Historical Culture and Peace: How Older Generations Address the Need of Younger Generations to Learn About Their In-Group Past

Abstract

This chapter has three aims. First, it aims to disentangle social denial of in-group responsibilities for intergroup violence from other types of silence about intergroup violence. Secondly, it argues that intergenerational narratives which omit information about in-group responsibilities for violence that occurred before the birth of younger generations are highly risky to the descendants of perpetrators. Finally, it emphasises the importance of exploring in greater depth the understudied moment when a literal social denial about past in-group war crimes is exposed. To support these aims, the chapter presents results from a recent mixed methods, quasi-experimental study, which used between- and within-subject comparisons. The study asked young Italian university students to read an explicit text (“detailed text”) vs. a more nuanced one (“mild text”) about Italian war crimes occurring during the colonial invasion of Ethiopia. Data were collected before reading the text, during the reading and after it. Texts were constructed by manipulating the wording of a single historical narrative, taken from a textbook currently used in Italian high schools. The inclusion of this information in Italian history textbooks is quite recent, taking place approximately 70 years after the end of the war. Prior to this a widespread social denial silenced these crimes and as a result they were largely ignored in general social discourse. Results showed that participants reacted not only to the new information received but also to the way in which it was conveyed. The detailed narrative, by frankly taking a moral stance on past violence (a strategy that we named, after classic works of Foucault, 1983, parrhesia), provoked a better understanding of information, together with an increase of negative group-based moral emotions. Interestingly, while collective guilt did not differ between participants exposed to a detailed or a mild text, moral emotions distancing young participants from the responsibilities of older generations increased when these crimes were clearly exposed.

Is outgroup prejudice passed down generationally in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi?

“…First, guardians and children’s postgenocide perception of outgroups appeared to be shaped by a wide range of influences outside the family including daily social interactions and formal programming such as ingando , political reeducation camps intended to de-ethnicize Rwandan society (Purdekova, 2015) and government propaganda (Blouin & Mukand, 2019)—all under the ostensible narrative of national unity. Beyond these extra-familial influences, it is also plausible that in both survivor and génocidaire households, the pervasive insecurity about discussing ethnicity (Hilker, 2009) coupled with the fear of what such discussions may stir-up about family members’ experiences during and after the genocide (e.g., imprisonment for atrocities committed, death of family members) stifled formative conversations at home about intergroup relations (Leone & Sarrica, 2020). This reticence or “chosen amnesia”—a deliberate forgetting deemed “essential for local existence” (Buckley-Zistel, 2006, p. 134)—pragmatically served to maintain harmony in families and the community-at-large.…”