Imaginary apoliticality: relativization of guilt in the neoliberal European strategy of memory
Abstract
The subject of research in this article is the manipulative strategies of forming collective memories of the Second World War in the neoliberal European memory politics. The relevance of this paper is explained by the gradual increase of tolerant motives towards Hitler’s perpetrators, associated with the policy of “repentance” and “guilt”, represented in the optics of postmodern non-pragmatic relativism. The author uses the following research methods: hermeneutic interpretation and deconstruction of the political documentation of the European Union and the historiographical texts of Italian scholars of anti-fascist orientation, structural psychoanalysis of mass consciousness phantasms, semiotic analysis of slogans, myths, rituals and signs in the contemporary Western politics of memory. In the course of the study of collective memory, the author reveals the manipulative mechanisms of devaluing the guilt of Nazism for crimes against humanity committed during World War II, whose results are currently being actively revised in the light of the increasing propaganda of Russophobia. Such concepts as “advertising memory”, “the place of memory”, “the tyranny of repentance”, “traumatic memory”, “resentiment”, “remediation”, and “pre-mediation” are analysed in the article. The author concludes that in the current situation of purposeful discrediting of traditional narratives of historical and cultural memory it is necessary to insist on the restoration of the memory of the Victory. This implies a radical break with the discourse of asserting the relativity of the guilt of Nazism, which is deliberately and unreasonably compared now with the guilt of “communist terror”, in order to achieve a confusion of concepts and historical realities denoted by them.
