James E. Young

speaker

89 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 16 Feb

James E. Young’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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The Excerpt · Politics of renaming a presidential memorial · 16 Feb 2026 podcast

I like to keep in mind, again, how these memorials come into being, that there really can't be a prescription.

There have been prescriptions, and autocratic regimes love prescribing what these memorials will be.

but memorials that can remain open to debate to the issues of the moment, you know, as they come into being so that they reflect both the past that they would be commemorating on the one hand, but they must also reflect the moment in which they're being conceived.

And for a memorial to do both openly creates a conversation between us in the present moment and the object of memory in the past.

that they say the past has never really passed as long as we're thinking about it in this present moment.

So as long as that dialogue remains alive, I think these memorials work.

It would probably be hard to say that the same thing occurs everywhere.

Every nation, every culture really has its own reasons for commemorating the past.

In some cases, it's a way to come to terms with the past, the way the German government did when it decided to create a national memorial to Europe's murdered Jews there in Berlin, what is called the Detmach.

But it instituted a process, it had a large competition, but it always knew exactly why he was doing it.

And it wasn't to put the past behind, as many people suspected.

It was really to bring the past forward into the present moment so that we understand why we are where we are, that we can't live truly in the present moment without acknowledging the reality of how we got here.

And the Germans were very good about that.

There are places which I think would commemorate huge events like the Holocaust as a way to put it behind, as a way to move forward, as a way to unshackle oneself from responsibility for the Holocaust in order to move forward.

And there's a way in which every nation's reasons for doing what they do create a foundation for these memorials.

The U.S.

Holocaust Memorial and Museum, for example,

And the Days of Remembrance were really established around the memory of American soldiers liberating camps at Dachau and at Buchenwald.

So it was really about commemorating American experience or creating that space to begin, and then to understand in a way to repeat and relive our own reasons for being as liberators and as a land of immigrants and rescuers.

So a lot of it is always repeating and reinstating the myths by which we understand, you know, our own reasons for being, national reasons for being.

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