Here and now, I'm reading Primo Levi, "The Drowned and the Saved."

[NNadir]

I've had the book lying around in my room for a very long time, but never picked it up to read...and then...all these wars.

The Drowned and the Saved.

The first chapter deals with the artifice of memory, in a clinical but yet powerfully emotive and deep way,

I'm struck with this passage:

Here as with other phenomena, we are dealing a paradoxical analogy between victim and oppressor, and are anxious to be clear: both are in the same trap, but it is the oppressor, and he alone, who has prepared it and activated it, and if he suffers from this, it is right that he should suffer from it, as he does indeed suffer from it, even at a distance of decades. Once again it must be observed, mournfully, the injury cannot be healed: it extends through time and the Furies, in whose existence we are forced to believe, not only rack the tormentor (if they do rack him, assisted or not by human punishment), put perpetuate the tormentor’s work by denying peace to the tormented. It is not without horro that we read the words left us by Jean Améry, the Austrian philosopher tortured by the Gestapo because he active in the Belgian resistance and then deported to Auschwitz because he was Jewish:

Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured…Anyone who has suffered torture never again will be able to be at ease in the world, the abomination of the annihilation is never extinguished. Faith in humanity, already racked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again.

So it is, I think, when we remember the memory of others, become entrapped in this awful antisymmetry from which we cannot escape, where we are inextricably bound.

I was explaining the genocide to my son that went on around the time he was a toddler, the Serb/Bosnian tragedy, and I told him, and this is true, that the root cause was an outgrowth of events in the 14th and 15th century involving the Ottoman Turks and Eastern Orthodox Serbs.

By what mechanism does this memory of memory remain?

The question is whether the oppressed become the oppressor, reversing roles in a periodic way.

I suppose this all sounds like pathetic trivializing, but I cannot think but that I can't stop hating the hate, and that act is hate itself.