Victims of trauma, like car crashes, do sometimes suffer memory loss. Other people avoid dwelling on unhappy memories. The two things are quite different. The idea that you could be regularly abused from age three to 13 and have no memory of it is more than exceptional.
Aptheker's support for the military suppression of the Hungarian working class is not a difficult question as far as thinking it through goes. In fact it is a bit of a no-brainer. Side with the Hungarian workers' councils, or side with the military authorities crushing them? Same with Stalin. Side with the working class, or side with the brutal dictator? How hard is that? What it did demand of people who were committed to social change is moral courage. That was the hard part. Everyone in the Communist Parties knew that they were choosing to turn a blind eye to oppression. Some people had the moral courage to make the break with Stlalinism, like my good friend Dave Hallsworth http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/1899/ Other, like Herbert Aptheker did not.
He was wrong on slavery, too. Because he did not understand Marx's dictum that the working class is revolutionary, or it is nothing.Slave revolts were decisive only in the setting of a wider revolutionary struggle, like the war of independence, or the French Revolution. Otherwise, like Peasant Jacqueries, they had no focus or possibility of forward momentum. Aptheker was the ultra-leftist phrasemonger, magicking up a history of revolt to drown out the sound of his own shabby compromise with the military dictatorship in the USSR and Roosevelt's militarisation of labour in the US.