Talk:What Is a Nation?

Benedict Anderson's argument
I do believe Benedict is misreading what Renan meant by forgetting and knowing about a historical event, the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre wasn't just a massacre, it was a clear division between the members of the french nation, religion was a factor strong enough to send french people to assassinate their own neighbors. Years later, french people forgot what truly drove all these people to go outside and hunt their religious enemies - people progressively learned to tone down the religiously-motivated violence, until religion became more of a personal thing (first a social community, then later a family element, then much later something personal for each individual).

So while they learned in schools that in 1572 a massacre happened and it was about religion, they forgot how it truly divided communities and families, they commonly accepted to forget that Mr X went outside and dragged Mr Y in the street and sliced open his belly because Mr X was afraid of a certain group of people gaining influence, that Mr A burned down Ms B's house because he was frustrated with the way his social class was treated, but also that the perpetrators (X, A, etc) later accessed to positions of power or were isolated from the rest of society. All these details, revealing the motivations and emotions before, during and after these events are blurred away - so only historical "facts" are kept and taught in schools.

It is clearly visible in countries living traumatic events such as civil wars and crimes against humanity : the failure to "forget" (sometime because of the crimes being too horrible) demolish the idea of a nation. For example with the Balkans, unable to form a large nation because every community has a significant amount of members not forgetting and wanting revenge, leads to several smaller nations.

Meanwhile, forgetting allows existing nations to continue and move on. For example, France after WWII, forgetting the details and true motives of the collaboration of many of its citizens in the Holocaust ; Germany, forgetting the details of the totalitarian Third Reich and its horrible crimes to allow the unification of Germany, after the fall of the USSR ; all the South American countries "forgetting" about the criminals during the Years of Lead of the Cold War ; and so on. Many victims and activists fought hard to not be forgotten, built museums, wrote books and held conferences/marches, but in all these cases the state and a majority of its citizens participated in a Selective amnesia to preserve/rebuild the nation.

A very good example would be the Chilean national plebiscite, 1988, where the "No" campaign, after years of activists informing the population about the horrible crimes and torture of the Pinochet regime, chose to go for a much more positive approach in the last few months leading to that vote: "La alegría ya viene" ("the joy is coming"). The criticism of the regime, exposing the pain and suffering, took a back seat because the nation wanted to forget about these years first and foremost.

A fitting analogy would be a suicide in a family : 30 years later, people have not forgotten the facts, and the new members of the family are taught about it (when they're old enough). But if the family wants to renew the feeling of belonging to the "community", they have to let go all the blaming, all the reproaches, all the memories that led to the suicide of that member of the family. If they don't do that, family reunion are sparse and difficult to live for everyone: the weight and the sadness of the suicide is still there.

I think that's what Renan meant when he mentioned "forgetting", similar to the way he made the distinction between the emotions and motives of a group forming a nation, versus the "facts" based approach relying on criteria such as the race, language, ethnic origin. People are keen to forget on negative emotions to only keep a biased, positive emotional version of their common history - the result is either historical revisionism/denial, or detached factual history.

My post here is meant to provide some analysis elements to readers, to better (in my opinion) understand Renan's work and Benedict Anderson's criticism. If someone can add some of it in the article, or find published papers on the matter, my post would have played its role in building a better Wikipedia :)

See also: Selective omission 164.177.113.225 (talk) 13:12, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

You're on the right track in that the trouble with Anderson's criticism is that is in large part misses the point of what Renan is driving at. "Forgetting" is not just a matter of completely putting a historical event out of the national mind, but forgetting aspects of the event so it better suits the nation's contemporary understanding of itself. 138.51.126.41 (talk) 19:55, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Smart phone
Smart phone Brightness makukule (talk) 00:58, 10 May 2018 (UTC)