CW for sensitive themes including discussion of antisemitism
I can still see it. The soft light of the evening sun sets both the endless fields of grass and my orange ice cream bar alight, as seven-year-old me hops home with scraped knees and a loose tooth. If the light didn’t go out, as it often did in the middle-of-nowhere Punjabi town where my grandparents lived, I would get to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. If the light did go out, I could sit in our backyard and count the stars all night as our three cows slept peacefully in their shed. Nostalgia most directly translates to the pain of returning to one’s homeland, and I feel that pain as I write these words down. Partly because my grandparents and I have now moved to Canada, meaning that I have to return to a homeland I can never see as my own again, and because of something else, something deeper. The world seemed so wonderful and simple then, completely still under the warm sun of nostalgia.
Ironically, history seldom enters the realm of memory. Times weren’t simpler when I was seven. The annexation of Crimea, the 2014 Gaza War, the ascent of ISIS and the spread of Ebola were all happening; time was marching at its familiar vicious pace. I simply wasn’t aware of everything unfolding across the world because I was a child. My developing mind, given its limited capacity, made the world seem smaller; everything was still out there, waiting to terrify me as soon as I became aware of it. My sense of memory loses its pristine quality when history infiltrates it, filling the whole scene with a quiet sense of foreboding.
At the individual level, the mismatch between memory and history appears fairly harmless. For the collective, it can be terrible. The present, the only actuality, is firmly rooted in our understanding of the past. We create the future only in relation to the present, in the space between the actual and the potential. The past hangs over this all like a nightmare. This is why the stock question for a psychoanalyst is ‘so tell me about your childhood’; this is why I study history. However, historians know that more important than the story we tell ourselves about the past is their critical evaluation. This is why one of the first courses historians take here at Oxford is Historiography, the comparative history of historical narratives. I do not think that nostalgia can be critical in this way because of the irrational and personal nature of memory.
By enshrining something in memory, you posit a singular subject doing the remembering. This is, again, harmless for the individual. But what does this mean for a community, for a nation?
The nostalgic ideal will have to exclude those it cannot accommodate. Sometimes, this is done deliberately. Nostalgia is the pain of a lost homeland, and one of the classic responses to grief is anger. If it’s gone, who took it? In the politically fraught days of the Weimar Republic, the blame fell on the so-called “November Criminals,” the social democrats, politicians, and ultimately Jews who were said to have sold out the German soldier on the battlefield. The soldier is portrayed in propaganda as an unfeeling emblem of the lost, blood-and-iron days of the Kaiser’s rule, frozen in nostalgic, masculinist idealism, as a stereotyped figure who gleefully stabs him in the back. These posters work because they show both what people thought they had lost and what they thought replaced it. They conveniently ignore the repeated strategic failures of the military leadership itself, or the sacrifice of 12,000 Jewish soldiers for the sake of their country. These facts do not fit the glorious past these pictures aim to construct. Once again, we see that memory rarely accounts for history.
While I do not mean to insinuate a continuity in ideology, there is a worrying continuity in tactics between our own reactionaries and those of the last century. President Trump’s rallying cry of ‘Make America Great Again’ is already emblematic of the familiar tactics of nostalgic propaganda, invoking how amazing things were in a fabricated past, and how horrible they are now. The staffers behind the Department of Homeland Security’s Twitter account have improvised on these themes, taking them to absurd lengths. I personally find it hard to believe that a bottle of cola and an old car are things worth fighting for and dying for, or even things I couldn’t already acquire in this lifetime without any major changes to our political system. But evoking these images still has a mystifying effect, reminding one of all-night diners, couples waltzing to Elvis, and all the hallmarks of kitschy Americana that the young audience these posters are directed towards probably never experienced for themselves.
This cheap, fuzzy evocation of nostalgia doesn’t really hide what it is trying to get you to do: join the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services as a ‘Homeland Defender,’ a desk job vetting immigration applications. A more specific piece of propaganda geared towards the same purpose is another tweet, which depicts Washington D.C in 1943, with another hopeful exclamation that “we can return.” But if the 1940s are meant to be idyllic, who is ‘we’? Because it certainly excludes me, alongside other people of colour who would have been second-class citizens in the 40s. Once again, I believe that this is by design. The singular image of America projected here, the one all are encouraged to view as their own memory, excludes the experiences and memories of minorities because the Republicans hardly have time for them, either. Nostalgia imposes a narrow narrative onto history, blocking out any contradictory voices, to tell a story of decay and renewal, rather than of progress.
The historian Jeffrey Herf used the designation of ‘reactionary modernism’ to describe movements that favoured technological progress but shunned social progress and liberal democracy. The paradox of reactionary modernism is that its nostalgia is future-oriented. The past it invokes is less a destination than a blueprint. Nostalgic memory takes a productive role in the construction of a reactionary future. Despite their evocations to ‘return,’ reactionaries do not truly seek restoration; they seek to build something new while claiming only to recover what was always there.
There is nothing wrong with rewatching your favourite movie from school when you’re upset, with the seasonal recurrence of Y2K trends, or reminiscing on childhood. Memory and loss are what keep us human. Our societies are not individual agents like us, however, and when people try to project an image of a ‘golden age’ without any critical insight or qualification, they’re probably trying to sell you something. This article focused on political actors trying to peddle ideologies, but this is also the case with any other product or service. Coca-Cola is famous for using old-fashioned Christmas imagery to inspire warmth, and its rival, Pepsi, brought back Crystal Pepsi in 2022 to call forth the coolness of the 90s. The beauty of my childhood, of the clear stars, and the long fields of mustard flowers is that, looking back through the prism of memory, it feels as if it all belongs to me. But history does not belong to any one person, party or company, and, by projecting our nostalgia onto it, we risk stripping it of all meaning.