Just and Unjust Memory? The Moral Obligation to Remember All Victims of Wars and Totalitarian Regimes

ABSTRACT

The main purpose of this article is to analyze the philosophical problem of just and unjust memory. There is a general consensus about commemorating fallen soldiers and killed civilians. But, unfortunately, our human memory of such victims is often incomplete. Some victims are remembered, others are not – maybe very few even want to remember the latter. It turns out that in our world, not only wars may be just or unjust, but also the memory of their victims. In this context, a serious problem is the unequal memory of crimes perpetrated by Nazism and Communism in the last century, denying several dozen million victims of the latter totalitarian system their due place in the collective awareness of mankind. Therefore, one of the most important aspects of the ethical analysis of wars and totalitarian regimes should be the moral obligation to commemorate all victims in a just way.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• history
• genocide
• gulag
• communism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Andrzej Kobyliński is a Polish philosopher. In 1998 he earned a doctorate in philosophy from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Since 1999 he has been lecturing at the Faculty of Christian Philosophy at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw. He is currently an associate professor at this University and the head of its Department of Ethics. His books and articles have been published in English, Polish, Italian and German. His academic and research work include the following areas of interest: philosophical interpretation of modernity, nihilism, post-metaphysical ethics, philosophy of religion, pentecostalization of Christianity, bioethics and the sexual abuse of minors.

Notes

1 Laogai labour camps (China’s Gulag) is a vast system of camps, detention centres, reeducation-through-labour institutions, and prison factories throughout China. Over five decades about 50 million Chinese have been through the Laogai. The system was set up by the Communists in the early 1950s, primarily to deal with the millions of real and suspected opponents of China’s newly established regime. It had two main objectives. One was identical to that of the Soviet Gulag: the use of coerced labour for ambitious state projects for which ordinary workers could never have been found. But the second objective, often cited by the Communist authorities as more crucial than the first, was actually far more sinister. It was not enough, the Chinese Communists believed, for a prisoner to admit their guilt. They had to be morally and spiritually broken down through “thought reform” to the point where they actually felt guilty for the crimes attributed to them by the regime. See Fruge (1998).