Abstract
When Philip Gourevitch walked among the dead Tutsis massacred by the Hutus at Nyarubuye in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, he saw, one year after the killings, that the dead were still there, left unburied as a memorial to what had happened. He noted that the corpses were strangely beautiful: “The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquility of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there—these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place.”1 After stepping accidentally on a skull, hearing its crunch and feeling its vibration, Gourevitch was unsure of his response, worrying that he, like Leontius in Book IV of Plato’s Republic, was cursed for having his fill “of the lovely spectacle.” He felt unreal. Gourevitch confessed that the dead were to him omnipresent but only as “absences” and “only of interest as evidence” in the impending trials of their killers.2
We have been entrusted with an awesome legacy, and we are being judged by invisible friends, brothers, teachers, parents and they are all dead. And they all had but one wish, to be remembered.
Elie Wiesel, at the Opening Session of the United States
Holocaust Memorial Commission, 15 February 1979
I do not know / if you can still / make something of me / If you have the courage to try …
Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After
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Notes
Michael S. Roth and Charles G. Salas, eds, Disturbing Remains: Memory’ History’ and Crisis in the Twentieth Century (Los Angeles, CA: The Getty Research Institute, 2001), pp. 63–73.
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Judy Ledgerwood, “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative,” in David E. Lovey and William H. Beezley, eds, Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory: The Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 2002), pp. 103–22.
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Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 166.
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© 2005 Paul C. Santilli
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Santilli, P.C. (2005). Philosophy’s Obligation to the Human Being in the Aftermath of Genocide. In: Roth, J.K. (eds) Genocide and Human Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554832_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554832_18
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