Past studies of collective memory have focussed on how negative emotions, like anger or grief, are concealed by or tamed within the history represented. On the other hand, it has been argued that resentment is a basis of social action and its form, as we can see that in the process of class formation. Then, do not people with the self-consciousness of being oppressed in a social structure, project their resentment in their own histories? This paper aims to examine this question by analysing an account of the First World War by Ulster Loyalists, who claimed their hardship as members of the Protestant Working Class in the Northern Ireland society in the 1970s.
In a pamphlet published in the 1970s Loyalists described their social experience as a story in which their hard work was neglected by Britain and by Protestant upper-class politicians. At the same time, they also described the experience of serving in the Great War as miserable work with no reward, and juxtaposed it with their other experiences of oppression. Further, they related a story of one battle in which Britain betrayed Ulster's devotion, and forced a huge number of Ulster soldiers to die meaninglessly. The plots of these stories are the same: first devotion, then betrayal, and finally suffering.
What we can see in this process of giving a plot to a past event, is a mechanism in which people create or discover "the same" experience and emotion in the past in their social imaginations. In the case this paper examines social and economical hardship were described in such a way that reinforced their nationalism and hostility towards the other, Catholic group. But when such an imagination crosses social categories, for instance, of religion, nation and race, it is also supposed to have the possibility of revealing the contingency of such categories.
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