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s cathartic institutions secular churches of a sort that aim to transform both guilty sinners and traumatized victims memories for the lofty purpose of achieving reconciliation so far so good on the implementation level however these idealistic projects begin to crack who commissions the truth commissioners what is the methodology applied in the process of transforming individual and collective memories even if the aim of these commissions is rehabilitative rather than punitive can they ever be devoid of this or that political agenda while truth commissions are a relatively recent phenomenon historic revisionist projects their shadows in the parlance of analytical psychology are as old as history itself the historic revisionist is an anachronistic species who is particularly driven by symbolic anniversaries recent examples of such opportunistic political campaigns feeding on the corpse of history include the 70th anniversary of the molotov ribbentrop pact the establishment of the commission to counter the attempt of falsification of history to the detriment of interests of russia coinciding with moscow s celebration of the 64th anniversary of its victory over nazi germany the melodramatic spat between new eu members hungary and slovakia because the latter barred the former s president from privately crossing its border on a day the country was commemorating the invasion by soviet led troops which included hungarians and finally the looming 20th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall an event ripe with potential for more memorialization and less and less laughter and forgetting à la milan kundera history is a nightmare from which i am trying to awake says stephen dedalus in james joyce s novel ulysses the comment resonates with the sentiment of philosopher poet friedrich nietzsche s attack on historical knowledge and education for their own sake knowledge which he calls impotent stripped of all creative impulse one that leads to a decadent culture and the ultimate destruction of the vitality and strength of a nation the germany of his time it is not that history cannot serve life nietzsche says in the use and abuse of history for life the desire to know the past is inherent in every individual and every nation historical knowledge is healthy as long as it serves as inspiration for action as reverence to the heritage of one s ancestors or as relief from suffering out of context however historical knowledge can be easily manipulated for unhealthy and degenerate ends from the thoughtless transplanting of plants stem many ills the critical man without need the antiquarian without reverence and the student of greatness without the ability for greatness are the sort who are receptive to weeds estranged from their natural mother earth and therefore degenerate growths another author obsessed with the labyrinthine clogs of excessive memory is jorge luis borges who in the short story funes the memorious creates a character who possesses total memory unable to forget anything funes is an example of the nitzschean historic man of paralysis since without forgetting no action can take place and creation is reversed into degeneration in gabriel garcía márquez novel one hundred years of solitude the characters suffer from the opposite malady an insomnia sickness that culminates in total amnesia and the construction of an imagined fictitious reality therapeutic forgetting philosophers and writers have been preoccupied with the subject of memory and forgetting for thousands of years more recently cognitive and neuroscience has taken up serious interest in the pathology of memory daniel l schacter author of searching for memory the brain the mind and the past talks about the subjective experiences of remembering and knowing the past by paying homage to yet another memory obsessed writer marcel proust proust who contemplated the act of remembering as a telescope pointed in time laid the groundwork for scientific research of the experience of remembering writes schacter foreshadowing scientific research by more than a half century proust achieved the penetrating insight that feelings of remembering result from a subtle interplay between past and present cognitive science is in tune with literature not only when it comes to blending past and present realities the literal and the literary truths and fictions gerd gigerenzer mostly known for his work on heuristics argues in his book gut feelings the intelligence of the unconscious that more memory is not always better and that our best choices are usually based on a beneficial degree of ignorance gut feelings and intuition rather than on our culturally held beliefs that more information is always better and that more choice is always better gigerenzer echoes nietzsche on the healthy use of history as a prompt for action forgetting prevents the sheer mass of life s detail from critically slowing down the retrieval of relevant experience and so impairing the mind s ability to abstract infer and learn forgetting and mythopoeia then can be seen as therapeutic devices a way of digesting the past through slow creative reflection instead of archiving the ulcerous symbols of history psychology and cognitive science research can also help shed light on the physical and mental processes of memory work and adaptive forgetting to bring relief to traumatic experiences myths and legends oral epics or folk songs are the instruments of restorative historians taken out of their native earth which is the realm of literature and transplanted to use nietzsche s metaphor into the foreign soil of politics they become degenerate growths of populist rhetoric that appeal to the fictions of national identities it is those forms of literature diagnostic rather than prescriptive and focusing more on the individual than the collective that have the potential to transform the experience of suffering which posses the magical ability of turning tears into laughter platonic reconciliation there are some truth commissions that make use of individual stories interviews and personal recollections but their performance is nevertheless marred by their ultimate purpose which is collective by the nature of their commissioners they are governmental methods of constructing big pictures and sense making tools that are devoid of sensing which is an individual and private experience in an ultra networked technologically insatiable world where context is valued over content the very existence of truth commissions is to say the least suspect contextual truths fall prey to the insensitized ready made emotions on which the non reflective minds of political entrepreneurs in need of quick fixes and relativistic truths gorge as long as truth commissions remain in the realm of collective bureaucracy reconciliation will remain platonic a present representation of an absent thing filed under cognitive science literature news current affairs 8 comments a song at the year s end posted on december 15 2008 by wholenotwhole frankfurt september by paul celan translated by nikolai popov and heather mchugh blind wall space bearded by brilliances a dream of a cockchafer sheds light on it behind that raster of lamentations freud s forehead opens up the tear compacted of silence breaks into a proposition psycho logy for the last time the pseudo jackdaw cough caw s double is breakfasting the glottal stop is breaking into song thank you for your interest in my blog in 2009 this blog will undergo a transformation in addition to a change in title the focus will change to reflect my literary interests you will find me under things whole and not whole with best regards linda filed under literature 1 comment who s got the last laugh interview with dmitry rogozin in bulgarian kapital posted on october 9 2008 by wholenotwhole last week the european council on foreign relations ran a commentary by compatriot vessela cherneva in which she gives a summary of an interview given by dmitry rogozin russia s ambassador to nato for bulgarian newspaper kapital in addition to ms cherneva s apt evaluation of the nuances and implications for bulgaria and beyond in terms of russia s foreign policy toward bulgaria and other lost spheres of influence in the wider balkans region a comment by one of the readers explaining the notion of the useful idiot stemming from pre cold war russian ideology are both well worth reading while rogozin is well known to the international community for his thuggish sense of humor i m not sure to what extent such thuggishness comes across in a summary of his speech this prompted me to translate the full interview from bulgarian which can be read below something else worth noting is perhaps the difference between interviews given to the western press and the one in this bulgarian publication i cannot pinpoint exactly what those differences are but one thing is certain speaking to a cultural audience that one considers its adversary and another its historically proven and justified sphere of influence is not the same rogozin who may or may not be having the last laugh aside i can highly recommend the analyses and policy briefs published by the ecfr they are a voice of hope that the eu has not entirely lost its ability for rational thought interview with dmitry rogozin regardless of the west s position moscow views the conflict with georgia as unconditional victory what is your next step you mean who s next my colleague the us ambassador to nato kurt volker said that lithuania latvia and estonia face a threat of a russian attack i would like to add to this list two more categories the marcians and the penguins we are getting more and more annoyed of such panic raising us statements the german foreign minister frank walter steinmeier has proposed an independent investigation of the events in georgia we agree to such measures but the georgians don t in this case the georgian president saakashvili is the aggressor and the criminal and so what is nato going to cease communication with him if we were to open the facts to cnn are they going to apologize for the disinformation they were spreading during the crisis and what are the faces of dick cheney and george bush the men who financed saakashvili s regime going to be like the recognition of south ossetia and abkhazia was not an easy decision for us but it was the only way to stop the violence in the very near future they will be recognized by another 10 15 countries if a country is not formally recognized it does not mean that it does not exist the us didn t recognize the soviet union until 1933 yet we existed and developed prior to that despite the civilian and military casualties we can speak of a positive result of this war namely the war was a test in morale responsibility and who s worth what in international politics these things are clear you can t not take a side in this issue what we want is that the aggressor is punished and anathemized by the international community if not in real at least in moral terms the second thing we want is peace and stability on the caucuses for all third it s clear that our world is fragile and that it can be easily destroyed by one wrong step taken by a drug addict this is why we have to protect ourselves from dividing into political ideological blocks and to try to find stability for all of us you are comparing 8 august 2008 to 11 september 2001 what do you think are the long term consequences of 8 august one thing is sure we will not be acting like the americans after 11 september after they were attacked instead of taking care of their national security they attacked iraq and afghanistan what s more under a laughable pretext russia will concentrate on its national security and will keep to its own part of the geographic map our goal is to create a wide coalition for peace and stability in europe to change the agreements and to make security an indivisible issue for us all you can laugh at me but i support the idea for obligatory conscription for everybody in russia where else are there russian minorities that russia intends to protect as it did in south ossetia and abkhazia minorities are not only a russian problem there are hungarians in romania turks in bulgaria what s important is to not provoke one another but to secure peace of mind for our compatriots why for instance are russian in the baltic states refused citizenship rights they are the second largest ethnic group in those countries this stands in the way of friendly relations between russia and estonia and latvia there is one thing i want to clarify we intervened in south ossetia not only because russians live there we would likewise protect every small nation in our region which is threatened by genocide jews bulgarians all how can we stand by indifferent if someone is shooting rockets at a civilian population after all the hard words of the past few weeks is there place for constructive dialogue between russia and nato as a washington favourite saakashvili has been a force of instability in the caucuses for years since the beginning of august i have been in constant communication with nato we wanted to use the mechanisms for cooperation available in order to put a stop to the aggression with joint efforts for some reasons america blocked this process this is why we think that nato s general secretary visit to tbilisi on the 15 16 september despite being planned way in advance is amoral and not correct we were hoping that our colleagues in nato will understand that such a visit will be taken to mean moral support for saakashvili which is totally out of line the behavior of the americans was scandalous for many people the us was also an actor in this conflict because they were arming the georgian army as for the europeans we expected from them not just propaganda but an objective evaluation of who played what role in this war and why we trusted that they would adopt a balanced approach we have economic and friendly relations with europe we are building together a common european home which has now been bombarded from within by some revanchists with a cold war mentality we did not expect such hypocrisy do you think nato s expansion to the east has come to an end we consider further nato expansion as counterproductive and very very dangerous if nato had not promised georgia membership the situation would not have escalated to aggression saakashvili took this promise as an indulgence until recently we treated his behaviour in the way an elephant would react to a puppy barking but when he started to exercise violence over a small nation like south ossetia which only four years ago suffered the tragedy in beslan we could no longer pretend that nothing is happening if nato likes to pretend that it doesn t matter whose hands it is shaking and refuses to see the blood on these hands then an organization of this kind can no longer be our partner if nato offers georgia a plan of action toward membership we ...