Memorializing war crimes and how we remember to forget

John Hagan and Joachim J. Savelsberg

Chapter 5 in Research Handbook on Violent Crime and Society, 2025, pp 63-83 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: American memories of the Vietnam War are distorted. Instead of deterring engagement in war, these memories recall successful battles in a triumphal schema that rewrites history while encouraging subsequent wars and war crimes as a continuation of politics by other means. We place Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz’s (1991) classical contribution on the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial [VVM] at center stage, while further connecting declassified information about the Vietnam War with recent advances in collective memory research on the social contagion of retrieval-induced forgetting [RIF]. The logic and findings about this forgetfulness challenge Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz’ arguments about effects of the VVM design. Over time, entrepreneurs of memory were able to alter the memorial’s “political neutrality.” In so doing, they created a narrative of the war that is distinctly more triumphant than the original memory carved in stone. The Memorial turns out to be path dependent on redefinitions of the war previously achieved by actors such as President Richard Nixon and his “peace with honor” doctrine. This doctrine ignored the more than one million Vietnamese casualties of the war. The article further considers connections between the Memorial’s intended political neutrality on the one hand and a military justice process on the other hand that institutionally decoupled front-line actors from criminal legal responsibility for their war crimes, thereby exculpating persons of higher military and political ranks and preserving the reputation of the military and the presumed sacredness of the nation. Continuing involvement in crimes against humanity and war crimes more generally are one consequence.

Keywords: War Crimes; Vietnam War; Collective Memory; Politics Of Forgetting; Vietnam Veterans Memorial; Military Justice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035317851
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