Mr. Lanzmann said in a statement: "Museums come to terms with death and institute forgetting as well as memory.
That is to say, he believes in the uses of forgetting as much as the necessity to remember.
Shocked that memory of this sacrifice was fading, Mr. Slaughter led the effort to build the $20 million memorial, a monument to the risks of forgetting as much as fighting.
There are wet, earnest commentators who think Chan should have been played by an Asian actor, conveniently forgetting that Asians were then in short supply in Hollywood, forgetting as well that the issue was not Chan's race but the respect in which he was always held.
It seems possible, though, that some of the biggest – the Jimmy Savile scandals, for example, or the murder of a British family in Annecy – are simply too harrowing to make a permanent mark, and will turn out instead to be things we sweep under a carpet of forgetting as soon as we decently can.
The result was simulated selective forgetting as well as selective permanent memory storage during a long, 20,000-hr simulation (Fig. 8).
