Saving Agents from the Martyrdom
The idea of "mass dictatorship" originated in my encounter with the
history and politics of coming to terms with the past in South Korea and
Poland. In the midst of radical democratic transformations sweeping
through these two societies at the end of the Cold War, I have
experienced a complicated present history as a participatory observer
wandering the transnational space between Korea and Poland. In the last
two decades, these two post-totalitarian democracies have shared a
history of martyrdom supported by the memory of tragic victimhood
and crossed often by heroic resistance.1 Any challenge to this dominant
memory in the post-totalitarian era would have been dismissed as
politically "incorrect" in both countries. But a history of martyrdom,
however popular, was only made possible by ironing crooked histories
and memories, converting them into a neatly lined History. Plural
memories betray and rupture such a linear History. As Vaclav Havel
constantly stressed, the line did not run clearly between victimizers and
victims. Rather, it ran th
