1st Edition

Historical Injustice and Democratic Transition in Eastern Asia and Northern Europe Ghosts at the Table of Democracy

Edited By Kenneth Christie, Robert Cribb Copyright 2002
    224 Pages
    by Routledge

    224 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    Introduction: Remembering, Forgetting and Historical Injustice Robert Cribb and Kenneth Christie Victim or Victimizer: the Reconstruction of the Cultural Revolution through Personal Stories Jin Qiu The Aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in Inner Mongolia Wu Di Sing Wis Ya Wis: What is Past is Past? Forgetting what it is to remember the Indonesian killings of 1965-66 Robert Goodfellow Remembering and Forgetting at 'Lubang Buaya': the 'Coup' of 1965 in Contemporary Indonesian Historical Perception and Public Commemoration Klaus H. Schreiner Causes and consequences of historical amnesia: the annexation of the Baltic states in post-Soviet Russian popular history and political memory David Mendeloff Coming to terms with the past: memories of displacement and resistance in the Baltic states Dovile Budryte Transmitted Experience: Individual Testimonies and Collective Memories of the Nanjing Atrocity Daqing Yang Thirty thousand bullets: Remembering political repression in Mongolia Christopher Kaplonski Coping with the civil war of 1918 in twentieth-century Finland Risto Alapuro Civil War victims and the ways of mourning in Finland in 1918 Ulla-Maija Peltonen Remembering the Finnish Civil War: confronting a harrowing past Mandy Lehto

    Biography

    Kenneth Christie lectures in the Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, Norway. Robert Cribb is Reader in Southeast Asian history at the University of Queensland.