110,000 people gathered in Naha city Okinawa over the weekend to protest the governments backing of revision to history textbooks in Japan. The revision, directed by The Ministry of Education, removes a line from the texts which say that the Japanese military encouraged and forced civilians to commit mass suicide during the Battle for Okinawa in 1945. This is contrary to a multitude of testimonies and statements by survivors. This news is on nightly these days. It has made me think about this passage of Walter Benjamin from his 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' which I happened to discuss last week with my students at Musabi:
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognise it 'the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger....the danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
Recent Comments