Summary Of Trouillot's Silencing The Past

Power, the past, enemies, and victims all can be tied together in most accounts found throughout history. While we tend to live in the present and anticipate the future, it is important to understand the past in order to continue or studies of history. With the past comes stories of enemies, victims and different roles of power. By reading these documents we are given different insights and help with answering questions of how and why specific accounts took place. In the first chapter of Michel Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Trouillot sets out to answer the question of how history is produced by laying a framework, arguing that in the writing of history, lots of things get lost and what is lost
He is attempting to explain genocide through how it evolved from hatred. He believes there is no better example of this than the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich and the end result being the Holocaust. Specifically, he explores how the Germans who were murdering the jews feelt like they were acting in their own defense against potential victimizers. He argues that the elusive enemies, in the Germans case, were the jews, especially when the people they kill are not seen as individuals but as what they represent. In their quest for perfection, the urge to “cleanse” society of all abnormality, ultimately turned into destruction. We see that these encounters between the victims and the perpetrators is what facilitates genocide. This process of persecution and segregation should be clarified rather than accepted as natural. Whenever keeping victims and killers strictly apart it creates a blurred vision of the fact that one side does something to the other in an encounter of physical, mental, and imaginary. Bartov mentions that the mass slaughter of Jews was acknowledged but with discomfort and humiliation. The resulting tendencies from blurring the two, left the holocaust survivors just as defenseless against their memory and mental devastation as they were against the Nazis. He writes “The ubiquity of perpetrators and victims, and the frequent confusion between them, is at the core of the destructive energy characteristic of modern genocide, taking place as it does within an imaginary universe that encompasses every single individual in a cycle of devastation and murder”(786) For the jews while in the camps, action was impossible and those who survived were unable to act against the