On this day in 1920 the United States voted not to join the League of Nations that had emerged out of the ‘never again’ tide of feeling that accompanied the end of the First World War. Although President Woodrow Wilson had been appalled at the scale of human suffering he had seen, the increasingly isolationist tendencies of the US meant that the first organisation with an international peace agenda began its life without one of its potentially most powerful members.
One of the early supporters of the League of Nations was Vera Brittain, whose classic memoir of the Great War, ‘Testament of Youth’, was released as a film on 16 January. Having read a review that found it sentimental I went to see it on Friday with mixed expectations.
The film is primarily, like Brittain’s book, a commemoration of the lives and deaths of the young men whom she had loved and lost rather than an attempt to make a contemporary point. But the act of remembrance itself, can be a subversive and not just a sentimental act. Urged to forget and move on by those around her, Vera determined not only that she would not forget these young men, but that she would not forget what she herself had witnessed and learned as a Voluntary Nurse whilst at a military hospital in étaples.
Confronted there with a hut full of German wounded Vera recognized, with shock, that these enemies were young men too, bleeding, suffering and dying far from home; the memory led to her initial support for the League of Nations, and in the face of the growing militarism of the 1930s, eventually to become one of the 20th century’s leading pacifists.
As this month’s events in France continue to reverberate, and the release of the Guantanamo diaries raises inconvenient moral questions about western values, what we do with our memories is a key question. ‘Forgive and forget’ is often not realistic, ignores the claims of justice, and is simply not safe, whilst the memory driven cycle of defending our own ‘high ground’ runs the risk of causing more and more damage and of failing to see how our attitudes and actions – whoever we are - also need scrutiny.
An alternative way to remember is offered by Miroslav Volf, a Croat theologian, writing out of the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. What he offers is a twofold way of remembering – a remembrance of harm done to us and ours that honours real anxiety and protects the vulnerable, but a remembrance which also honours the humanity of our enemies – a remembrance that restrains our desire for vengeance, opens up space for the scrutiny of our own actions, and constrains us to work for the reconciliation of all peoples – even if that day is beyond our sight.
The League of Nations failed for lots of reasons, and was succeeded by a variety of international institutions, but it did hold out a vision of common humanity in the years after the Great War. Who, or what, now, amidst ricocheting fears and outrages, might we allow, not to help us forget, nor even just to remember, but to remember well?