After every collective harm—apartheid, genocide, systemic racial violence, colonial dispossession—a familiar chorus emerges. It's time to heal. We need to come together. We must move forward. The language sounds generous, even noble. But who benefits most from the rush to turn the page?

The call to 'move on' is rarely neutral. It carries within it a politics of forgetting, a distribution of whose pain matters and whose comfort takes priority. When we examine who is asking for closure and who is still waiting for acknowledgment, the supposedly universal desire for reconciliation reveals itself as deeply partisan.

This article unpacks the ideological work performed by premature calls for forgiveness and unity. Drawing on critical theory and the politics of memory, it asks an uncomfortable question: what if the demand to move on is itself a continuation of the original harm?

There is a pattern so consistent it functions almost like political law: the moment victims of collective harm begin demanding accountability, a counter-demand for reconciliation surfaces. The timeline for 'healing' is almost never set by those who were harmed. It is set by those who inflicted the harm, or by bystanders uncomfortable with the disruption that justice requires.

Consider how this operates structurally. After periods of racial violence, calls for unity typically ask the victimized community to demonstrate grace—to forgive publicly, to shake hands, to perform closure for the cameras. The perpetrating group, meanwhile, is asked to do remarkably little. Perhaps acknowledge that 'mistakes were made.' Perhaps express a vague regret. The asymmetry is staggering, yet it passes as balance.

This is what critical theorists identify as reconciliation without redistribution. The symbolic gesture replaces the material one. An apology substitutes for reparation. A handshake substitutes for structural reform. The surface appearance of harmony is purchased at the cost of actual justice, and the bill is always sent to those who can least afford it.

Premature reconciliation also functions as a disciplinary mechanism. Those who refuse to move on are recast as the problem—bitter, divisive, stuck in the past. The victim who insists on accountability is made to appear more disruptive than the perpetrator who caused the original harm. The politics of timing becomes a politics of silencing. By controlling when the conversation is supposed to end, those in power control whether it ever meaningfully began.

Takeaway

When you hear a call to 'move on,' ask who set the timeline—and notice whether the people being asked to forgive are the same people still waiting for repair.

If premature reconciliation is a tool of power, then collective memory is a tool of resistance. The struggle over how the past is remembered is never merely historical—it is a live political contest with material consequences. Who controls the narrative of what happened controls the range of what can be demanded now.

This is why dominant groups invest so heavily in shaping public memory. Statues are erected. Curricula are written. National holidays are chosen. Each of these acts is a claim about which past matters. When communities insist on remembering what power would prefer to forget—the Middle Passage, the Nakba, residential schools, Jim Crow—they are not 'dwelling in the past.' They are contesting the terms of the present.

Michel Foucault described this as counter-memory: the practice of surfacing suppressed histories that challenge official narratives. Counter-memory is dangerous precisely because it refuses the closure that dominant ideology demands. It keeps the wound visible not out of masochism but because the wound has not been treated. To remember collectively is to insist that the conditions which produced the harm have not been adequately addressed.

This is also why attacks on memory are so politically charged. Banning books about racial history, defunding museums of conscience, dismissing testimony as 'identity politics'—these are not neutral acts of moving forward. They are acts of erasure dressed in the language of progress. Every struggle over monuments, curricula, and commemorations is ultimately a struggle over whether justice is still owed.

Takeaway

Collective memory is not nostalgia—it is a political claim that the past still has debts the present has not paid.

The dominant liberal framework presents peace and justice as naturally aligned—get to reconciliation, and justice follows. Critical theory inverts this. Without justice, peace is just the silence of the suppressed. What passes for social harmony is often the exhaustion of those too worn down to keep fighting.

This distinction matters enormously for how we design transitional justice processes, truth commissions, and reparative frameworks. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for instance, is often celebrated as a model. But many South African scholars and activists have pointed out that the reconciliation it achieved came at the cost of meaningful economic redistribution. The truth was told. The reconciliation was performed. But the material structures of apartheid—land ownership, wealth distribution, institutional access—remained largely intact.

A justice-first framework does not reject peace. It rejects cheap peace—the kind purchased through the suppression of legitimate grievances. It insists that genuine social cohesion can only be built on a foundation of accountability: acknowledgment of harm, material repair, and structural transformation. These are not preconditions for moving on. They are the substance of what moving on actually means.

This reframing also shifts the moral burden. Under the reconciliation paradigm, the onus falls on victims to forgive. Under a justice paradigm, the onus falls on perpetrators and beneficiaries to repair. The question is no longer 'Why can't you let go?' but 'What have you done to make letting go possible?' That difference is not semantic. It is the difference between ideology and ethics.

Takeaway

Peace built on unaddressed injustice is not peace—it is managed silence. The question is never whether to move forward, but whether the ground has been prepared for everyone to move forward together.

The call to move on after collective harm is never as innocent as it sounds. It carries ideological weight, distributing the costs of reconciliation unevenly and protecting those who benefit most from forgetting.

This does not mean societies should remain permanently frozen in grievance. It means that the path forward must pass through accountability, not around it. Memory, repair, and structural transformation are not obstacles to peace—they are its only honest foundation.

The next time you hear someone say it's time to heal, ask a different question: heal from what, exactly—and has anything actually been done to stop the bleeding?