Forgotten History - why we remember sometimes

Sometimes there’s a logic behind why some historical events are remembered more strongly than others. Of course, you cannot control what events not just strike people, but stay in their heads and hearts for years, and what is turned into song, story, and film. It’s not some empirical thing. But danger does lie in the fact that if you remember some deaths, and not others, you are suggesting that some lives matter more than others.
"Certain things are memorable, and certain folks’ deaths are rallying cries and others are lost to history. And that would be natural if it weren’t helped along so much by the biases of a warmongering state. We can barely get people to remember the some 4,000 American soldiers who died in the Iraq war. That is a tragedy, but one to ignore in preparation for the next terrible threat. The million Iraqis who died thanks to America’s war are nothing. They are certainly not a folk song, or a even a famous photograph. They are an error on a balance sheet, a pity, an aside. Two at Jackson State, a million in Iraq, hundreds of thousands in the Philippines – every death can be forgotten if it is inconvenient for the powerful to remember," writes Lucy Steigerwald who is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and a columnist for VICE.com.
Here is an interesting piece from her.

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