This text belongs to the Historia y Vida newsletter, which is sent every Thursday afternoon. If you want to receive it, sign up here.
There are moments in which everything changes abruptly, in which the narrative thread of the story stops, transforms or speeds up. And that change occurs forever.
The fall of Robespierre. On Thermidor 8 of the year II (July 26, 1794) Maximilien de Robespierre was the all-powerful statesman, architect of Terror and the most radical face of the French Revolution. 48 hours later he was executed by guillotine to which he had sent many opponents. What happened in so few hours for the fate of the Jacobin leader to change so suddenly? It was a frantic moment that closed a transformative historical stage. And traumatic.
Five seconds that changed the US The promise of an entire era for American society ended in just five seconds, the duration of the shooting against John F. Kennedy with the famous magic bullet included. That assassination elevated to the category of myth a president who months before had proclaimed himself a Berliner in the middle of the Cold War. However, in recent years his figure and those around him have been subjected to more severe scrutiny.
Testimonials from the Titanic. The Titan submarine disaster has refreshed the memory of a much worse catastrophe, the sinking of the famous Titanic that killed almost 1,500 people. What should have been a long and peaceful voyage of twelve days ended less than three hours after the impressive ship collided with an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912. This is one of the first testimonies of the drama.
Power and revolution. Prigozhin's rebellion and his mercenaries from the Wagner Group is an example of how fast historical events can be (and how fast they can no longer deserve that name hours later). The action was left, in principle, but Russia knows full well that a frustrated coup can weaken power. It happened in October 1917.
Ghost mothers. Photographing a young child was never entirely easy and in the second half of the 19th century, when the exposure time was very long, it was even more complicated. So that the little ones were calm in the perches, they sat on their mothers, but they covered themselves so that attention was focused on them. They are the ghost mothers. This article from Yorokubu and this one from The New Yorker (in English) talk about them and their reification.
Balance of damages. The war in Ukraine has once again made weapons topical. On the occasion of the last G-7 summit in Japan, the Bulletin of American Atomic Scientists (BOAS) published an article on the balance of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. The conclusion is that the estimate of victims (dead and wounded) has not stopped growing between 1945 and the present, reaching over one million people. Read in Conversation about history.
soldiers of fortune When the Wagner Group mercenaries entered Rostov last Friday, some analysts pointed out that, in times of rabid neoliberalism, this was an unprecedented example of a private army taking control of a city. It was, in short, the sign of the times. And it is true that the very existence of Prigozhin's forces or Academi Constellis (the name given today to the former American paramilitary organization Blackwater) show that the war is undergoing a process of privatization thanks to the proliferation of subcontractors.
But the conquest of a city by a private company is by no means new. In fact, in times it was the norm. Alejandro Rodríguez de la Peña, a medievalist from the CEU San Pablo University, pointed out a few days ago that the current situation is beginning to resemble the one that prevailed before the birth of nation states (one of whose objectives was precisely to exercise a monopoly on violence). . We would find ourselves, then, in a regression towards the figure of the mercenaries of the Middle Ages, such as the condottieri, at the service of the Italian city states, or like the famous Catalan Great Company, the almogávares.
It is surely an exaggeration to conclude from all this that the State as such is collapsing, but it is indeed a symptom of a privatization trend, unthinkable, for example, in the Second World War, and which is taking place in all areas.
