Like Spain, Does the United States Need a Historical Memory Law to Account for (and Prevent) Atrocities?

In 2004, Spanish President Jose Luis Zapatero proposed The Historical Memory Law that was passed by the Congress of Deputies three years later. The law formally condemned General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, recognized the victims on both sides of the Civil War, and provided certain reparations for the victims and their families. Executions under Franco’s brutal reign were common, as was torture and rape and the annihilation of Republican strongholds. Some 200,000 civilians were killed and murdered in what has been termed the “Spanish Holocaust.” One of the most important provisions of the new law allocated federal funds for the mapping of mass graves and exhumation and identification of the victims. (1)

Although they often differ sharply on the numbers, scholars without exception now portray the European colonization of the Americas as a monumental, perhaps unprecedented, demographic catastrophe for the continents’ Indigenous peoples. Liberal estimates put the number at 112,000,000, whereas more conservative ones exceed 50,000,000. There also is agreement that even though infectious disease killed many Indigenous peoples, so did atrocities like massacres and unrestricted warfare against civilians and total war. In terms of the degree to which its ferocity was sustained over time not by one but by several participating groups, the American Indian holocaust was and remains unparalleled.

For centuries, US atrocities and war crimes were committed against African Americans, Latinos, Asians, immigrants, and other non-whites. Along with the institution of slavery that killed many Blacks, other acts of state-sponsored terrorism, like rape and medical experimentation, were designed to seize land and resources and suppress voting rights, religion, education, economic advancement, freedom of the press, and/or labor rights. Misnamed as “battles” or “race riots,” they were used to maintain white nationalism and supremacy. The perpetrators of these criminal actions are moreover associated with Adolf Hitler’s SS, by defining the enemy in purely racial terms and understanding war in language of sheer annihilation of the racial enemy. (2)

The violations of the laws and customs of war as found in the Hague Conventions have extended far beyond the borders of the US. Starting with the Philippine-American War until now, US forces have committed mass rape, summary executions of civilians and captured enemy combatants, torture during imprisonment and during interrogations, and acts of terror against civilians and non-combatants. (3) In several cases, sustained and widespread massacres and eco-genocide have been employed during military occupations that included the mass murder of women and children (No Gun Ri and My Lai are just two examples.) Some claim the US most likely has been directly/indirectly responsible for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people since WWII.

Psychologists agree that a proper collective memory is essential in developing a holistic and authentic national identity and purpose. They also know that “how” a nation remembers is as important as “what” it remembers, specifically with the well-being and effective functioning of the nation in various ways. Just as dishonest and repressed memories can lead to incoherence and dysfunction at home and abroad, with little regard for national awareness, a transparent and honest reckoning of the past enables a nation to function more properly. It is a truism that, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Too much forgetting puts a nation at risk, just as too much remembering of a distorted and falsified past can.

Spain’s Historical Memory Law is still controversial, which is to be expected. But it is a controversy (Spanish Holocaust) that needed to be remembered and confronted, so that the hard work of justice, forgiveness, and healing could begin. As for the US, a memory law regarding the American Indian Holocaust and Black, Minority, and Foreign Wars, would help in recovering traumatic situations and in developing a new national identity, awareness, and purpose that is not only functional but related to the psychological well-being and the occurrence of psychopathology. Consequently, there is another truism: To be wholly without memory is to be without a world.

(1)   See here.
(2)   Stone, Dan. The Historiography of Genocide. New York, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010., p. 274.
(3)   See here.