In his book Just Remembering: Rhetorics of Genocide Remembrance and Sociopolitical Judgement, Michael Tumolo examines the ways in which rhetoric and communication helps shape the memories of atrocities and how those memories are used socially and politically.

What inspired you to write about the Holocaust through this rhetorical lens and what do you hope to achieve with this book?

My interest in this project stemmed from a series of questions that I was pursuing concerning the dynamic relationship between freedom and control. From this line of questioning, I became specifically interested in interrogating how public discourses concerning past atrocities influence human judgment. Cases of forgotten genocide took precedence in this work, with the Armenian case standing as the paradigm for reflecting on both the rhetorical dimensions of genocide as it is reconstructed in contemporary discourses and as a standing reminder that we need to develop a more complex and thorough understanding as part of a continuing commitment to producing a better present and future. Consequently, my hopes in writing this book align with what I understand to be the critical work of organizations like the Committee on Conscience, which is part of the United States’ commitment to remember the Holocaust, who are tasked with drawing on memory of the past as a resource to prompt decisive actions to identify and stop genocide where it is happening and to prevent it where it is likely to occur.

You quote Georges Santayana’s famous observation that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” How do we determine which parts of the past—in particular, which genocides—to remember, memorialize, and emphasize? What is the place of forgotten or neglected genocides?

It is certainly no easy task, and has no easy answer. As I have written in my book, remembrance of past atrocities is “a powerful force working to ensure that the genocide remains incomplete” (p. 74). As such, calls to honor all such events in their uniqueness could be seen as an unambiguous attempt to ensure that the genocides forever remain incomplete. Nonetheless, the peoples and cultures that have been targeted by genocidal campaigns were something quite different than what that which we have when we engage in acts of remembrance of peoples and cultures lost. My hope is that one of the focuses of acts of recovery or re-membering forgotten or neglected genocides is to invoke the past to provoke the courage to demand our nations and supranational institutions to do everything that we can to cease and prevent genocide.

As you describe in your book, the capture, trial, and execution of Adolf Eichmann was fraught with legal controversy, pitting moral judgments against legal justifications. The UN deemed his removal from Argentina a violation of international law and of national sovereignty. How should we think about and resolve this conflict?

To start, we are unable to resolve a conflict that has already occurred. My approach to the conflict is to think about how the various positions highlight practices akin to “”jury nullification,” which indicates the practices of criminal juries nullifying laws that they find to be immoral. In the case of Eichmann’s extraction from Argentina, I argue that there are times when the moral implications outweigh the legal ramifications, not only concerning the UN decision, but also the trial itself. We should think back on this decision as a case in which the laws were not adequately designed to address such a unique situation and were overruled by a moral mandate. On the flip side, there is a more insidious type of nullification, which I label “pragmatic nullification,” in which we see politicians and other state actors invoking pragmatic political needs to nullify historical, legal, and moral commitments.

Finally, in regards to the title of the book, Just Remembering, could you elaborate on its double-meaning: the act of simply (i.e. just) remembering, and remembering such sensitive events “justly”?

The double-meaning was an intentional choice and I am grateful that it was supported by the editors at FDUP. The title invokes a sense of humility in the face of the past. We do not have the ability to change what happened, only to remember it. However, the act of remembrance is profoundly important. Doing justice to memory is a normative goal of acts of remembrance.