Historians study the living and the dead. If we can identify the rights of the living and their responsibilities to the dead, we may be able to formulate a solid ethical infrastructure for historians. A short and generally accepted answer to the question of what the rights of the living are can be found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The central idea of human rights is that the living possess dignity and therefore deserve respect. In addition, the living believe that the dead also have dignity and thus deserve respect too. When human beings die, I argue, some human traces survive and mark the dead with symbolic value. The dead are less than human beings, but still reminiscent of them, and they are more than bodies or objects. This invites us to speak about the dead in a language of posthumous dignity and respect, and about the living, therefore, as having some definable core responsibilities to the dead. I argue further that these responsibilities are universal. In a Declaration of the Responsibilities of Present Generations toward Past Generations, then, I attempt to cover the whole area. I identify and comment on four body-and property-related responsibilities (body, funeral, burial, and will), three personality-related responsibilities (identity, image, and speech), one general responsibility (heritage), and two consequential rights (memory and history). I then discuss modalities of non-compliance, identifying more than forty types of failures to fulfill responsibilities toward past generations. I conclude that the cardinal principle of any code of ethics for historians should be to respect the dignity of the living and the dead whom they study.
This article deals with post-conflict history education moratoria: the temporary suspension of history education or its recent history segment, including its textbooks, with the aim of aligning it to the goals of a transition to peace and democracy. I present fifteen cases arranged under four types: moratoria after the defeat of the Axis powers in international war (the successor states of Nazi Germany, Anschluss Austria, Fascist Italy, and Imperialist Japan), moratoria after the implosion of communist regimes (USSR, Moldova, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina), moratoria after genocides (Cambodia, Rwanda, and Guatemala), and moratoria after racial, ethnic and religious conflicts (South Africa, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq). The analytical part starts with the basic question of whether the period of recent violence should be taught at all: I argue that this is a state duty, any suspension of which cannot but be temporary. After a brief exploration of the distribution over time of the moratoria, I discuss the moratoria brokers (the executive and legislative branches of government) as well as the pressures from below (civil society) and above (international intervention). Seven types of reasons typically used to justify moratoria are then weighed: politics, didactics, legacy, practice, safety, reconciliation and the passage of time. Next, the crucial question is tackled of how long moratoria lasted and how long they ought to last: I argue that wholesale moratoria should last no longer than five years and that meanwhile sound interim materials should be prepared. By way of conclusion, the relationship between moratoria, forgetting and democracy is explored. Truly democratic moratoria are part of mediation-induced, not censorship-induced strategies of social forgetting. Five conditions decide this: a legal framework, an explicit and short time span, a public debate, the effective preparation of new materials, and unimpeded academic historical research. They help define under which regime of restrictions postconflict history education moratoria are justified in a democratic society.
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