Notes Prologue 1. From Robert Faurison, a lifelong Holocaust denier from France, to David Duke, the American white supremacist politician and former Ku Klux Klan leader, who contended that no gas chambers or exter- mination camps were actually built during the war on the grounds that killing Jews by that method would have been cost-prohibitive and much too bothersome. “The number of victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp could be about 2,007. The railroad to the camp did not have enough capacity to transfer large numbers of Jews,” said another speaker. The conference included an exhibition of various photos, posters, and other materials meant to contradict the accepted version of events, that the Nazis murdered millions of Jews and other “undesirables” in death camps during the war. Some familiar pho- tos of corpses at the camps bore new captions in Persian arguing that they were victims of typhus, not the German state. This dis- cussion of the Holocaust denial conference is based on “Iran Hosts Holocaust Deniers,” Associated Press, December 12, 2006; Nazila Fathi, “Holocaust Deniers and Skeptics Gather in Iran,” New York Times , December 11, 2006; “Rogues and Fools,” Editorial, New York Times , December 15, 2006; Tammy Bruce, “This Weekend: Iran’s Holocaust Denial Conference.” Blog. : <http://tammybruce. com/2006/12/this_weekend_irans_holocaust_d_html>; “Hatred on Parade,” Editorial, Daily Camera , December 14, 2006. 2. Minow 123. For an extended discussion of various manifestations of justice ensuing from trials, truth commissions, and reparations, see Minow 123–33. 3. In 1995 Queen Elizabeth II became the first British monarch ever to make an official apology. In the presence of the Maori queen, Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu, she signed into New Zealand law a bill in which the Crown apologized to the largest Maori tribe, the Tainui people of Waikato, for sending imperial forces into their land in the 1860s and for the subsequent devastation and injustice. In 1997 Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized for Britain’s role in the Irish potato famine; French bishops apologized for silence over French collaboration during the Holocaust. In 1998 alone, the Japanese prime minister Tomichi Murayama apologized for suffering 192 NOTES inflicted in World War II; East German lawmakers for the Holocaust; Pope John Paul II for violence during the Counter- Reformation and, partially, for the Church’s role during World War II; the Canadian government to its native aboriginal population for past governmen- tal actions that suppressed their languages, cultures, and spiritual practices; and President Jacques Chirac of France to the descendants of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain who was falsely arrested, convicted, and degraded for spying in the 1890s. As well that year, Australia instituted an annual Sorry Day, held on May 26, the anni- versary of the release of the best- selling human rights report Bring Them Home , which documents the government’s long- standing pol- icy of stealing some 100,000 Aboriginal children from their parents to be raised by white families and in orphanages. 4. In 1998 President Clinton awarded Fred Korematsu, a leading figure in the movement to make official amends for the Japanese American internments, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor. More than a decade earlier, the District Court judge Marilyn Patel had not only granted Korematsu’s petition for the rarely used coram nobis (which, 40 years after the fact, wiped from the record his 1942 conviction for refusing to obey the executive relocation order) but also used the occasion to afford a public acknowledgment of the harm done and a public warning against future harms. Korematsu’s case and the larger movement for reparations inspired other US citi- zens to seek redress for group-based injustices. Of these, following the example of the Japanese Americans reparations movement and bearing the most success, Native Hawaiians pressed in the 1990s for redress of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. In 1993 Clinton signed a joint congressional resolution apologizing to Native Hawaiians for American’s role in the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii. 5. See Leslie T. Hatamiya, Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and the Passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1993). Recent years have again witnessed more official apolo- gies: in 2004 the South African president Thabo Mbeki apologized for failing to intervene in Rwanda, and the BBC apologized to the government over Andrew Gillian; in 2005 the Pope apologized for injustices against indigenous people in the South Pacific, and Tony Blair apologized to the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven. Nonetheless, official denial of inhuman violence persists perhaps most notably in the case of Japan’s half- century denial of the imperial army’s rape and abuse of “comfort women” during World War II, with which this prologue concludes. 6. Quoted in Hayner 18. See also Danielle Gordon, “The Verdict: No Harm, No Foul,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 52, no. 1 (1996): 33; Michael D’Antonio, “Atomic Guinea Pigs,” New York Times NOTES 193 Magazine , August 31, 1997: 38–43; Timothy Garton Ash, “Ten Years After,” New York Review of Books , November 18, 1999, 18. 7. Hayner distinguishes these far less common “historical truth commis- sions” as “present- day government- sponsored inquiries into abuses by the state that took place many years earlier (and that ended years earlier). Such an inquiry is not established as part of a political transi- tion . but serves instead to clarify historical truths and pay respect to previously unrecognized victims or their descendants. The events investigated [are] generally not those of widespread political repres- sion, but targeted practices may have affected specific ethnic, racial or other groups. These historical truth commissions document prac- tices that are largely unknown to the majority of the population, and their reports can thus have a powerful impact despite the years that have passed” (17). 8. Vidal devotes his whole book to detailing many examples of such amnesia. Here he rebukes the predictable reaction to his proposal for all drugs to be legalized “and sold at cost to anyone with a doctor’s prescription”: “horrific.” “Brainwashing on the subject begins early, ensuring that a large crop of the coming generation will become drug addicts. Prohibition always has that effect as we should have learned when we prohibited alcohol from 1919 to 1933, but happily, for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing. The period of Prohibition . brought on the greatest breakdown of law and order that we have ever endured—until today, of course.” We forget, Vidal reminds us, that in 1970 England, with a population of 55 million people, “had only 1,800 heroin addicts. With our 200 million people we had nearly a half-million addicts,” because rather than criminalizing the addict, England “required him to registers with a physician who then gives him, at controlled intervals, a pre- scription” (7–8). 9. Bertman devotes his entire first chapter, “Cultural Amnesia,” to a thorough eponymous display, citing over 100 statistics such as these: “More American teen- agers can name the Three Stooges than the three branches of government”; “80 percent of eighth graders were found unable to do seventh-grade math”; “only 48 percent of Americans know that the earth goes around the sun once a year”; “fifty- eight million Americans couldn’t tell east from west” on a map issued by the National Geographic Society. Each fact comes from organizations such as the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Gallup Organization, the New York Times , and the US Congress, who conducted the dozens of national and interna- tional studies, polls, and surveys from 1988 to 1998, with the major- ity carried out between 1992 and 1998. 194 NOTES 10. My initial discussion of this book is from its collectively authored introduction (1–13). As the authors Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelan write separate primary chapters, I later cite the individual author as appropriate. 11. The pilot survey, conducted by Arizona State University graduate students, convinced COHMIA that they “needed to pay attention to how we introduced our topic. History is the word that scholars privi- lege to describe how they approach the past. But in Phoenix history conjured up something done by famous people that others studied in school. Trust was the concept that best captured how people viewed sources of information about the past. what mattered to them in the past could be elicited by the concept of connection ” (6). 12. They cite among other such pundits Lynne Cheney, who, as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), had issued in 1987 a pamphlet called American Memory , which began with the declaration, “A refusal to remember . is a primary characteristic of our nation.” In turn, Cheney is among the exponentially more sources that inform Bertman’s decade-later irrefutable testimony of cultural amnesia. Bertman’s premise deals with the collective loss of core knowledge—i.e., the category of “history” that COHMIA stra- tegically circumvented—but his central concern is “education’s larger purpose,” to teach why geography, history, and literature are “worth knowing,” “the cultural whole to which the parts belong” and “their interconnections” (16). 13. “Many respondents said they fear being manipulated by people who distort the past to meet their own needs—whether commercial greed, political ambition, or cultural prejudice. In their desire to strip away layers of mediation, respondents trust eyewitnesses more than television or movies. They feel unconnected to the past in history classrooms because they don’t recognize themselves in the version of the past presented there” (13).