There is a memory that forgets nothing, and another that recalls only what it desires, and between the two arises one of the most pervasive phenomena in politics and one of the least willing to acknowledge itself: the duality of memory. In public life, forgetting is not always a defect of memory, nor is remembering evidence of an alert consciousness.
A person may remember an event because it supports his account, and forget it because it threatens that account. At this point memory ceases to be a neutral storehouse of facts and becomes an instrument for rearranging the past to the measure of the present. This is not a passing phenomenon; it is among the oldest instruments of power, because it does not confiscate the truth. It merely arranges it.
The ideologized mind is adept at disposing of time. It summons up a position taken half a century ago as though it happened yesterday, if it incriminates an opponent, and cannot recall what it said itself a few years back once that becomes embarrassing. Alliances shift, slogans are exchanged, and those who held them move from a cause to its opposite - whereupon selective memory undertakes to build the bridge that makes yesterday consistent with today.
Herein lies the paradox: the politician does not usually need to falsify history. It is enough for him to select from it. And selection is more dangerous than outright lying, because a lie is exposed by setting the account against reality, whereas selection builds its case out of facts that are entirely true, illuminating some and extinguishing others, and emerging with an incomplete picture that appears complete with a half-truth deadlier than any falsehood entire.
Iranian policy may be the clearest contemporary model of this duality. In its discourse, Tehran raises the principle of sovereignty and the rejection of interference and counts any foreign military presence near its borders a threat to its national security - a comprehensible position in the logic of states. But the principle loses its absoluteness once it becomes exchangeable according to party and geography. Where its adversaries are concerned, sovereignty is a red line beyond discussion; where its own influence is concerned, intervention itself is reformulated under the headings of resistance, common security, the unity of the arenas, and the defense of the axis.
Nor does the duality stop at the boundaries of discourse. Tehran has warned Gulf states against taking part in American economic pressure, and its statements have gone as far as intimating that neighbors' interests would be targeted should they participate. At the same time, it speaks of respecting the sovereignty of countries, while its name is coupled with armed forces inside Iraq that shell an important part of the country in the Kurdistan Region to the point that Baghdad now faces mounting pressure to keep its territory from becoming a platform for striking its neighbors, or its own region, which America and its allies consider a red line.
The clearest manifestation of this equation is reflected by the relationship with the Kurdistan Region. The region whose capital has been struck by ballistic missiles more than once, on the pretext that it shelters what threatens Iranian security, is the same region required, under security understandings, to disarm the Iranian Kurdish opposition and move it away from the border. That is to say: the presence of armed groups on a neighbor's soil is unacceptable when they are Tehran's adversaries, and legitimate when they are its allies, such as the militias in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen. The rule is one and the same; the verdict changes with the identity of whoever holds the rifle.
Iran is not an exception in this respect so much as its most consistent and conspicuous model. Many keep two ledgers: one of the grievances done to them, read aloud at every gathering, and one of what their own hands have committed, which stays in the drawer. This is why the discourses resemble one another, while the narratives contradict one another, and why talk of international law and good neighborliness becomes a language brandished in the face of adversaries rather than a standard by which actions are measured.
The point here is not to deny a country's right to protect its security or to weave its alliances. The matter is finer than that: does the principle we demand of others remain binding on us when circumstances reverse? That is the line separating realism from selectivity. Realism acknowledges that states have interests, and that they may maneuver, bargain, and change their allies. Duality, by contrast, sets rules for others that it does not consider itself bound by and at that point memory turns from an instrument for understanding history into an instrument for justifying positions.
Societies that live on a double memory do not learn from their history; they reproduce it. For them history is not a school, but an ammunition depot, opened whenever the battle needs a witness and bolted shut whenever a fact appears that does not serve the account. Reconciliation with history therefore does not begin with agreement on a single narrative, which is impossible, but with accepting an idea at once simple and arduous: that the past does not change as our positions toward it change.
What pays the price in the end is neither the historian nor the adversary, but the generations handed a truncated account, which they take for an inheritance, and are then asked to defend as an identity. We may differ over the interpretation of an event, over the assessment of its motives and its consequences. What we may not do is demand that others remember what suits us and then grant ourselves a license to forget when the truth grows heavy. A mature political memory is not the one that retains everything, but the one strong enough to remember what it hates to remember. A state that wants a stable future needs a memory that neither avenges nor deceives: a memory that acknowledges facts, whoever their authors, errors whoever committed them, and victims whatever their identities.
Once memory becomes the property of ideology, truth forfeits its right to exist unless it seeks permission from the owners of the narrative. Here the great paradox is complete: minds afflicted with a fish's memory whenever their own past is examined, which turn into a complete archive from which not a comma is missing whenever an adversary's past is examined. This is less a weakness of memory than a weakness of integrity toward it. Politics changes positions, interests change alliances, and time changes a great deal. Truth alone should not change along with them.
