Quotes from Susan Neiman

What is certain: it's good that those deeds have been marked and preserved. Imagine a world where the greatest crimes ever committed were consigned to dust. Where nothing acknowledged racist terror of any kind—the Holocaust, the genocides, the lynchings were left without a trace. Whatever helps us escape oblivion is welcome.

Forget the past and move on isn't even helpful in the realms of individual psychology; as political advice, it is worthless. When pasts fester, they become open wounds.

But if I had to set priorities, I'd prefer that political commitments—expressed in laws preventing expressions of racism, punishing racist crime, and roundly condemning it from the highest levels of government to the teachings in elementary schools—come first.

I doubt that anyone in town belongs to the Klan, or even its more respectable cousin, the White Citizens' Council. They'd simply prefer to leave the past unexamined, cover it with honeysuckle, and go back to their bourbon. It's the kind of response that ensures no one will reflect on the ways that past seeps into present.

The monuments were not innocuous shrines to history; they were provocative assertions of white supremacy at moments when its defenders felt under threat. Knowing when they were built is part of knowing why they were built.

Nietzsche turned the question into a cornerstone of his philosophy. His Twilight of the Idols states: 'In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgment on life: it is Worthless Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Everywhere and always their mouths have uttered the same sound – a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life' (p. 29).

You can learn that no country, no culture, no religion is immune to falling into the abyss into which we fell. And once it begins, there will always be people who shut down their consciences and side with the strongman. Knowing that, we need to develop a kind of preventative uncertainty.

Descendants of Confederate soldiers have self-serving reasons for denying that their ancestors fought and fell in service to a criminal enterprise.

It's natural to defend the honor of your forebears, if only with arguments so facile that a well-educated child could see through them. He fought for states' rights. States' rights to do what?

What can other countries learn from the German experience? "To look at your own country as if it were a foreign one. It's crucial to have a broken relationship to your past, to be ready to see your own history with shame and horror.

If you invite representative voices, shouldn't you listen to them, even when their claims are at odds with what you want to believe? West German beliefs about East Germany are so tenacious that the subjects of concern went unheard. In America, when white people tell black people how to feel about their own history, it's called whitesplaining. There isn't a word for it in German.