Anyone who has seen war face to face knows what it smells like and tastes like, how it feels and how much it weighs. It is impossible not to carry it on your back and let it cover you when it gets dark. Whoever knows this reality, who has survived this primitivism, knows that peace will hardly come through the path of truth and justice, but rather through resignation to suffering and the predisposition to oblivion.
In 1932, a few months before Hitler came to power, Einstein asked Freud if there was a psychological cure for man's inclination toward war. Freud responded that there was no cure for war and that only collective wisdom could temper each individual's instinct for destruction.
That wars are not cured implies that we have to move on with what they leave us and it is, precisely, the management of this pain, of the accumulated grievance, destruction and death, which determines our behavior as individuals and, likewise, the of our political and social leaders.
Wars are still alive when they are over. “Neither forget nor forgive” is a popular slogan that forces us to remember, that is, to perpetuate trauma through collective memory. We are told that remembering atrocities will prevent us from repeating them, but this is not the case.
Memory keeps wounds open and bleeding wounds are powerful political weapons.
We preserve Auschwitz to honor the dead and condemn Nazism. It is our obligation because the Shoa occurred in secret and forgetting the extermination camps would mean the definitive triumph of Nazism. It would be inhumane.
The memory of Auschwitz, however, has not prevented other wars in Europe. He did not avoid the Balkans nor has he avoided Ukraine. What's more, the memory of trauma, manipulated by Putin, encouraged the invasion. Didn't he justify it to Russian society by saying that the Nazis ruled Ukraine?
Netanyahu compares Hamas to Nazis. Begin did the same with Fatah, the main party of the PLO, during the first war in Lebanon in 1982. Eleven years later, in the Oslo accords, Rabin signed peace with Fatah and he did so not from oblivion, but from continuation, that is, from the obligation to move forward, distancing Israel from the war.
How did Europe overcome Nazism? With more forgetfulness than justice. What does France remember about the collaboration with the Nazis? What do you remember about the collaborationist Vichy regime and the continuity of Vichy in the IV and V republics?
The Germany of Adenauer, father of the European Union, left the crimes of Nazism unpunished for twenty years. 8,200 German soldiers left Auschwitz alive, but the Frankfurt trials (1963-1965) tried only 22 suspects of the 800 who were investigated. There were six life sentences and twelve sentences, including three to ten years in prison. Two defendants were acquitted and two others died before the trial.
In the Netherlands, half a million people (5% of the population) collaborated with the Nazis. The justice system investigated 300,000 and tried 65,000. The vast majority received sentences of less than ten years in prison. There were 152 death sentences, but only 40 were carried out. The documents from those processes will not be made public until 2025. Those that affect people who are still alive will be kept secret.
The Spanish transition was a pact to forget. The criminals were not tried. On the contrary, they were granted amnesty.
Peace, many times, requires impunity for murderers and politics, when it has to be practical, when it has to build to advance, has to have little memory and a lot of ambivalence.
The historical truth must be preserved, but the past must not be distorted or glorified. Nationalisms, however, do the opposite, they distort and exalt, they fill the landscape with martyrologies, they dope memory until it turns it into a children's story. They abuse defeats because they know that they unite more than victories. They also keep the memory of collective oppression alive because it fuels victimhood. Victims, after all, can justify their crimes based on harm and resentment, and this is how the cycle of violence keeps moving. That is why it is so difficult to live with people and nations that mythologize their victimhood.
Those who have suffered a war want to forget. They want criminals to be tried and convicted, but then they want to forget. They need silence to be able to live through guilt, pain and shame. There is no other way to get ahead.
The day the guns fall silent in Gaza, there will be no peace, no justice or truth as there has not been at the end of so many other wars. This holy trinity, this triangle of light, barely exists. The most likely thing is that the silence that hides the truth and hinders justice will spread over the armistice. It will be a failure similar to that of Bosnia and Ukraine, but one necessary to preserve life. This is the paradox of our evolution as social beings.
Life, as any witness to war knows, makes its way through crimes and the extreme fragility of the breath that sustains it. It is a miracle that we should rejoice in. Carrying paradoxes and not stones is how we move forward.
