7.19. Integration and disintegration of democratic memories

This paper investigates the figure of Rambo as a mnemonic figure within U.S. far-right online spaces, tracing how the character is recontextualized and mobilized in digital memory cultures to shape and circulate specific notions of white masculinity, militant heroism, para-military imaginaries, and visions of Americanness. Emerging during the late Cold War, the Rambo figure provided what contemporaries per-ceived as “a world simple enough for heroes” (Eldon Kenworthy (1995), America/Américas: Myth in the Making of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America, p.68). In this setting, Rambo of-fered both an orientational model, enabling individuals to construct identities as mercenaries and Cold Warriors, and a tool of criticism and agency, allowing rightist activists to rewrite U.S. history through imagined victories, such as a “Vietnam 2.0” in Nicaragua. These cultur-al practices intertwined with broader traditions of American exceptionalism and rightist poli-tics, producing durable narratives of white masculinity and resistance. Although the Contra movement and Cold War context dissolved, the Rambo as a mnemonic figure persisted and evolved. It continued to symbolize endurance, outsider status, and oppo-sition to both perceived foreign and domestic enemies. This endurance was visible during the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack, when Trump supporters carried Rambo-themed flags depict-ing Donald Trump as the hypermasculine warrior, reflecting the persistence of paramilitary fantasies first cultivated in the Reagan era. An analysis of several far-right online platforms, alt-tech microblogging and social network-ing services, and forums reveals how communities that broadly identify with the MAGA-movement have adapted the Rambo figure to post-digital landscapes. The hashtag #Ram-boTrump, for instance, demonstrates how Cold War-era imagery now circulates as memes, offering a “tough mask” for disillusioned individuals.

Illiberal politics often exploit narratives of victimization. Populists appeal to their bases by invoking collective memories of loss, suffering, and trauma inflicted by a historical foe or contemporary enemy. The desire to “make a country great again” rests on nostalgia for a vanished era—before some imagined catastrophe destroyed ethnic or religious bonds. My paper explores the political and social effects of such narratives in interwar Germany. Rather than revisiting the familiar motifs of German martyrdom—like claims that Jews “stabbed Germany in the back”—I examine how Germans across the political spectrum sought out other historical victims whose suffering could legitimize their own. During the 1920s and early 1930s, many German writers expressed solidarity with African Americans, who they claimed suffered under Jim Crow laws and lynch mobs just as Germans supposedly suffered under Allied occupation and “Jewish” domination. By aligning themselves with a more sympathetic victim—African Americans—Germans attempted both to exploit global sympathy for the Black Freedom Struggle and to delegitimize the Weimar democratic system that they associated with national humiliation. The irony was striking: recognition of anti-Black racism was, and remains, central to democratic projects of reckoning and reform. Yet Germans appropriated that recognition to evade responsibility for their own historical misdeeds. Through this case study of Weimar Germany, I argue that collective memory is not only a national enterprise but also a transnational one, capable of fostering international identification and solidarity. However, the recognition of shared trauma does not, in itself, advance democracy. Only when such recognition is accompanied by an honest reckoning with the past can it support democratic renewal rather than subvert it.

The late 1980s and 1990s marked a critical juncture in Taiwan’s transition from authoritarian rule to democracy, a period characterized by rapid political liberalization and the emergence of a distinct Taiwanese identity. While existing scholarship has examined this transformation through political reforms, ethnic tensions, and the rediscovery of memories surrounding political suppression, such as the 228 Incident (1947) and the White Terror (1949-1991), this paper turns to a neglected site of memory—the recollections of Taiwanese who served in the Japanese armed forces during World War II. Drawing on discourse analysis of Taiwanese and Japanese newspapers and court records from Japan, this paper investigates how memories about these “Imperial Japan Servicemen,” particularly those reignited during their lawsuits against Japan in the 1980s and 1990s for their loss due to the war, were negotiated and constrained within Taiwan’s expanding democratic public sphere. Unlike scholars who claim that the suppression and marginalization of memories about Taiwanese servicemen were removed in the late 1980s and 1990s, I argue that democratization opened new avenues for formerly suppressed memories while simultaneously reproducing silences and marginalization. The servicemen’s memories were stigmatized as Hanjian (traitors to the Chinese Han) and remained politically inconvenient both for Chinese nationalist narratives and for emerging Taiwanese identity discourses that idealized Japanese colonialism as benevolent. By tracing how these memories were selectively marginalized in the process of democratic transition between the 1980s and 1990s, this paper explores the paradoxes of memory politics in post-authoritarian societies—how democratization can foster greater inclusivity while still delimiting the boundaries of acceptable remembrance. In doing so, it situates Taiwan within broader global conversations about the relationship between memory, identity, and democracy.

It is often thought that memory is a means to arrive in some kind of preestablished and memory independent account of the past. It is as if the exercise of memory is fully resolved into a picture of what had happened, a picture that is fully constituted and located in the past. I challenge this image by looking at the way memory works – it has a spectral character to it, it is not controllable because it is always hostage to insistent additions (new thoughts, new events) that come its way. In line with the account of memory as ubiquious and leading to further memory I have developed in books such as Memory Assemblages (Bloomsbury, 2024), I argue that the intrinsically diachronic nature of memory makes it impossible to be resolved in truths and falsehood about the past that are established once and for all. Further, the continuous investigation prompted by memory assemblages make them somehow akin to democratic practices where nothing is established once and for all. Through what is called ‘spectral realism’, inspired in the thought and practices of recent literature, cinema and philosophy in South America, I argue that we should replace the colonial politicities and epistemicities by alternatives connected to the mnemic. We have an experience of the spectral – with its indeterminacy and its reliance on haunting and conjuring – in our activities of remembering and forgetting. Because memory is intrinsically connected to the circumstances with its additions, it is nonending – the archive becomes a different archiving always in the hope for something to come (what can be understood in terms of Jacques Derrida’s messianicity and Walter Benjamin’s weak messianic force). That incorrigible diachrony is both in line with the fragilities of memory and with its connection to a democracy to come.

The history of Europe is one of violence including revolutions, ethnic cleansing and interstate wars. In particular the commemoration of 20th century mass violence has provided a foundational basis for the narration of European integration after 1945. Contrasting with European attempts at articulating a shared European vision of 20th century wars and violence against civilians is the plurality of mnemonic narratives that divide European societies between one another but also overshadow differences within. The most prevalent of such divisions is that between East and West, although the binary tends to ignore the memories of mass violence that can be encountered in Spain or the UK. Also divisions within societies, be this based on age or regional identity, are ignored in such depictions. Our analysis of how remembering mass violence underpins expressions of European belonging is part of a larger study into European senses of belonging in the 21st century which is at the core of our book Shades of Blue: Claiming Europe in the Age of Disintegration (Cornell University Press, 2025). The book is based on a large scale study of newspaper articles from six European countries (Poland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) between 2004 and 2023. In this paper, we identify five different European senses of belonging that have underpinned debates over the commemoration of mass violence and examine the mental maps of Europe implicit in these senses of belonging. On this basis, we analyse how perceptions of European centers and peripheries changed from 2015 to 2023. We will furthermore elaborate on the implications of this research perspective for understanding mnemonic dynamics in other world regions and the potential and challenges inherent in integrating such experiences. We would very much like to enter into a dialogue with colleagues working, e.g., on Latin America or Asia.