by Zoë Pollock
Paul Connerton singles out coerced forgetting as "one of the most malign features of the twentieth century":
For example, think of Germany after Hitler, or Spain after Franco, or Greece after the colonels, or Argentina after the generals, or Chile after Pinochet: in all these cases, there had been a process of coerced forgetting during the dictatorships. And if, on the other hand, you think of some the distinguished writers of the second half of the twentieth century—Primo Levi or Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Nadezhda Mandelstam—the interesting thing about them is that they took up their pens in order to combat this process of coerced forgetting. As a result of this, I think that you could say that at the end of the twentieth century there was such a thing as an ethics of memory. Memory and remembrance had acquired the quality of an ethical value.
The Dish 