On Forgetting, in a Democracy
- Alka Pradhan
- Oct 8
- 8 min read
On a sunny day in June 2025, I visited the celebrated writer Hwang Sokyong at his home in Gunsan, South Korea. Years spent investigating the history of state-sponsored torture had led me through Mr Hwang’s fiery accounts of the fight for democracy in South Korea,[1] and my despair over the deterioration of law in the United States led me to his doorstep. When he opened the door, and I introduced myself as ‘the Guantanamo lawyer’, he first beamed, then said, ‘I was just watching the violence in Los Angeles on the news’.
The comment made me flinch. There was little surprise in his voice, unlike the breathless tone of the US media in describing events that have been foretold for decades. We Americans are now surprised when military are deployed to quell political protests;[2] indignant when surveillance expands beyond Muslim communities;[3] shocked that concentration camps could be opened on the mainland despite the continuing existence of Guantanamo.[4] ‘History is a conflict between the pain of memory and the ease of forgetting’, said Mr Hwang. Sometimes, watching from Gitmo, it feels like Americans have been programmed to party through the suffering of others, and then forget because we felt no pain.
Guantanamo Bay is a rough place, where a few minutes under the sun will cover your neck in sweat and fill your nostrils with dust, and odd birds, or insects, of varying sizes will scurry away as you trudge towards your damp lodgings. When on the island, we become hyper-focused on the blaring injustice there. Each transgression by the guards, each untreated detainee illness triggers fury. Our clients were ‘dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean’,[5] but unlike Hamilton, some of them never made it out. America forgot about them, so we lawyers harness our anger to keep reminding the world.
From Guantanamo, we have watched democracy recede on the mainland for over two decades, with the same anger. Even the tortured men at Gitmo comment on issues like the targeting of Black Americans and the impunity of US police,[6] and the erosion of free speech or religious rights when their expression is politically inconvenient.[7] Masked ICE agents may disappear your school nurse, but as long as the autumn brings pumpkin spice everything, surely things are not that bad?
‘Each generation feels tempted to choose comfort over responsibility’, said Mr Hwang, ‘Forgetting is easy, compromise is tempting, and isolation is comfortable’. Sitting in his sun-filled library, it was hard to imagine him wrestling with demons during his years of imprisonment. Because of our culture of forgetting, it is also hard to imagine going to jail for opposing the sort of acts now being perpetrated by the US government, as he did. ‘Were there times when you could not speak or write?’ I asked, thinking of his torture. He did not hesitate. ‘Yes, there were times when the weight of fear or grief was too heavy. After friends were executed or after nights of interrogation, I sometimes felt paralyzed’. He paused while we sipped from our cups. ‘But it never lasted long. Silence visited me, but it could not stay. Memory broke it open again. The dead would not let me rest’.
Whose deaths will keep us awake? I’ve seen former clients die after release from Gitmo, from injuries we inflicted on them.[8] Drones under Obama decimated families; one of my clients was a young girl who came to DC to ask for justice after a drone blew up her grandmother in Pakistan.[9] None of these ‘foreign’ deaths disturbed most Americans. The brutal murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor galvanized many,[10] but by the end of 2020, the protests had stopped short of achieving real reform, although ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ was now painted prominently in front of the White House.[11]
But we should lose sleep even before killings begin here at home, right? With friends, I circulated a letter to Columbia University alumni in March 2025, furious at the school authorities for facilitating the persecution of students. Many signed, but some law school alumni were incensed. ‘So you support Hamas terrorists’, they messaged, referring to Columbia students Mahmoud Khalil and Ranjani Srinivasan, sidestepping all facts and law.[12] Several formerly dear friends, now among the leadership of their powerful law firms, stayed silent. They would not sign; they had tee times scheduled. One of them said, in earnest, ‘We’re so grateful for the work that non-profit lawyers are doing right now’.
‘Were you angry with people who did not speak out back then? Are you angry?’ I asked Mr Hwang, about the persecution of the 1980s. This was the real reason for my visit: I needed to know what was forgivable, decades later. I needed to know from an elder that my anger might be productive, that we could still prevent the worst excesses of fascism in the US. ‘Silence is betrayal’, he said. ‘Words alone cannot change the world, but without words, no change is possible’.
He went on, animated by my own barely-concealed agitation. ‘I lost friends, I lost family, I lost years of my life. But I never lost my conviction that the truth had to be spoken. It is the difference between carrying silence like a stone and carrying memory like a torch. One crushes you, the other lights the way’.
The tremendous irony of our culture of forgetting is that the memory of the internet—the tool that destroyed our attention span—is infinite. In 1985, the book Gwangju Diary, an eyewitness account of the 1980 massacres in Gwangju, was published under Mr Hwang’s name. The now-credited author was a student named Lee Jae-Eui, but Mr Hwang was already a famed writer, had participated in the Gwangju uprising and compilation of accounts, and was willing to assume the danger of backlash. The book was officially banned, but secretly distributed throughout South Korea, and later relied upon to establish the crimes committed by the government in Gwangju.
Just forty years later, very little such toil is necessary to preserve memory of atrocities. The CIA’s internal account of my client Ammar al Baluchi’s torture at the black sites is available by quick internet search,[13] but some of the same techniques are now used on detainees at Alligator Alcatraz.[14] Graphic photographs from the US military’s massacre of innocents in Haditha, Iraq, were published online by the New Yorker,[15] a war crime forecasting the recent renaming of the Department of Defense as the ‘Department of War’.[16] Instead of risking our lives to preserve memory, we now risk our democracy for the luxury of forgetting it.
And we forfeit our own dignity. Dignity, recalled Mr Hwang, sustained South Korean activists until democratization. ‘That’s why even after defeats, the movement always returned. You cannot permanently suppress a people who know their worth. And it’s a lesson I hope younger generations never forget: democracy begins with dignity’. Watching famous technology CEOs pay obsequious homage to the White House amidst a nationwide crackdown on their customers’ right to freedom of expression, I question where, exactly, the end of dignity might be.[17]
The day after my meeting with Mr Hwang, I attended the opening of the National Museum of Korean Democracy in Seoul, based in the preserved Namyeongdong interrogation and torture center.[18] Of the museum, Mr Hwang mused, ‘A democracy without memory is like a tree without roots. It may stand for a while, but it cannot endure the storms’. It took about forty years after democratization for the Namyeongdong facility to be turned into a memorial—justice is a work in progress in South Korea, but it will be built on memory. Walking through the room where a young student protestor was waterboarded to death in the name of ‘anti-communism’, I think of the US government’s excuse of ‘terrorism’ to justify dismantling the rule of law.[19] I think of the migrants newly transferred to Guantanamo in February 2025,[20] twenty-three years after the facility’s opening. And I wonder how long it will take us to remember to remember.
Alka Pradhan
Alka Pradhan is a human rights lawyer practicing at Guantanamo Bay and before the International Criminal Court. Her writing does not reflect the opinion of the Department of Defense, and even less the ‘Department of War’.
Special thanks to Professor Hyunah Ahn of Kunsan National University, for her generosity and skill in providing interpretation.
[1] See eg Hwang Sokyong, The Prisoner: A Memoir (Sora Kim-Russell and Anton Hur tr, Verso 2021); Hwang Sokyong, The Guest (KJ Chun and M West tr, Seven Stories Press 2005); Hwang Sokyong, Mater 2-10 (Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae tr, Scribe Publications 2023).
[2] Rebecca Schneid, ‘Trump Has Deployed Troops at Home Like No Other President. Here is Where He’s Sent Them’ (Time, 11 August 2025) <https://time.com/7308904/dc-national-guard-trump-troops/> accessed 18 September 2025.
[3] Jessica Katzenstein, ‘The High Costs of Post-9/11 Mass Surveillance’ (Costs of War, 26 September 2023), <https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2023/surveillance> accessed 18 September 2025.
[4] Hatzel Vela, ‘Families and immigrant detainees allege “horrible” conditions at “Alligator Alcatraz”’ (9 July 2025), <https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/families-immigrant-detainees-allege-horrible-conditions-alligator-alca-rcna217743> accessed 18 September 2025.
[5] Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton: An American Musical (Grand Central Publishing 2016).
[6] ‘Systemic racism pervades US police and justice systems, UN Mechanism on Racial Justice in Law Enforcement says in new report urging reform’ (UNOCHR, 28 September 2023) <https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/09/systemic-racism-pervades-us-police-and-justice-systems-un-mechanism-racial> accessed 18 September 2025.
[7] ‘USA: Free speech on campus needs to be protected, not attacked, say experts’ (UNOCHR, 25 July 2024) <https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/07/usa-free-speech-campus-needs-be-protected-not-attacked-say-experts> accessed 18 September 2025.
[8] ‘Former Guantanamo Detainee, Hunger Striker Emad Hassan, Dies at 45’ (The New Arab, 2 August 2024) <https://www.newarab.com/news/former-guantanamo-detainee-emad-hassan-dies-oman-45> accessed 18 September 2025.
[9] ‘Pakistani Family Urges US to End Drone Strikes’ (Dawn, 30 October 2013) <https://www.dawn.com/news/1052706> accessed 18 September 2025.
[10] ‘Breonna Taylor: Protesters call on people to “say her name”’ (BBC News, 7 June 2020) <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52956167> accessed 18 September 2025.
[11] AJ Willingham, ‘Washington, DC paints a giant “Black Lives Matter” message on the road to the White House’ (CNN, 5 June 2025) <https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/us/black-lives-matter-dc-street-white-house-trnd> accessed 18 September 2025.
[12] Leila Fadel, Taylor Haney, Arezou Rezvani, and Kyle Gallego-Mackie, ‘“Citizenship won’t save you”: Free speech advocates say student arrests should worry all’ (NPR, 8 April 2025) <https://www.npr.org/2025/04/08/nx-s1-5349472/students-protest-trump-free-speech-arrests-deportation-gaza> accessed 18 September 2025.
[13] Julian Borger, ‘CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach interrogators torture techniques’ Guardian (London, 14 March 2022) <https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/mar/14/cia-black-site-detainee-training-prop-torture-techniques> accessed 18 September 2025.
[14] Peter Charalambous and Laura Romero, ‘“It’s like you’re dead alive”: Families, advocates allege inhumane conditions at “Alligator Alcatraz”’ (ABC News, 14 August 2025) <https://abcnews.go.com/US/youre-dead-alive-families-advocates-allege-inhumane-conditions/story?id=124645763> accessed 18 September 2025.
[15] Madeleine Baran, ‘The Haditha Massacre Photos That the Military Didn’t Want the World to See’ (The New Yorker, 27 August 2024) <https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/in-the-dark/the-haditha-massacre-photos-that-the-military-didnt-want-the-world-to-see> accessed 18 September 2025.
[16] Harlan Ullman, ‘U.S. Department of what? Are you serious?’ (UPI, 10 September 2025) <https://www.upi.com/Voices/2025/09/10/department-of-war-Hegseth/8911757437560/> accessed 18 September 2025.
[17] Rebecca Falconer, ‘Big Tech elite lavish praise on Trump at White House dinner’ (Axios, 4 September 2025) <https://www.axios.com/2025/09/05/trump-tech-dinner-ceo-zuckerberg-musk> accessed 18 September 2025.
[18] Yoon Min-sik, ‘Symbol of tyranny breathes new life as museum of pro-democracy movement’ (The Korea Herald, 21 May 2025) <https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10492540> accessed 18 September 2025.
[19] Anna Meier, ‘What Does a “Terrorist” Designation Mean?’ (Lawfare, 19 July 2020) <https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-does-terrorist-designation-mean> accessed 18 September 2025.
[20] Maia Davies, ‘Trump sends first migrant detainees to Guantanamo Bay’ (BBC News, 5 February 2025) <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0p1ykxyzjo> accessed 18 September 2025.
