ABSTRACT

The memory of past atrocity lingers like a ghost at the table of democracy. Injustices carried out in the past - from massacres and murder to repression and detention - embitter societies and distort their structures so that the process of establishing and running a democracy carries an extra burden. This volume examines societies at various stages of dealing with the memory of the past, from China, Mongolia, Indonesia and the Baltic States, where bitter memories of death and persecution still intrude, to Finland, where the civil war of 1918 has finally been accepted as a distant national tragedy.

chapter |12 pages

1 Introduction

Remembering, forgetting and historical injustice

chapter |11 pages

2 Victim Or Victimizer

The reconstruction of the Cultural Revolution through personal stories

chapter |22 pages

5 Remembering And Forgetting At ‘Lubang Buaya'

The ‘coup' of 1965 in contemporary Indonesian historical perception and public commemoration

chapter |39 pages

6 Causes And Consequences Of Historical Amnesia

The annexation of the Baltic states in post-Soviet Russian popular history and political memory

chapter |21 pages

7 Coming To Terms With The Past

Memories of displacement and resistance in the Baltic states

chapter |16 pages

8 Transmitted Experience

Individual testimonies and collective memories of the Nanjing Atrocity

chapter |14 pages

9 Thirty Thousand Bullets

Remembering political repression in Mongolia

chapter |12 pages

Remembering The Finnish Civil War

Confronting a harrowing past 1