Some of apartheid’s injustices are “unforgivable”, says David Rieff. It’s a startling statement from the man who has just written a book called In Praise of Forgetting.“Personally, I have always been very sceptical about the forgiveness part of the TRC [Truth & Reconciliation Commission],” says Rieff, a US policy analyst and former war correspondent, whose latest book is a plea for peace. “People were being asked to forgive, quite literally, the unforgivable ... You read the testimonies and you think: ‘How can you forgive that?’ What you can do, eventually, is move on from it.”It is that moving on — what in pop psychology is termed “letting go”, and what German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called “active forgetting” — that Rieff argues is crucial for peace. The world, he says, would be a better place if people chose to forget a few things.It is not history that is in Rieff’s sights, it is political memory. Where history is an empirical, academic exercise, political memory is the ...
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