World Champions of Forgetting

Until recently, before President Trump began ‘cleansing’ federal websites (first at the Veterans’ Administration and more recently at the National Park Service) of references to racial injustice, the shortcomings of American memory culture seemed apparent. Despite Bryan Stevenson’s impressive ‘Lynching Memorial’ in Montgomery, Alabama, and the still relatively new Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, DC, America as a whole had not really succeeded in weaving a broad social fabric of historical reckoning on par with the density and substance of German Erinnerungskultur. Nevertheless, these initiatives appeared to constitute a meaningful uptick, and similar events in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 seemed to be moving in the right direction. 

But now, in light of Israel's relentless pummelling of Gaza, I wonder if our view of US memory culture, such as it is, needs revising yet again. Failing to commemorate racial injustice adequately is only the obvious failure. The other seems not even up for discussion. The memory of the US military’s killing of civilians and non-combatants is something we’d rather not even think about, let alone speak of. There is a link, I propose, between our suppression of the latter and our response to the former.

Let’s begin with the spectacular security breach by the Trump administration of March 2025. When the White House insisted that nothing classified had been revealed about its plan to strike Houthis in Yemen, Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who was included in that chat, proved them wrong by publishing the exchange.¹ Heather Cox Richardson subsequently reported that “White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller apparently made the decision to strike based on his interpretation of what President Donald Trump wanted. In violation of the Presidential Records Act, the app was set to delete the messages. There was apparently no larger strategy or diplomatic plan other than to strike, and participants greeted news of the collapse of an apartment building into which a Houthi leader had allegedly walked with emojis of fists, fire, and a U.S. flag.”²

There is so much to be upset about in this one incident – the carelessness, the puerile macho emojis, the possibly unconstitutional abuse of power, the betrayal of informants, sources, and allies, etc. – that we can easily overlook the content of the ‘strike’ itself. Who else was in the apartment building that our ‘manly’ leaders were so eager to bomb? How many civilians, and non-combatants? How many women and children?

Until the actual bombing occurred, Goldberg seriously considered that the entire exchange was a hoax, possibly meant to entrap him. But then news of the actual attacks reached him, and he realised it was all true. Goldberg reports that “the after-action discussion included assessments of damage done, including the likely death of a specific individual. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.” The congratulations pour in, including emojis of bulging biceps, the American flag (always the flag), and praying hands.

But they aren’t praying for the civilian ‘collateral damage’, of that I can assure you. This is all self-congratulatory banter about hitting the right target. Yet even Goldberg and Richardson, perhaps too overwhelmed with the baffling array of violations implicit in this single security breach, find no time to mention all those ‘other’ people – whose actual numbers have not been verified. Will they ever be? Do we care?

When she returns to the topic several weeks later, Richardson focuses in some detail on what the security breach cost in terms of matériel: “a $60 million F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet.” She does later mention “one [American] sailor [who] suffered minor injuries”, but wastes not a word on the Houthi civilians.³

By this deliberate act of cultural amnesia, including with respect even to America’s last ‘good war’ (World War II), US memory culture promotes a heroic mode of thinking in which military excess and overreach – in some cases alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity – are instantly justified by their service to a ‘greater good’ – and then basta. No sorrow, no pricklings of conscience, no awareness of the sheer contingency that put these lives in the line of fire rather than yours or mine.

Especially when one can plausibly see the enemy as a perpetrator of genocide, as Nazi Germany indisputably was, discrete episodes of indiscriminate killing can in the short term be legitimised, and in the long term … simply forgotten. Memory culture is forgetting culture, made in the USA. And this pattern of suppression, I argue, informs contemporary approaches to war and genocide. When we suppress the memory of our own spectacular violence, we are more likely to approve it in others. Or at least to look away.

To see how this plays out today, we only need to step back and take account of a range of reactions to the Israel-Gaza war.

In an elegantly argued, full-page essay in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Israeli-American philosopher Omri Boehm explains how the very universal humanism that was conjured after World War II to prohibit genocide could be twisted to justify it.⁴ Actually, the ‘could’ part was a prescient warning delivered by none other than the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who cautioned well before the UN Declaration of Human Rights that the concept of universal human dignity – ‘Menschheit’ itself – could readily be distorted to reduce one’s enemy to the category of the subhuman. Boehm shows how right Schmitt was. 

For that is exactly how it has played out. In asserting that Israel’s Zionist founding constitutes ipso facto a veritable genocide, leftist defenders of Hamas, Boehm argues, end up justifying indiscriminate murder of Israelis: for if the colonial act is itself ‘wesensmäßig genozidal’ (essentially genocidal), then one can’t restrict Hamas’s response by requiring them to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, between military and civilians. That just wouldn’t be ‘fair’. That the reverse holds true as well hardly requires demonstration, insofar as senior leaders in the IDF and the Netanyahu government have on occasion explicitly sought to legitimise the wholesale destruction of Gaza, as Boehm meticulously documents. In both cases, de facto indiscriminate targeting of both combatants and non-combatants is approved. We are, in other words, back to the days prior to the UN Declaration. Anything can be justified as long as your enemy is deemed ‘barbaric’.⁵

How did we get here? One answer is simply that we were always and intrinsically thus, that we in fact never lived up to the ideals of the UN Declaration. We are, in other words, where we’ve always been. There is surely some truth in this.

But not the whole of it. We are also products of the cultural memories we have ritualised and of those we have suppressed. The memory of the Holocaust, it is often asserted, got us to the unprecedented assertion of universal human rights. Indeed, the Shoah has become, as intellectual historian Alec Ryrie argues in Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2022), the very touchstone of morality in the modern world, replacing the primacy of traditional religion.

Yet this is notably only half the story. For the ‘never again’ implicit in the UN Declaration proscribes not only the repetition of genocide, but also some of the very practices of warfare deployed to ensure it is not repeated. However good it might feel as a slogan on a poster, ‘by any means necessary’ is expressly forbidden. That is the harder lesson, apparently, especially for those who justify utterly foreseeable acts of ‘collateral damage’ – the pre-emptively planned and accepted murder of civilians and non-combatants for a ‘greater good’. 

In America this is an excruciatingly difficult conversation to have and one that is typically either conducted by relatively few experts or simply avoided by the many. The former will understandably ask what is new here and move on; the latter have long since done so.

Of course, none of this is to say that the Allied bombing of civilians and non-combatants during World War II is in any way tantamount to the Holocaust. Though that is exactly what post-war Germans seemed to think. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s famous Group Experiment of 1957 – a mass interview of 1,800 Germans from diverse backgrounds inquiring into German guilt – “it was the bombing of German civilians, which most participants had experienced directly, that came up most often.” And the one, Susan Neiman (2019)⁶ sharply observes, conveniently served to cancel out the other: “Anyone guilty of that [civilian bombing]”, the participants concluded, “has no right to accuse others of war crimes.” (pp. 50–51; cf. p. 78) Twisting memory in this manner is transparently self-serving. Yet the lesson cannot be to ban the topic entirely: German abuse of memory culture in the 1950s does not absolve us Americans of the duty to reflect on our prodigious use and abuse of military power over decades.

For we all know there were indisputably extravagant instances of ‘overkill’. One only has to mention Dresden and Hamburg, though residents of numerous other sites of bombing in Germany will want to enter the names of their towns and cities in that list as well.

And please don’t feel obliged to direct me to the expert commission that was convened to study the Allied bombing of Dresden, and the some 130 smaller armaments plants that were turned up to justify it. I’ve read it, even written a bit on it.⁷ This may have interested some Germans – though frankly I doubt it was very many – but I can guarantee you that this did not make a dent in the American popular psyche. 

“The German war generation paid quite a lot”, Neiman observes: “First and foremost, seven million lives [...], more than a tenth of the total German population, and hardly a family was spared. At least a million of the dead were civilians, though no one knows the exact number killed in the Allied air raids begun in retaliation for London and Coventry. [...] Another number: one-quarter of German territory was permanently surrendered.” Which as we know unleashed yet another wave of suffering as some 12 million ‘expellees’ fled the Eastern territories and attempted to start life anew among those who were already bombed out, starving and doing their best to survive “the winter of ‘46, [...] the coldest in living memory.” To help Americans grasp the misery, Neiman (2019)⁸ resorts to this counterfactual, which is omitted from the German edition of her book: “For comparison, imagine that China conquered the West Coast of the United States and everyone west of Wyoming went east to seek shelter.” (pp. 41–42)

It is a futile, if well-intentioned comparison. For Americans have not, on the whole, taken stock of ‘German as victims’ – let alone responsibility for any American role in this. In the wake of W. G. Sebald, Jörg Friedrich and others, Germans have come in the last quarter century to understand their World-War-II victimhood in a manner that does not necessarily compete with or cancel out responsibility for the Holocaust. To the extent that this has taken root in German public discourse generally speaking (with exceptions on the right), it is a major achievement. But please do not assume that there exists any counterpart to this in the United States. Nor do I see any broad-based interest in moving in this direction.

Even the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are distant echoes for us, often reduced to ‘debates’ in high-school American history classes: was it actually a war crime (more likely phrased as ‘military excess’), or was it necessary to end the war and save thousands of lives (including grandpa’s)? Guess how that plays out. The Smithsonian exhibit on the Enola Gay – the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb – was quickly withdrawn in 1995 because veterans’ groups objected that there was too great a focus on the victims. Reflecting on the controversy that compelled his resignation, Martin O. Harwit, Director of the National Air and Space Museum, chalked it up to American culture wars in which “those who in any way questioned the bomb's use were [deemed] […]  the enemies of America.”

Outside graduate seminar rooms, within the broader US public sphere, a serious reflection on the widespread, conscious killing of non-combatants – whether during World War II, or in Vietnam, Iraq, or elsewhere – is typically shut down before it gets off the ground: it was necessary, don’t you see; or at least those doing the killing sincerely thought so at the time. Or it was a matter of limited technology (‘dumb bombs’ during World War II); or it was an accident (misfired weapons, wrong target, etc.). The list goes on, and we can generously grant that a great deal of this may be true or at least sincerely believed. But the point of all this – and my point here – is that it is meant to stop the conversation, not to foster it. 

If you mention the name ‘Lieutenant Calley’ , most Americans would probably want to thank him for his service or let him board the airplane first. Few, I submit, would be able to associate him with the My Lai massacre of 1968, for which he received a life sentence for the premeditated murder of 22 civilians. That’s just not the kind of warfare we are willing to remember. And when we remember – if we remember – the war’s death toll, the number typically given is the circa 58,000 US military deaths. Not the two to three million Vietnamese lives – including hundreds of thousands of civilians – and not those killed in the illegal US bombings of Laos and Cambodia.

Indeed, few things can illustrate the paucities of American ‘memory culture’ like the Vietnam War. For Germany it was an unambiguous genocide, perpetrated by the USA. When he was Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer went on record saying so, confirming a widespread German conviction going back to the student movement. So much, by the way, for an Erinnerungskultur that forbids even the implicit comparison to other genocides. Peter Schneider once told me that the student movement’s harsh denunciation of the American war in Vietnam had both genuine and ‘unburdening’ (‘entlastende’) dimensions. It was somehow good to know that one’s parents weren’t the only genocidaires. 

But most Americans would be shocked by this accusation, believing that it was a noble if lost cause (stopping the spread of world communism) and that we were tragically misled into an unwinnable war. Our Vietnam memorial in Washington, DC – the one that has garnered such international acclaim and emulation for its innovative design – is to ourselves.

The real conversation terminator when it comes to military ‘excesses’ is to let you know that you have no business asking the question in the first place. It was war, little tyke, conducted by real men. You weren’t there. Go play with your crayons.

I am not disputing the value of serious, detailed historical investigations into specific military operations. As a teacher, how could I? But many of these have been conducted already, and live on in a parallel universe of thick unread tomes in dusty library stacks, destined never to see the light of day. Or – in an effort to increase accessibility – they have been deposited in digital archives that are now – even as I write this – being steadily erased by Trump loyalists.  

What is missing in all this, from the perspective of broader cultural memory – as Peace Studies scholars the world over already know – are meaningful opportunities for mourning those deemed to be the fair ‘cost’ of a just war (And what an obscenity that word is here.) The point is not to tally it all up once more and erase the victims yet again from our conscience because, after all, it was so very necessary. Even – or especially – when we conclude that the ends were justified, we should ask ourselves: where is the concomitant space for authentic grief, regret or remorse? Where the cultural rituals that evoke and promote ambivalence and introspection, the opportunities to ache, weep, and lament these destroyed lives? When have we made it our business – where have we made it a cultural priority – to empathise with the civilian and non-combatant victims of our morally righteous causes? 

This used to be the provenance of religion. Yet in Germany, institutional religion is in massive retreat. “With each passing year we see enormous reductions in church membership”, observes Jürgen Kaube (2025; my translation)⁹ recently, “The churches are in many places almost empty.” (p.1) And in the USA, where this is less the case, Evangelical Protestantism has become so colonised by the MAGA right that it is almost unrecognisable to many Christians. From these quarters, at any rate, we can expect only more of the same: white "Christian" nationalism and xenophobia, rather than nuanced empathy with erstwhile civilian enemies. 

On 12 May 2025, the New York Times reported that US operations against the Houthis, of which the above mentioned ‘strike’ was just one part, had come to an end. Measured against its stated goal to dissuade Houthis from targeting Israel, the mission clearly failed. Perhaps predictably, Trump proclaimed it a victory, despite the fact that the ‘gain’ was essentially the status quo ante: the agreement not to target US ships. But ‘Yemen defeats America’ is what we read in the social media posts of the Houthis. 

In tallying up the ‘costs’ of the operation, even the August New York Times focuses almost exclusively on munitions: “But the cost of the operation was staggering. The Pentagon had deployed two aircraft carriers, additional B-2 bombers and fighter jets, as well as Patriot and THAAD air defenses, to the Middle East, officials acknowledged privately. By the end of the first 30 days of the campaign, the cost had exceeded $1 billion, the officials said.”¹⁰ Only after paragraphs of such analysis do we encounter this single line: “[…] dozens of people were killed in a U.S. attack that hit a migrant facility controlled by the Houthis, according to the group and aid officials.” But it merits no further reflection or explanation: we can’t even get a clear number of the migrants, let alone a sense of their circumstances.

When we forget all the violence we have perpetrated in the name of the greater good, as the American forgetting-culture makes it so effortless to do, it is much easier to make the same mistake again, to justify ‘collateral damage’ of Gazans, Israelis, or whoever the enemy is in the next righteous cause. Our own pervasive culture of forgetting invisibly undergirds the extremism we are witnessing today, in the Middle East and elsewhere, and blinds us to our own complicity.

Can we really remember our own crimes – broadly, as a culture, and not just within narrow academic silos – against civilians and non-combatants? Is this not utterly utopian? Yet to do so would be finally to live up to the full charge of the UN’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and – as much as progressive Germans hate to admit it – to follow in the footsteps of the best of Germany’s Erinnerungskultur.

With a hint of envy, my German friends used to ask me about Americans' ‘relaxed’ and ‘easy’ relationship to patriotism. They’ve stopped asking me. I think they’ve figured out that it comes at the cost of repressing any hint of national self-critique. Making America great again means, among other things, silencing our violent past. And in that, America truly is exceptional.