Payne, L. (2008), Unsettling Accounts, Durham, NC, Duke University Press.
Payne discusses efforts by perpetrators of violence to avoid consequences via forgetting. Using Paul Benzien of South Africa (the so-called "wet bag torturer") as the examplar, he argues that amnesia eliminates some consequences while imposing others. On the one hand, amnesia may insulate perpetrators from full disclosure requirements from truth and reconciliation commissions, or prevent criminal convictions. But on the other hand, amnesia imposes a stigma of mental illness, and using amnesia to gain amnesty from prosecution without full disclosure can leave a perpetrator with no friends among either former perpetrators or former victims, leaving them as "neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring." Indeed, Payne explains that this is exactly what happened to Benzien. Furthermore, amnesia leaves accused perpetrators without a mechanism to deny the accusations against them, even if they are false, such as happened to Bob Kerrey. Amnesia also opens a rhetorical space for victims to assert memory and to push their own agendas toward perpetrators. Ultimately, Payne concludes that several conditions must exist if amnesia can successfully protect perpetrators: it must be total, not partial; there must be no evidence outside of the perpetrators' own recollections; the human-rights community must be demobilized; and there must be no perpetrator turncoats.
My take: I've been hit with the "can't remember, and so can't contradict" problem before. In litigation, if one side remembers and the other does not, then the one that remembers is the one that wins. In the case of violence, the terrifying thing about amnesia is something Payne touches on - the efforts by perpetrators to continue to dehumanize victims by asserting that their torture and agony was so commonplace and so unremarkable as to leave no impression on the perpetrator's memory.