The Wrath and Burden of History

Why is the US enraged? The ‘insurrection’ at Capitol Hill on 6 January 2021 is undoubtedly a trigger and legitimately so. But is that the lone cause that has forced eminent Republican senators to break ties with President Trump or has led Speaker Nancy Pelosi announce that unless the President immediately resigns, they would initiate impeachment against him?[i] Is it a call of conscience or an imminent national emergency? One cannot discount possibilities that in the near future Trump or his staunch Republican supporters might turn the tables on the Democrats accusing them of carrying out a witch-hunt. Or they might try to defend their unlawful entry into the Capitol as an act ‘necessary’ to save the nation from the outcome of a ‘rigged’ election mandate.

Such contrary discourses could form alternate historical trajectories that the Republicans might wish to appropriate to counter the legitimate claims of Biden and Harris to represent the US nation. On retrospect, spinning of contrary historical discourses might seem essential to save the Republican legacy. However will such possibilities of a future backlash from the Republican quarters deter the Democrats from pushing for impeachment at this hour—a mission they are fighting tooth and nail for? What is the cause of this enragement, the blinding wrath that refuses to subside even after a week from the fateful day? I would argue that it is to protect the Memory of the Nation that the impeachment is deemed necessary— to protect the memory of the present generation and to protect the faith that this generation and the subsequent ones can instill in the governance of US, in the nation itself, in its ideals, what the nation stands for in the eyes of its people and what it should stand for in the eyes of its future-people.

Urge to protect the memory also implies having a definite idea of what the nation should embody, what its promise should be to its people, with no provision or acknowledgment for any alternate idea/discourse of nationhood or patriotism. It is also perhaps time to recognize and talk about the elephant in the room. Who is Trump at the end of the day? Or those loyal supporters of his who ransacked the Speaker’s room and brandished a broken plaque from her room’s entrance as a spoil of victory? While the entire world and Democrats might attack, denounce and disparage him in every little way possible, and perhaps rightly so, isn’t it a very modernist and totalitarian way of looking at the situation or the calamity that unfolded in US when he took over as President and henceforth created legacies that led to memories that are terribly unsavoury yet unfortunately can’t be wished away?

It also raises uncomfortable questions as to whether in this 21^st century we can still found our arguments and course of actions on an idea of the Other that is fixed, immobile and constant and build our Selves intra-actionally with it.  When the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo in Paris was attacked (incidentally also in the month of January, January 7,2015) and cartoonists murdered on a religious vendetta, the strange silent cloak wrapped around by most of the media houses nationally and internationally, save perhaps in France( the country of attack) or England, did not translate into not taking a stand. The impact by default was one of alienating the ‘Other’—in that instance the arsonists and murders. But is anything outside us at all? Do the Self and the Other constitute fixed, non-flexible entities with non-breachable contours and boundaries? Or do they keep changing positions and truth claims thus incessantly dissolving and reifying the dominance-subjugation paradigm? Consequently, it is pertinent to ponder whether by denouncing Trump, or by decreeing only certain forms of sanitized, idealized memories for us or for the successive generations, we are actually shelving, yet again, crude, unpalatable parts of us—the Self, that so acutely need to be brought out in the broad daylight, to cut through the cobwebs of insanity and disquiet.

Preference of one form of memory over the other on grounds of being ‘ideal’, sanitized and in perfect sync with the quotidian life also hints at a controversial making of history or its interpretation as a closed discipline, functional to prioritize only a specific form of memory or legacy and preserve the same for the subsequent generations. Reality is uneven and unpredictable and so is Life. If the attack on the Capitol was uncouth and uncalled for—as much by the unsuspecting guards strolling outside like every other day of their work week as by the billions of viewers/readers who woke up to headlines of ‘Democracy being under Attack’, so was humanity and human lives when the Covid Pandemic sprang out of nowhere.  That the democrats are out with their knives against Trump and against all who support him is understandable. They are determined to teach Trump and all his sympathizers a lesson of history by showing them what actually US stands for, what her Constitution or Independence represents, their understanding of what US stands for—its history and legacy to return to its pristine idealized for, for sanity to return.

But I feel it is also time for academicians to explore and ponder what paves the path for Trumps to arise, what makes certain memories score over others and who decides what and what not to preserve for future-people and also how does history counter unpredictability or its varied monster heads.  This brings me to the controversial question of archivization of memory and my belief that such acts of archiving need to be routinely reassessed, to avoid the dominance of one memory, a particular discourse or one genre of thought over the rest. We, as practitioners of this discipline need to clean our closets regularly, lest there are any remaining skeletons– of thought or favouritism.

Somdatta Chakraborty

Senior Adjunct Researcher, Asia in Global Affairs

Research Project Coordinator, ICSSR Major Project 2020-2022

[i] As I finalize this article for submission, news comes that Donald Trump had indeed earned the unenviable distinction of being the only US President to be impeached twice.