Selective Omission

Selective omission is a memory bias in which a group, such as a state, a media organization, or public opinion more broadly, works to forget and avoid reintroducing a traumatic or unwanted collective memory. The term is often applied to the way history gets rewritten after a war to fit a society's own stereotypes and moral values more comfortably, including by denying atrocities that were actually committed; under this pattern a group may forget or minimize the atrocities carried out by its own side while readily publicizing those committed by an opposing side, a pattern connected on the winning side to ideas such as a just war fought only against combatants. Researchers including Norman Brown and Peter Lee have also studied a related pattern in personal memory, testing the idea that people organize their memories around major life changing events: people who had lived through a war or a natural disaster such as a tsunami tended to date their own personal memories against those historically defined periods, for example describing something as happening during the war or after the earthquake, while people living in New York rarely used the September 11 attacks the same way to date their own memories, apparently because the attacks, although well remembered, had comparatively little direct effect on their day to day lives.