One of my earliest memories is of my father speaking to me about the importance of reading, learning, and understanding history. Knowing where we come from, learning from mistakes to avoid repeating them, but even more importantly, recognizing when someone speaking about the past was coating it in makeup or simply leaving out entire passages that would redefine the story. Over time, I came to understand the message behind those words and the power that comes from controlling memory.
The years allowed me to see that playing with history is the fastest way to fill some with nationalist pride by emphasizing others’ differences. Those others who for decades lived alongside us, but without knowing it, neither side knowing, they represented the embodiment of evil. The reason for their wickedness was ethereal; what mattered was not explaining it but knowing where to find the source of our ills, so as to channel resentments, frustrations, and fears into a single feeling: hatred.
Hatreds that justified the great punishments of some segments of humanity against others. One might overstate it with simplistic reductionism, arguing that the distinction between citizens and barbarians ultimately rotted the Western Roman Empire from within. Meanwhile, in the Eastern Empire, the redefinition and reordering of Christian texts helped it endure for several more centuries. Its end, in the most basic sense, was similar. The others were simply more powerful.
So powerful that they managed to alter memory, to hide achievements, stories, and poems for centuries. Ancient texts that some of those barbarians preserved, while in other lands, they were only accessible to those who committed to following some divinity. Memory, inventions, and ways of life were defined by those who controlled the written word. Eco had already noted it: control of knowledge implies control of the historical narrative, and whoever controls the narrative controls the limits of what a society can imagine as truth.
What is interesting is that even with the fall of knowledge’s exclusivity, little has changed. The discourses remain, but the tools of their manufacture and distribution have evolved. Controlling the narrative remains essential to controlling human beings. As society’s inputs change, the narratives and legends mutate. We cling to the legacy of bread and circuses that served the Romans so well for so long, because a full belly in the midst of celebration and revelry tends to think very little.
What is extraordinary is that throughout time, countless writers, politicians, philosophers, and clowns have warned us of the dangers of ignoring history. Of reducing the triumphs of someone or something to an isolated behavior that has no impact on anyone in society. Successes, like prominence, do not arise suddenly. Each has its own history, its heroes and villains.
Perhaps the warning that has resonated most deeply with me is Milan Kundera’s, discovered while reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. A warning that has since haunted my mind as I see it constantly materialize, sometimes in moments that hit close to home, sometimes on the front page of a newspaper.
Kundera’s ink gifted us these words through the allegory of a photograph in which a group of protagonists ends in the solitude of the leader:
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Other writers have been less direct, focusing instead on describing how the Ministry of Magic in the world of Harry Potter controls the information published daily. Rowling seems to revisit the same concept that Orwell sketched in his Ministry of Truth. Both rewrite reality to make it more palatable, both persecute those who dare to think differently, and both are condemned to their eventual self-destruction.
And yet, beyond books and among our leaders, the same age-old practices of distorting history to blame the other remain alive. As a result, the same age-old consequences of division, polarization, and distrust continue to grow.
The discourse is similar everywhere: the real history, the one that truly represents us, is hidden, and only the leader of the moment can reveal it. What follows is a history riddled with gossip and unrealities, where economics does not apply, and statistics have yet to be invented. As Foucault would say, it is a history conceived in power to sustain it. And so, in anachronistic fashion, foreigners are pariahs, undeclared enemies of the homeland.
The result is demanding reparations and apologies for harms done in a past that supposedly contributed nothing to the present. A discretionary demand that absolves the Chicxulub of all blame for the near-instantaneous genocide that sprang from its presence.
Perhaps it is this same discretion, deployed to rewrite history, that explains why surprise is still felt when hearing assertions claiming that “in Mexico there is no repression, no state force used against the people, the greatest freedom of expression in all of history is practiced, censorship does not exist.” Then, like a theatrical morning performance, the speakers are seen criticizing, attacking, and even insulting the press, while innocently making public where these people of bad faith reside.
Further south, the redefinition of history feeds an imaginary longing for Gran Colombia. An ideology is manufactured as an essential need to establish a local counterweight to policies born beyond the borders but with local repercussions. The dismemberment, it seems, was spoken in English, with the British as the main protagonists and the Americans as supporting actors. It is a confrontation between Jorge Manrique and the Book of Ecclesiastes over whether all time past was better. Suddenly, the security crisis, the instability of the currency, and the lack of water in entire regions are attributed to the country’s geographic size, interpersonal relationships, and geographic distances — none of which have anything to do with national history.
To think that four decades ago, there were those who believed that with the arrival of cyberspace, many of these problems would change. Those were times of optimism, when the democratization of information, a contradictory concept in a world mired in a digital divide, would allow the deceptions and manipulations of those with perverse interests to vanish. The result has been quite the opposite: sophistication has led to the creation of more believable narratives and alternate realities that take root in the minds of many as supreme truths. The internet did not eliminate manipulation; it perfected it.
The technologies that were going to lift us out of poverty, democratize existence, and broaden our vision with different perspectives no longer need to be erased and rewritten; they simply need to flood us with plausible but false narratives. To promote fiction in order to make it more appealing, and to encourage the cultivation of a short-term memory.
Yes, the danger lies in failing to recognize the importance of knowing how we have arrived at this present. Not knowing which threads were woven together to create the sense of belonging to a language, a piece of land, or an ideology. The collective fictions that Harari identifies as the protagonists in creating the concept called society.
Ignoring the past means building the road along which we watch demagogy triumph, slavery cease to be a punishment, and genocide become justified as the mandate of a divine will. Perhaps the supposed democratization of artificial intelligence will free us from all sin and make possible a more equitable, just, and peaceful world, or perhaps it will mark the beginning of a regression in all these areas, exacerbating already existing differences between cities and countryside, or between the Global North and South.
While we await the answer, let us continue celebrating being invaded, let us rejoice in the existence of slaves, let us excuse corruption and normalize hunger. After all, if all those things were as bad as they’re described, surely they would include them in school textbooks. The problem is not that history is manipulated, but that we have a broken memory. We choose to believe without questioning.
