesses, and inheritors, the past can only be worked through together, in collectivity and community, in struggle and solidarity. This effort of a mass approach to memory should involve a confrontation with the present as much as the past, for it is today’s material inequalities that help to shape mnemonic inequities.

While revolutions in memory are thus not possible without revolutions in other aspects of social, economic, and political life, and vice versa, some scholars have argued that if we remember too much, we will be mired in the past, unable to move forward. Remembering too much, or remembering the wrong things, is supposedly part of an identity politics, a negative politics motivated by a feeling of victimization, or so the critics claim. For these scholars, identity politics encourages people to believe that they are members of a persecuted group rather than individuals, which incites them to resurrect old histories of grief and resentment that divide a nation from within or separate it from its neighbors. Undermining the nation’s identity, identity politics supposedly diverts us from real politics, the kind concerned with economy and class, money and mobility, the things that matter for people, country, and nation.
²²
But those who insist that we should forget the past and focus on economic and class inequality do not see that inequality cannot be addressed without a just memory.
²³
This kind of memory recognizes that nationalism is the most powerful form of identity politics, armed to the teeth and eager to harness all the nation’s resources for war, including memory and the dead.

A just memory opposes this kind of identity politics by recalling the weak, the subjugated, the different, the enemy, and the forgotten. A just memory says that ethically recalling our own is not enough to work through the past, and neither is the less common phenomenon of ethically recalling others. Both ethical approaches are needed, as well as an ethical relationship to forgetting, since forgetting is inevitable. All individuals and groups are invested in strategic forgetting, and we must forget if we are to remember and to live.
²⁴
A just memory constantly tries to recall what might be forgotten, accidentally or deliberately, through self-serving interests, the debilitating effects of trauma, or the distraction offered by excessively remembering something else, such as the heroism of the nation’s soldiers. These excessive memories do not point to a just approach to the past, but to an unjust one, defined by what philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls “memory abusively summoned” by those in power.
²⁵

The response to unjust, repetitive memory is not to cease remembering an event that has been chewed over relentlessly, but to reconsider how we remember that event, who controls the industries of memory, and who abuses memory. A project of just memory indicates two ways of dealing with the problem of excessive memories. The passive route is to recognize that time and mortality offer a solution, for witnesses inevitably pass on. Their hardened memories turn to a handful of dust, fulfilling Nietzsche’s claim that “without forgetting, it is quite impossible to
live
at all.”
²⁶
The other route to fulfilling his claim is active, through the struggle to ethically remember conflicted events. Acts of the imagination, the creation of memory works, and the entire artistic enterprise are crucial to this kind of just memory, but just memory can never be fulfilled solely through them. Art and ethical work are never enough to effect change without power. Just memory is only possible when the weak, the poor, the marginalized, the different, and the demonized, or their advocates, can influence or even seize the industries of memory. This struggle for what Ricoeur calls an
enlightened forgetting
, which leads the way to reconciliation and forgiveness, can only be done through an ethical memory that recalls one’s own and others.
²⁷

This ethical practice inevitably questions identities, for if remembering one’s own affirms deeply held notions of identity, remembering others challenges those notions. In so far as this work of just memory is done about war, it also challenges war’s identity. If we no longer accept the identities of our enemies as provided by the authorities, we might find it difficult to accept the identities of the wars those same authorities give us. Negotiating between remembering one’s own and remembering others does not mean that competing memories can be reconciled, only that submitting to only one ethical way of memory, at the exclusion of the other, will never suffice. Still, even a just memory which uses both these ethical approaches will not necessarily make us feel better about ourselves or reconciled with our deeds, our omissions, or our enemies. While just memory might lead to an enlightened forgetting of the horrors and conflicts of the past, it can also lead to a tragic awareness of what is irreconcilable within ourselves and within those near and dear to us. When it comes to war, ethical memory illuminates how war neither emerges from alien territory nor is fought by monsters. War grows on intimate soil, nurtured by friends and neighbors, fought by sons, daughters, wives, and fathers. Our ambivalence about war’s identity simply expresses ambivalence about our own identities, which are collectively inseparable from the wars our nations have fought. These are the wars for which we have paid, from which we have benefitted, by which we are traumatized. Whatever may be noble and heroic in war is found in us, and whatever is evil and horrific in war is also found in us.

When it comes to war, the basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is thus not only about remembering and forgetting certain events or people. The basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is instead more fundamentally about remembering our humanity and forgetting our inhumanity, while conversely remembering the inhumanity of others and forgetting their humanity. A just memory demands instead a final step in the dialectics of ethical memory—not just the movement between an ethics of remembering one’s own and remembering others, but also a shift toward an ethics of recognition, of seeing and remembering how the inhuman inhabits the human. Any project of the humanities, such as this one, should thus also be a project of the inhumanities, of how civilizations are built on forgotten barbarism toward others, of how the heart of darkness beats within. No wonder, then, that for Jorge Luis Borges, remembering is a
ghostly verb
.
²⁸
Memory is haunted, not just by ghostly others but by the horrors we have done, seen, and condoned, or by the unspeakable things from which we have profited. The troubling weight of the past is especially evident when we speak of war and our limited ability to recall it. Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember.

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