The Oberlin Review
<< Front page News March 11, 2005

Mini-course explores post-totalitarian world

“How do you organize a society where, for years or even decades, a good part of the population has been oppressing their fellow citizens into a society where oppressors and oppressed can peacefully and democratically coexist?” This is the main question that the mini-course “Memory, Truth and Justice” will attempt to answer from March 9 through March 17, according to Hispanic Studies professor Sebastian Faber.

The interdisciplinary course will cover the post-dictatorial transitions of Germany, Spain, Argentina, Chile, South Africa, Yugoslavia, Russia and Iraq. The Hispanics department is the main sponsor of the mini-course. It will be co-taught by Faber, history professor Annemarie Sammartino, Hispanic Studies professor Patrick O’Connor, history professor Steve Volk and politics professors Ben Schiff and Steve Crowley. There are also two guest lecturers; Michael Scharf and Chuck Sudetic. Six films will be shown and a roundtable discussion will be held as a part of the course.

“The idea for this course was born relatively late last semester,” Faber said. “I was trying to write something on recent developments in Spain, which, it seemed, had suddenly begun dealing with its dictatorial past after ignoring it for 30 years. By accident I came across a C.V. of professor Ben Schiff and realized that he had worked on very similar topics.”

Faber described the move from dictatorship to a democratic government as “one of the hardest processes for any nation to go through.”

“It is also one of the major political, ethical and cultural dilemmas of our time,” he added.

Faber believes post-Franco Spain offers one model for post-dictatorial societies.

“Our understanding comes from those societies that have made, or tried to make, the transition,” he said.

In the case of Spain, the consensus was that “the truth about the past should not be revealed” and there was “no reckoning, no trials and no convictions.”

“South Africa is on the opposite end, where they established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Faber said. “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission starts from the premise that crimes from both sides from the apartheid era should be punished on principle.

“It starts from the psychological premise that these things must be brought above water for society to move on,” he continued.

Faber noted that Spanish and South African democratization happened under very different circumstances and that Francoism cannot be compared to apartheid.

Volk said a key point was “whether a dictatorship was defeated or not, if the dictatorship gets to write the terms of transition.”

“It is very hard to come to terms with a dictator that hasn’t been defeated when a lot of people think the dictator was the best thing around,” he added.

Volk affirmed the importance of culture for the transition to democracy.

“In all the transitions I know about it is in cultural forms that memory first appears and it is cultural forms that dictatorship is most worried about.”

Academic work on post-dictatorial transitions has changed over the years.

“The literature goes back about 30 years,” Schiff said. “It starts with a focus on Latin American transition from authoritarian state.

“More recently there is a rapidly growing literature that has more focus on restoring the rule of law, justice and building constitutions,” he continued.

Not only has the content of recent writing on this subject changed over time, but the tone has, too.

“The first generation literature suggested a much easier and successful process than many countries have undergone,” Volk said.

The second-generation literature “has a tendency to criticize content of democracy rather than focus on the form.”
 
 

   


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