He defines the concept of “victimhood nationalism” (not the nationalism of victims) around which the book is structured as “a narrative template to grant moral superiority and political legitimacy to a present nation.” For Lim, victimhood nationalism involves a dual process of de-historicization and over-historicization. Historical facts are cleansed of their complexity and refashioned to serve the nationalist needs of a country.

Along the way, victimhood nationalism objectifies and dehumanizes the victims of past injustices. Collective memory is no longer about collective reflection: it has become a historical asset to be used in the pursuit of contemporary legitimacy and power.

While Lim does not explicitly make this point, victimhood nationalism appears to be underpinned by a form of popular demand from below to forget, sanitize, or reinterpret a nation’s darker past in ways that serve present-day needs. Germany’s collective memory of the atrocities of World War II, for example, frequently lingers behind broader narratives about the universal causes of war and human violence. In Japan, meanwhile, wartime guilt is often subsumed within a discourse of absolute pacifism, blurring the distinction between perpetrator and victim.

The longest film series in Japanese cinema is The Human Condition (1959), adapted from the eponymous 1958 novel and centered on the pacifist protagonist Kaji. Kaji’s insistence on moral innocence follows him through every experience from wartime prostitution to Soviet gulags.

When I read the novel as a teenager in Seoul, I was struck by the dissonance between Kaji’s professed humanism and his racist condescension toward a Korean “comfort woman” who is infected with a sexually transmitted disease from Japanese soldiers. This contrasts with his devotion to his pale-skinned wife Michiko, which becomes the thread that sustains him all the way from the corruption of Japanese militarism to the bloodstained Manchurian front and ultimately into Soviet captivity.

Drawing on the idea of victimhood nationalism, I now find it easy to see why the book and film served a need for the postwar Japanese, liberal and conservative alike. It functioned as a vehicle to reframe wartime experience in ways that emphasize Japanese innocence and pacifism. It is not that Kaji’s story does not reflect the broader experience of the Japanese masses during the war. However, it elides what is ultimately at stake, turning such sentiments into a unilateral apologia and obscuring the structural forces driving the violence.

In Lim’s account, this postwar memory regime, often tinged at its margins with residual feelings of collective guilt and moral unease, underwent a significant transformation as it became enmeshed with the memory of the Holocaust. By 1963, Japanese peace activists and Holocaust survivors were already chanting “No more Hiroshima” and “No more Auschwitz” together at the annual ceremony in Poland marking the liberation of the concentration camp.

One strong point of Lim’s case for victimhood nationalism lies in his observation of how the memory of the Holocaust, often understood primarily as a singular historical catastrophe inflicted upon a single ethnic group, has become a template through which nations cast their own history of suffering. This means recasting sufferings as diverse as nuclear bombardment, colonialism, and Stalinism in ways that invite comparison with the Holocaust, transforming national memories into collective narratives of victimhood.

However, this project has often come at the expense of downplaying — or entirely overlooking — the agonies of real victims of these nations, from Japan’s military sex slaves to the political prisoners and detainees from other ethnic minorities who were persecuted under Adolf Hitler’s rule.

Lim discusses the dialectical interplay between the globalization and nationalization of this transnational memory regime. The incorporation of a particular nation’s victimhood narrative into the global memory formation of the Holocaust helps it gain moral capital and dignity, which in turn reinforces the global narrative, as seen in the adaptation of “Never again” by Japanese peace activists.

For Lim, the Holocaust has become a foundational frame of reference through which victims of historical tragedies are reinterpreted as martyrs, drawing on the way in which Israel commemorates the Holocaust. In the dominant Israeli national victimhood memory, the Israeli state was founded on the ashes of the Holocaust. The underlying logic is that if a Jewish state had predated the rise of Hitler, the Holocaust would not have occurred. Consequently, those who perished in Hitler’s gas chambers were not merely victims but martyrs.

In Germany, there was an effort to forge a postwar self-image that cleansed the sins of humanity by replacing the concrete realities of German wartime atrocities with vague, abstract questions such as “Why must humans wage war?” In collective memory, Lim argues, the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities were seen as crimes committed by Hitler and his henchmen, for whom justice had been served through the Nuremberg Trials. Ordinary Germans, meanwhile, tended to view themselves as the first and last victims of Hitler and, ultimately, as victims of an unjust memory.

For many Germans, the most horrifying memories stemmed from the experience of Germans who were interned in detention camps before their expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia. As early as 1949, West German political leaders already began to decontextualize German war crimes, with Hans-Christoph Seebohm, transport minister in the government of Konrad Adenauer, equating the suffering of German expellees with that of Holocaust victims.

According to Lim, victimhood took center stage in Germany’s nationalist narrative after the end of the Cold War. He cites a 1995 survey commissioned by Der Spiegel, in which about 40 percent of respondents age sixty-four or older said the postwar expulsion of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe was a crime against humanity on a par with the Holocaust. This form of victimhood nationalism, based on the dichotomy between “a few Nazi criminals” and “most innocent Germans,” was central to reinforcing the national identity of the unified Germany under Helmut Kohl.

Japan’s postwar memory culture, Lim suggests, was little different. He presents its cultural memory as a form of national victimology that defined the fifteen years of military rule between 1931 to 1945 as a historical aberration departing from an otherwise successful modernization process. This framework presented Japanese militarism as a deviation from, rather than a product of, Japan’s broader imperial development.

Much of the Japanese public imagination attributed responsibility for wartime atrocities solely to amorphous entities such as “militarism” or “the system” while depicting ordinary Japanese as innocent victims of the war. This narrative recast the peoples of Japan and the Asian nations it conquered as common victims of Japanese militarism.

For many Japanese, the memory of the atomic bombings supplies the dominant lens through which the war is remembered. Japan’s global identity as the only nation to have fallen victim to nuclear bombings has functioned, in Lim’s words, as a “screen memory that conceals Japan’s war crimes against Asian neighbors.” The dead and maimed of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are cast as victims of an “absolute evil.”

In turn, this narrative of absolute evil gave rise to a form of absolute pacifism that condemns all wars as evil, detached from its historical context. The issue of accountability is largely absent from Japanese pacifism because it identifies no clear subject of responsibility. De-historicized and decontextualized, Japan’s dominant version of pacifism is used to condemn war and nuclear bombs while rarely holding Japan accountable for the imperialist wars that devastated its neighbors.

In 1994, Kurihara Sadako, a poet who was critical of her country’s victimhood narrative, wrote the following words in a poem:

If the atomic bombing was mercy

so was the imperial army’s massacre of 20 thousand in Nanjing

so was the Nazis’ gas chamber that massacred 6 million

mercy.

Victimhood nationalism sanctifies victimhood into a collective form of martyrdom. Historical experiences are emptied of context, as certain elements are emphasized while others are marginalized. Lim refers to this as a combination of “historicization” and “de-historicization.”

One of Lim’s insightful observations is that de-historicization and globalization can serve as instruments of national cohesion and obstacles to transnational solidarity. By lifting national experiences of suffering up to a globally recognized moral framework associated with Holocaust remembrance, they strengthen collective identity at home. At the same time, they obscure the suffering of colonial subjects and other victims of historic persecution, evidently limiting the possibility of a genuinely universal memory politics.

The timeline of Lim’s book stops in the early twenty-first century. We are already living in a period when victimhood nationalism appears to be undergoing another transformation following an earlier phase marked by apologetic and self-pitying narratives of victimhood.

Recently, we have witnessed cases in which nationalist narratives of victimhood took a violent turn in Russia, Israel, and elsewhere, with claims of historical suffering invoked to justify the infliction of violence on others in the name of “Never again.” Benjamin Netanyahu’s explicit linking of his atrocities in Palestine with the fearful memory of the Holocaust has been widely documented. Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric portraying Mother Russia as a historical victim of the West is also well known.

Sooner rather than later, we may observe Japan and Germany using their own victimhood narratives to rearm themselves against China and Russia. Ahistorical narratives of nationalism are particularly corrosive.

In principle, the Left is internationalist, ultimately opposing all forms of nationalism even while critically defending the right of the oppressed to self-determination. For the Left, victimhood nationalism constitutes a particular challenge. While it is often articulated in universal moral languages — human rights, peace, and Holocaust remembrance — it blurs, or even glosses over, the memories of the devastation wrought by imperialism, colonialism, and authoritarian rule.

Lim’s case is a warning against the political use of remembrance, and that scope can likely reach beyond his proposition of victimhood nationalism. In order for “Never again” to retain its universal meaning, the Left must remain vigilant against all forms of narratives cloaked in the language of universal victimhood.