History, Memory, Identity

I’ve been talking to a lot of people about how we remember. How I will remember this experience, how we construct memories of our own lives, and how we remember communal memories – a history that either we participated it in or that constructed the world as we know it. Experiences stack upon each other, each contributing some weight, some structure to the architecture of our identities. We pull out values from events, how we were raised, books we have read. But how often do we really think about all the influences that can manipulate or distort how we remember, what we add to that concoction of history that gives us a definition? For some reason we have this misconception that we are in control of our own identities. To some extent I suppose we are, we can chose to analyze and incorporate our own experiences into ourselves in different ways, we can watch the news in belief or incredulity. But how many things do we simply take for granted? How are we shaped by what our parents tell us to believe, how our community tells us we ought to behave, how we are taught history in school? We aren’t supposed to argue with these authorities.

I wonder how many people have taken a history class after getting out of high school. Most people seem to have had the curiosity beaten out of them by surveys filled with names and dates. History, for the general public, is a boring subject that is reduced to memorizing. Memorizing; ingraining specific events, people and renditions into our memories so that we will all have the same basic image of what constitutes our history. We can feel connected through this. It is the substance of patriotism. We share this past, and it is taught it a way that we can be proud of it. This sentiment is a convenient political tool to rally support, or evoke ideals that go all the way back to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. We find it difficult to argue with the sentiments of a dead, white man we’ve been taught to hold in such great esteem.

If this public memory were violated in some way (such as pointing out the fact that Thomas Jefferson was an adulterous slave-owner, or the fact that the pioneers displaced and killed thousand of native americans) we suddenly would not only doubt the validity of our own history, but the very values of our patriotism. If we can recognize that any sort of memory is also a form of omission and forgetting, that it is a product of an agenda and politics, suddenly it becomes a much more interesting subject. History is not telling us what happened it the past. It is presenting a form of the past that we are supposed to accept in the present. It reveals one perspective, one interpretation of an interplay of events that we probably will never really understand. But more importantly, different histories affect how we think about ourselves.

In Chile the last 40 years of history are a bit unclear. This is not a period that is covered in the high school history class. In 1973 General Pinochet forcibly and violently removed the socialist president Salvador Allende from office, claiming violations of executive power and alluding to malicious communist conspiracies. The next 17 years of military dictatorship were either filled with disappearances, censorship and torture; or stabilization, development, and security depending on who you’re talking to.

There is a large portion of the population that adamantly continues to support and proselytize the military regime, denying all of the verifiable accounts of gross human rights violations, blatant propaganda, and deceptive control. They cite the impressive development in transportation and public services during the regime instead. You can see a direct correlation between how much the military junta benefited them and how much they defend it. We choose to believe what upholds our system of morals or justification. On the other side of that, it was the poor who had the most to gain from Allende’s socialist experiment, and they were also the ones that lost the most during Pinochet’s rule: family, homes, freedom of speech.

This is the odd thing about Chile. This history isn’t a story that you can put in a book because it is still living. When you start to hear all the different opinions and apparent facts regarding the dictatorship it becomes obvious just how subjective and manipulable history really is.

So I have to wonder, how will this eventually be written? What will the official legacy of Pinochet be after the living memories die? Will this deep rift in Chilean society persist, evolving through generations, transforming into less understood and simply dogmatic prejudice or hate? Or will it somehow be reconciled, brining the collective memory once again back into union, forgetting the complexity of the reality than transpired.

As divisive events pass and fade so too does the diversity of opinion. Alternative interpretations are pushed to the fringe as new generations become less and less invested in the meaning of the past. Events become reduced to useful anecdotes, employed to support present actions with the incontrovertible truth of history. How much is hidden within the past of your own country? What has been reduced, covered up and simplified? What kind of dark crimes have been buried and ignored in order to maintain the unity of patriotism?

Patriotism is valuable to a certain extent. You should be proud of what your country has achieved, the privileges and rights you enjoy, the actual accomplishments of people, government, and communities. But rabidly believing that your country is exceptional is a recipe for ethnocentrism, isolation, and hostility.  So maybe give it a little thought, and in the next speech you hear take notice of how history, in a tailored and simplified form, is being used to manipulate opinion in the present.