memory as a weapon

I've been working on reading Edwidge Danticat's "The Dew Breaker" over the past few days. I say working on, because I've rarely slowed down enough to simply sit and read. Still, the first 60 or so pages I've read offer a rather fascinating question, what happens to the perpetrators of violence, the torturers and killers that are state sanctioned and belief they are simply doing their job? Well her story isn't that simple nor are the emotions raised by her delicate writing.
What I enjoy about the story so far is the humanity in it. We learn about a man who used to torture prisoners through the eyes of his now adult daughter who always believed her father was the one tortured. This is all I've read so far but I'm amazed and in awe of the premise of it. What do you do? How do you live with that? How does anyone?

I've been thinking too of what an interesting month this has been. The anniversary of Tiananmen Square on June 3-4, Reagan's death...how will we remember the past, honestly and with all of it's most unforgivable flaws or will it be something more of a textbook memory--where history is re-written to be more palatable and more patriotic? One of my favorite quotes is by Milan Kundera, "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." I think no image could speak of this struggle more than that of the Chinese man putting his body in front of a tank or even Rachel Corrie putting herself in between a tank and a Palestinian home (unfortunately losing her life beneath that Israeli tank.) Still, what does it mean when memory is sanitized, denied, wiped clean? Can it still serve as a weapon against power...against forgetting?

peace!