Regimes of Terror and Memory: Beyond the Uniqueness of the Holocaust(Political Theory for Today)

Regimes of Terror and Memory: Beyond the Uniqueness of the Holocaust illustrates how convenient it has become in r not recognizing other regimes of terror in recent history. Manfred Henningsen compares the memory of Nazi Germany’s macro criminal record with the remembrances of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, the Japanese Empire, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Sukarno’s Indonesia . He discusses the cultural reasons for these memory distortions in the West and in the societies that have experienced these macro crimes of genocidal violence. Henningsen has embedded his search in an autobiographical context that begins with his birth, upbringing and education in Germany from 1938 to 1969, continues after his move to Hawaii in 1970 in the American political culture and becomes more realized through extensive traveling in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: My Discovery of the Holocaust and Other Democides Chapter 1: The Diversity of Mass Killing Regimes Chapter 2: Terror and Memory: Beyond the Uniqueness of the Holocaust Chapter 3: From Denial to Recognition and Reconciliation Chapter 4: The Contested Memories of Buchenwald Chapter 5: The Politics of Forgetting and Remembering Chapter 6: American Amnesia Chapter 7: The Holocaust and the Experiences of Evil Conclusion

About the Author :
Manfred Henningsen was a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu where he taught until his retirement in 2020 for fifty years.

Review :
Regimes of Terror and Memory is a powerful book that covers a lot of ground … Given how much research has been conducted on all of the individual democides he covers, the personal, synthetic narrative of this volume certainly represents an important contribution to the literature. Born in Germany in 1938, Henningsen began to question from an early age how societies dealt with the "damnable parts of their history" (p. xiii). He offers stories from his life as a teenager and university student, including interactions with classmates and teachers. In this volume, Henningsen writes a great deal about Germany, but he also considers other "regimes" with dark histories, particularly the US and East Asian nations. He analyzes the development of memory and action from denial to recognition and reconciliation, noting how each regime has taken a different path in a different amount of time. Particularly valuable is the historiography that runs through each chapter as Henningsen analyzes many different authors’ works. Looking at the chapter titles, one might think that this is simply a hodgepodge of stories and history. However, Henningsen draws these events together to study the "trauma layer of memory" in societies (p. 186). It is the comparison of these regimes that helps one recognize human nature in all societies. Interestingly, since it deals only with "regimes," the book does not examine how Rwanda moved to reconciliation more quickly than any other nation. Recommended. Advanced students. Driven by personal circumstances and an intense curiosity informed by an amazing array of books, movies, and observations, Manfred Henningsen compares, in lucid prose, crimes against humanity in numerous countries. The Holocaust, he demonstrates, is one of numerous mass killings by political regimes around the world. And most of those regimes refuse to acknowledge the evil they did. “At a time when global civilization has lost its moral compass, Manfred Henningsen’s Regimes of Terror provides a north star for our dark night of the soul. He embraces his personal formative experience in the spirit of a moral and philosophical anamnesis. His move from Germany to the United States and his marriage to Kareda, an African American woman, woke him up to the legacy of slavery and the collective refusal of modern America to come to terms with its past. He draws from his own story, beginning with a childhood in WWII Germany to illuminate his country’s success in coming to terms with the horrors of Nazi rule. This was a process so unusual in politics that Germans created a special term for it, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, meaning a society coming to terms with its traumatic past. Henningsen contrasts Germany’s remarkable success in emerging as a relatively wise and moral society with the conspicuous failure of the United States in confronting a foundation built on chattel slavery and the genocide of its indigenous population. He casts a comparative gaze on Japan, Cambodia, Russia, Indonesia, Australia and China. In conclusion he challenges the reader to consider the urgency of a collective moral, intellectual and political awakening in a post-truth age of appalling destructiveness. Regimes of Terror is a clearly written cornerstone work for those who are waking up to ‘love of truth-seeking’ as the ultimate answer to moral, political and existential catastrophe." This is an extraordinary and, indeed, a unique work that has no equal and almost certainly never will. That is because as a child Henningsen lived through the Nazi genocide campaigns in the early part of the twentieth century and as an adult scholar has studied it and a range of other genocides in exceptional detail. His sources are wide-ranging and analyzed in great depth and with compassion. The question of whether the Holocaust was unique arose with great intensity in the 1990s and has continued into the twenty-first century. Regimes of Terror and Memory should finally bring that debate to a close.