The phenomenon of damnatio
memoriae, condemnation of memory, is characteristic of all the groups who have a
bad conscience.
The inconsistency which we have just
analyzed is dramatic, for it reveals that in certain quarters people have not
perceived the profound malice of Nazism. That is why the door is wide open to ultra-Nazism.
By that we mean a Nazism brought to its supreme stage, made global and inscribed into
practices, laws, institutions and even ethics.
a) They erase the past above all because they are
ashamed of it. Some old imperial powers still restrict their archives relative to their
conquests. Some colonies, independent for a long time, have destroyed almost all of the
documents relating to slavery.
But they erase the past also because they are afraid to
risk illuminating the present and thus being able to judge it. This fear is particularly
frequent among societies with a strong totalitarian design. Mao Tse-tung purged the
history of Chinese culture because the Chinese of communist China would have already found
there ample material for demystifying the ideology of the Great Leader. Knowledge of the
past and its remembrance were rejected because they would have brought with them alarming
realization. The reactivation of memory, by recalling history, is thus perceived as
out of place, impertinent even, because it can brutally unmask the deceitful
certitudes of a bad conscience.
b) In the case with which we are concerned, this
reactivation could, for example, lead us to ask whether a new genocide is not about to
unfold. This genocide would no longer have as victims those envisaged by historical
Nazism; today it would be the immense multitude of poor people who would be targeted
above all. A perspicacious observer, Dr Baulieu, affirms that "in accord with the
World Health Organization, the Hoechst Company decided that in the countries of the Third
World, which represent the real big markets, the pill [RU
486] would be sold at a much lower price or given away gratis."
c) In the case of the Hoechst
laboratory which, together with Roussel-Uclaf, produced the RU 486 pill, fear of bringing
up the past has been cleverly analyzed by the same Dr. Baulieu. In an interview granted to
the Italian review L'Espresso, he noted that:
"It was precisely the directors of the American
affiliate of Hoechst that poisoned the opinion of the German mother company. Hilger, its
president, even as a Bavarian Catholic never had anything against the pill. But today he
is afraid. And his fears are nourished by certain phantoms of the past. The Hoechst firm
was founded after the war from the dismantlement of the I. C. Farben Co., the industrial
giant that, among others, produced the gas for the Nazi extermination camps. Hilger is in
terror of the idea that anti-abortion groups will let loose a campaign accusing Hoechst of
continuing to kill as in the Hitler days."
1
If we understand this "terror" well, we
understand less, on the other hand, the mental block that limits the perception of the
firm's president.
______________________________________
See the dossier of Carlo Galluci on "La pillola maldetta," L'Espresso
(Rome, Oct. 20, 1991) 156-165, esp. 163.
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