Linda Kintzler
Appearances
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Yeah. No. I mean, I don't know about the analogy, but it is kind of an instance in which you have a violent community of offenders who nevertheless must remain in the country, right? Yeah.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
You can't get rid of all of them. It wasn't moral forgiveness. It was just a measure that allowed them to remain in the society in a way that wouldn't cripple the society itself at this moment of extreme fragility.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
So historically speaking, we see that there were either acts of oblivion, laws of oblivion, or articles of oblivion that appeared... in peace treaties or as legislative measures or as kind of like kingly edicts that were issued in the aftermath of revolutions, wars, and uprisings, and what they were essentially as a kind of like resetting of the legal order.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Where they said, you know, and this is generally happening in the kind of quote unquote Western world, but we also see similar measures elsewhere. But what they would say is, you know, everything that happened prior to this law, whatever it was, whether like hostility, war, killing, theft, etc.,
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
None of that can be litigated or spoken of in public, which often meant, you know, you can't bring a lawsuit after this measure is passed.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Right. And like in some ways forgetting isn't even the right word. And the interesting thing to me is that, you know, the word oblivion is the kind of Roman invention that was used to describe it, that Cicero used after the fact. And that was kind of like his spin on it, right? Everyone is telling tales about how to make a democracy work or how to make a state or a kingdom work, right?
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Not all of these were democracies. But yeah, forgetting in some ways, it's not really the correct description of what's going on. It's more of a kind of collective agreement about how you're going to move past something that is like fundamentally irreconcilable.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Yeah, oblivio sempiterna, eternal oblivion to kind of wash away everything. It's a totally beguiling word, and it kind of connotes erosion in English, an erasure, but like there's also... You know, in other languages, in Russian, it's, you know, eternal oblivion, right? Eternal forgetting in a way.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Yeah, like it's like you're always rescuing things from oblivion or losing things to oblivion. I mean, it is in a way, right? Because you're burying something in oblivion. It's a physical location, right? It's a noun, oblivion. And so to me, I think of it as like, okay, you're burying it, but you're not forgetting where it is, right? It's always there.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Yeah, I mean, I would say they're kind of fundamentally opposite, right? Like one is constructive and one is malignant, right? Which is not to say that the two couldn't be conflated, right? But like for the sake of argument, like the oblivions I have been looking at have been kind of like ideal types. Like obviously none of these historically ever work perfectly, right?
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
It's more about the idea that people wanted them to work, that there was this kind of desire for reconciliation that would be operative. And obviously that's not what you see at all in the language that Trump has been using and in the way he and his supporters have been framing January 6th. Usually, like I think if we were to kind of follow the framework of oblivion,
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
What should have happened was that Biden, upon taking office and kind of restoring liberal order, we could say, would have passed an act of oblivion for the January 6ers that would have mandated that kind of Trump and his immediate circle would have to stand trial for their actions that day.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
And what we have been seeing with the kind of the lower level offenders that some of them would not have had to explicitly as a kind of gesture of goodwill.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Yeah, and it's actually interesting. I mean, I was in a couple of trials where the judge was like, to the prosecutor, was saying like, listen, I've been to so many of these trials. You do not need to establish for me what happened on January 6th writ large. Like, I get it. Like, can you please fast forward?
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
But I mean, like, I guess what I'm talking about is not even about like, oh, you know, keep these videos from circulating or, you know, don't talk about what happened. It's more about don't expect the legal process to achieve something that cannot be achieved through law.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Oh my gosh, absolutely. I mean, this is what fascinates me, precisely because we are in this era of kind of historical revisionism, and we have been for a long time. But the thing about acts of oblivion is that they actually, in my mind, consecrated what happened, right? They protected the historical record. They didn't literally say, oh, this never happened. And in fact, what you see is
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
is that they're often accompanied by records, like historical accounts of what happened such that an act of oblivion was necessary, right? Like, okay, actually, what happened here was a civil war or a tyranny or a revolution that kind of totally wiped out the legal order, so we needed to do this extremely drastic thing if we were to kind of reestablish democratic law.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
The one that I often point to is after the Revolutionary War, there were, because you... You did have the kind of legacy of British law, right, that, you know, and acts of oblivion came to the Americas from the European system. So there you did have kind of royalists who were subjected to acts of oblivion.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
It was individual states passing them over their royalist populations to allow them to remain even though they had been defeated.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
It meant that they couldn't be ostracized, essentially, like they couldn't be perpetually held accountable for what they had done for everything that they had done against their neighbors. Right. And often it was a kind of like very local proximate question, right, of like, we're not going to kind of kick you out unless you want to be kicked out, that kind of thing.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Yeah. I mean, I spent months, I mean, the better part of a year, actually, attending these trials in downtown D.C. And there are so many elements, as you have described, about the courthouse, you know, namely that it's right across from the Capitol and overlooks the grounds upon which all of these crimes happened.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Yeah. And I mean, there are a lot of failed oblivions. I mean, you know, after the Civil War, a lot of the southern states were, quote unquote, crying for an act of oblivion. And it was a term that was circulating in the papers. And... There's this amazing quote from Frederick Douglass who said, you know, I look in Congress and I see the solid South enthroned.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
And the minute that that is not the case, we will join you in calling for an act of oblivion. But as long as they have not been held accountable, we cannot support this.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
No. No, because I would never be so bold as to say that. But I do think it's like a useful political concept. I think that— There was a missed opportunity during the Biden administration to do something concerted that wasn't just the Jack Smith investigation about it. I think there could have been something really meaningful done.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
I think that would have been a really potentially transformative thing to do because it would not have done anything to jeopardize the record of what occurred that day or what it meant to participate in it. But we are going to move beyond it. And I think we will see the narrative of January 6th begin to settle in some way. Right.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
And as always happens, the conspiracies about it will become part of the narrative of how this is told. Right. Not in a kind of whitewashing way, but just in like a kind of it shows how volatile it is and how manipulable it is. You know, and I think, like, there's been this debate about how to memorialize that day, right?
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Whether it's through a physical memorial, a memorial to the Capitol officers who died, or to anyone who died that day. I think those are the questions that we haven't kind of figured out, really.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
I mean, I was at the Capitol for the year anniversary of January 6th and kind of like watched all the... from the press gallery, and it kind of just struck me how it was almost like a kind of nothing. You know, like how it was... What do you mean? It was just so quiet. Somber, of course.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
And, you know, there were so many times I was walking through the halls of the courtroom, and some of them had little windows you can peer through. And almost on every single one, there was one day when I, you know, you could see the monitors in the courtroom and you could see that they were all playing January 6th footage. You know, different angles.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
But it was... There was no... Like, you didn't get the sense of the enormity of the event that was being consecrated, right? And it was almost like this... You know, and understandable because it was so close and so... You know, there was this kind of sense that, like, we haven't figured this out yet.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
You could hear the sounds of the footage that the prosecuting attorneys had assembled.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
And you really do get the sense there that in this building, this really pivotal event in history is being litigated and worked through in real time, kind of away from the public eye, even though these are open to anyone who wants to come see them.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
I mean, I think this is justice, right? I mean, this is actually the levers of justice working. You know, it is absolutely that these people broke the law and they are being brought to court because they violated public order in different ways. So it is kind of like our ur-definition of justice. But it's a different question, and I think –
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
This is the one that has kind of been left undealt with in public is, okay, this is one version of justice, but this is not a kind of public reckoning with what January 6th was. And the kind of how these individual offenders are being treated and punished for what they did is not the same thing as how is the country going to deal with what January 6th threatened to kind of the fabric of democracy.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
And there's like in general been an over-reliance, I think, upon the legal process to kind of like deal with January 6th for, quote unquote, us, for us, the public in a way. And, you know, I don't think there has been a kind of broader conversation about what it means in the long haul. Right.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Yeah, I mean, like, on the face of it, what they are doing is, you know, manipulating historical terminology, right, for their political ends.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
No, no. I mean, I think that they broke the law and they should be punished for what they did. I think there's a genuine argument you could have about which offenders should be kind of facing jail time, but I don't think that's the conversation we're having right now.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
But I do think, you know, what this question raises is the fact that Trump himself has not been held accountable for what he did on January 6th, right? And there were many efforts to do that and... My view of this whole process is that historically speaking, we're doing it kind of backwards.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Historically, it was the top people in power who oversaw the crime who would be the first to be held responsible for it. for what they had done. In this case, we have almost the exact opposite, right? We have the lower level offenders, the people who are easier to find, the kind of foot soldiers of Trump's, you know, movement who are being the ones hauled into court.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
And obviously, we have seen the efforts to prosecute Trump himself have kind of sequentially collapsed and are now are almost certainly not going to happen.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Yeah, I mean, this is the kind of subject that has fascinated me for many years is like, how have societies worked through moments in which you have a population of perpetrators or people who have violated the public order, who nevertheless must remain in the country or the city in some way? How have you dealt with that? And so...
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
In my work, the kind of prototypical example comes from ancient Athens after the reign of the 30 tyrants, where you had a population of oligarchs, 30 of them, who overtook the city, stripped people of their rights and properties, killed people unjustly, oversaw all of these abuses, and then were deposed by the victorious Democrats.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
After the fact, there was a kind of general amnesty for most of the supporters of the 30, but the 30 tyrants themselves were made to choose between standing trial and exile from the city.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
So in that case, you have, like, this prototype of the people who were responsible having to account for their crimes verbally and in, you know, kind of legal system, while the kind of lower level of people were... offered a different set of choices. And of course, like, the reason this is so fascinating is because this becomes the blueprint for centuries of leaders after that.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
You know, if you look at 1660 after the English Civil War, it kind of comes after World War II, where there's this question of what do we do with Nazi perpetrators? How wide and deep should the justice run? And we know that denazification failed in many ways. So I do think, you know, in our country, we are going through something like this, in a sense.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Right. So, I mean, yes, of course, saying genotification didn't work is a huge sweeping claim, and we can argue about that a lot. But what you had there was, you know, the Nuremberg trials. Of course, what we think of as Nuremberg did hold, you know, the top brass accountable for what they had done.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
And then you had many, many smaller sequential trials, both in West Germany and in the former Soviet Union. But you know what? I often think of—and I want to be careful about making the comparison today, of course—
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
But I have been thinking about this line that the philosopher Judith Schlar said, which was that, you know, why denazification failed in many ways was because the prosecutors mistook a group of individual offenders for a social movement. So in other words, they thought that by denazification.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Continuing with all these trials that they would squash the kind of violent, virulent sentiment underlying Nazism itself.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Totally. And it feels good. Like it appeals to all of our liberal sensibilities about how, you know, order and justice are supposed to work.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Exactly. You know, we are in a very legalistic society in that we like to talk about freedom. courts and legal cases as kind of solving political problems. And I do think we repeatedly have seen that over the last however many years about, you know, oh, maybe the courts will save us from Trumpism writ large. And we have seen, you know, of course, that the legal system is just not working.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
I mean, so much in that it's just a legal strategy, right? It doesn't—and I think, you know, I can kind of see this in the almost allergy that people have when talk of pardons comes up, for example, right? There's this notion that if you pardon someone, you're letting them off the hook, right? But that's not what a pardon does. A pardon confirms the crime.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
And I guess I'm saying there is this paucity of kind of a wider understanding of what happened that day because it has become this kind of legalistic football, right, of, like, who was standing where, who was part of the mob, what does it mean to be part of the mob, who was commanding them, et cetera, et cetera. Like, you get lost in all these details and all these individual cases.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
And, of course, this is the role of historians, right, to say— This is what that event did that day and this is its lasting impact. But that's what I'm saying. That's the gap, right? The gap is what is the narrative of this event? How do you protect it from manipulation, particularly when the person who's about to be inaugurated has been one of its kind of manipulators in chief?
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
I mean, reconciliation, I think, is a different question. I think it's not going to accomplish that. I think the only sense in which it puts it to rest, quote-unquote, is that it will, as I said, confirm their crimes, right? A pardon does not erase what people did. It's unfortunate, in my view, that Trump will be the one to pardon them because I do think there was an opportunity for the Democrats—
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
to extend a kind of grace towards some of the January 6th offenders, and by no means all of them, if they had been the ones to pardon them.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Well, I think, you know, first of all, historically, pardons have been almost a routine thing that any new ruler or president has done upon taking office.
Radio Atlantic
January 6 and the Case for Oblivion
Well, I mean, it's kind of on the face of it. It's, you know, a gesture of goodwill. But it's supposed to say, you know, we are all subject to the law and let's kind of start on the right foot, et cetera, et cetera.