Paul Watson: Memories can't survive the passage of time

Paul Watson

Remembrance Day. I remember when we once called it Armistice Day. When we were children in the fifties and sixties in Canada, it was a school holiday and we were expected to go to the Cenotaph and observe two minutes of silence on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month – the time in 1917 that war officially ended in Europe.

Since the Great War, citizens in most Western societies have been asked to adopt the memories of other peoples. Memories of people born before us, and people who died before we were born. Memories of other cultures, of other nations, of other tribes.

It is a relatively new societal obligation and one that complicates even further the already complex demands imposed on individuals by cultural imperatives.

I am not talking history here. History is an important discipline and provides valuable lessons to help prevent the repeating of mistakes.

Take war memorials for example. These are a relatively modern creation, born in the aftermath of the American civil war and taken to excess in the 20th Century. The Romans, Greeks and even Napoleon had memorials to victories but keeping the memory of fallen soldiers in the form of a war memorial is a relatively modern idea.

There were no war memorials for the American Revolution or the Napoleonic Wars. The First World War - "the Great War" - left a proliferation of these memorials in its chaotic wake, simply because the losses were so great and so traumatic.

These memorials when I see them strike me as shells washed up on a beach. They are lifeless remnants of something that is no more. When they were built the idea of keeping the memory of the slain was real and sincere but they were built by people who knew and loved the people they were memorialising.

A generation later these memorials hold no real value and within two generations, the stones and the inscriptions mean very little. Memorials are a vanity and an atomement for the living who have experienced a personal loss. Without the personal connection, the memorials are anachronisms, shadows from the past – seashells on the shore.

Lest we forget. These are just words that many have already forgotten. The fallen from the Great War are no longer remembered. Fewer and fewer remember the losses of World War 2 and even the slain from the Vietnam War are fading from the collective cultural memory as younger people give little thought to such conflicts.

Even the Holocaust is trivialised as one genocidal war follows another from the killing fields of Cambodia to the atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia and the Sudan.

The Holocaust was an obscene tragedy of staggering proportions but it is a memory that is fading from the comprehension of modern society. It is becoming a myth to be read about in the Dairy of Anne Frank, a time so removed from the reality of 2005 that it is becoming increasingly difficult to comprehend.

Holocaust denial is reactionary and stems from ignorance but the reality of the Holocaust is now being unconsciously denied by human minds that have no emotional connection to the events. It is not a wilful denial, it is simply an unconnected denial.

Events become history. History becomes a story. And stories become myths and legends.

Napoleon, the monster of Europe, now advertises brandy. The reasons for past wars have been lost and replaced by revisionist romantic and noble motivations. As human societies evolve, history evolves and changes with it.

Five hundred years from now, Adolph Hitler may well be a romantic figure. As hard to imagine and as distasteful as it sounds, consider that Napoleon was just as hated in Europe by his generation as Hitler was hated by his. But societies' hatred for Napoleon has faded away and Hitler's evil will - unfortunately - fade away with time.

Sadly, Napoleon and Hitler will be remembered long after most of their victims have been forgotten. They will be remembered as distorted images of what they were. They will become something different with each century.

Occasionally I walk through cemeteries and I notice that as the stones age, they lose their meaning. After a time, no one comes to visit them. Disconnected visitors see a name and some dates that bear no relationship to the realty of the person whose bones lie beneath.

In time, the stones are weathered away and what lies beneath is forgotten.