The debate about the past and memory—which are not the same thing—or about history and historical memory—which are also very different things—has recently resurfaced in Spain. It happens from time to time, in different forms and with different intensities, but I do not remember a single moment in this century in which these tensions have not been present among citizens: The historical memory law, without going any further, will be 17 years old in a few months. Now it is about the attack that the right-wing parties carry out in certain communities against the Democratic Memory Law, who hasn't turned two years old yet. There is nothing new in this: politicians have always wanted to appropriate the past. But I have the confusing impression that this interest in mastering our common past, what we call history, has changed its nature in recent times, sometimes allowing daring things that to those of us who remember – there are not many of us, unfortunately – seem like something out of old age. manuals that we thought were outdated. And one ends up remembering once again, and with some fatigue, the well-worn proverb of 1984: “Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”. Yes, Orwell knew it well, or the authorities of his fictional dictatorship knew it.
I have always liked the banal coincidence between the publication of the novel and a brief episode in Colombian history, and I cannot resist writing it down here. During those years, Colombia was sinking into an unprecedented outbreak of political violence—and this is said of a country that already had more than a handful of civil wars on its back—and the two major parties began to negotiate to end it as possible. with partisan war. For the following elections, in which the fate of that shaken country would be defined, the liberal party proposed Darío Echandía, a moderate liberal who had been designated president at other critical moments; But a few months later, while walking through the streets of Bogotá as part of a liberal demonstration, Echandía was the victim of an attack. He survived, but his brother died. The next day he withdrew his candidacy, and from the entire episode his melancholic phrase remained in history: “Power for what?” This occurred in 1949. Orwell's novel, published that same year, contained a possible answer. The power for this, Mr. Echandía: to control the past. Well, whoever controls the past, controls the future.
That's right: political power is, among other things, the ability to impose a version of history on a given society. It has always been like this, as I say, but it was the totalitarianisms of the 20th century that understood it best, or that got the most juice out of it. What has changed in recent times is, perhaps, the ease with which we do it or will be able to do it. Stalin had to use a daring and very complex technique to eliminate Trotsky and Lev Kamenev from the photographs that recounted the Revolution; In another case he inserted himself into the photo of a convalescent Lenin, trying to prove that he had visited him in his last days and thus gain the right to be his successor. There is a fantastic photo in which Mussolini raises a sword on the back of a horse, and today we know that he had the man who had the horse removed from the bridle so that nothing would hinder his virile pose as a hero: like so many dictators, Mussolini was a man of self-conscious masculinity. But our societies are now slowly entering a dangerous era where minimal computer knowledge will be enough to launch an adulterated, convincing and, what is worse, influential image to the world: by the time the falsification is detected, if it is detected, it will already have achieved its political consequences.
But this is not, strictly speaking, what we are talking about these days. It is true that this (not so) brave new world of artificial intelligence worries me deeply, and it worries me even more to see that our leaders do not seem to be very worried. The laws that will regulate artificial intelligence are not in their infancy: they have not been conceived. Of course, the law lags behind reality, always pursuing it at a forced pace, always with its tongue hanging out; and in this case the warnings are clear, and the consequences of not acting in time are – literally – unimaginable. But our debate now does not refer to images of any kind, nor to artificial intelligence, but to something more familiar: the war over the story. There are immense questions surrounding it: how is the story told? Who tells it, or who should tell it? How can we defend ourselves from the rude attempts made by political forces to impose their interested and biased narrative on us? Beneath all these questions lies one that, in its simplicity, I find moving: why is the past so vulnerable?
That's what it all comes down to, it seems to me. And the answer is dizzying and at the same time simple: the past is vulnerable because, in a certain sense, it only exists as long as we imagine it. A famous novel begins by saying that the past is a foreign country, and the metaphor is quite good, at least in the book, but the reality is more complex precisely because it is not like that: many of us would like it, but the past is not a physical place where we can go to really see how things happened. Paul Valéry, who spoke so often and so well on these issues, visited a group of students in 1932, and spoke with them about our difficult relationship with the events of history. The same events, he reminded those students, constituted one story if told by an anticlerical and free-thinking historian (Michelet, for example) and a very different one if told by a conservative and ultra-Catholic historian with authoritarian tendencies (for example, Joseph de Maistre). . How is that possible? Valéry answers: it is possible because the past is “an entirely mental thing.” And he immediately adds: “It is nothing more than images and beliefs.”
Since they realized the implications that this has, politicians have not missed a single opportunity to adulterate those images, to manipulate those beliefs. They do this by telling stories whose truth is difficult to verify for the average citizen, who often has neither the time nor the instruments to question what they are told, and frequently does not have the will either: because the images and beliefs that they come from their political leaders are always much more flattering, more pleasant or less uncomfortable than those proposed by others. That is why the historical past is constantly moving, depending on political winds or fickle cultural fashions: the placing or removing of marble plaques from our public places is nothing more than the incarnation of these mental phenomena. Today it seems that populisms around the world have discovered, in the absence of proposals to improve people's future, the immense profitability of promising them a better past. What is a better past? A space where they feel more comfortable, less guilty, less responsible. It is a mistake to accept it; It is a double error to accept it from politicians. It would be like accepting a doctored photo. Who decides what appears in the photo? Don't let it be them, please. Let it not be them.
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