One of the most memorable walks of my life was along the beaches of Normandy a few years ago, searching for the shadows of those young Americans, Canadians and British who fell to free Europe from Nazism, like so many young Russians in the eastern front. Another equally memorable walk was, together with my father and one of my cousins, through the native land of my Murcian grandfather, expelled from there by misery and the gentlemen. And, finally, I have one more walk to record: the one I did trying to track down my other grandfather through the streets of Havana, where his adventure failed to become a rich American who, upon returning to Catalonia, paid schools, squares and choirs. I also have a walk along the beaches of Argelers pending, where the exiled republicans in 1939 were imprisoned by the French authorities. Walking is starting the memory. Strolling to connect with what happened and with that –one does not always match the other– that they told us, with the echoes of a scene that has vanished. It is a need of every human being.
The new Democratic Memory Law has been approved in committee, a government commitment to update and reform the text that came into force in 2007, during the Rodríguez Zapatero period. The popular froze and sidelined all policies in this area, unfortunately. The new law has broad parliamentary support, from which the three rights have distanced themselves, something that was foreseeable. Among the arguments of those who oppose policies of collective memory and acts of restorative justice, an idea always appears, as erroneous as it is perverse: the past does not interest people, we cannot waste time with what happened yesterday when the problems of the present are pressing. “What is the point of spending public money to open the graves of the Civil War when inflation is punishing citizens?” is a type of phrase that is commonly heard.
It is nothing new. This speech tries to delegitimize any legislative advance or government initiative that does not fit with the ideology of those who question these policies. Now it is the memory, but it can be any matter that can be compared with other issues “that are urgent and that do interest people”, in order to create an effect of offense and alleged waste. Although there is a double standard, of course. For example: nobody questions the promotion of Galician in Galicia, but that of Catalan in Catalonia is always under suspicion for parties like PP, Cs and Vox.
It is not a luxury to look back and approach from the public administrations, with rigor and pluralism, everything that has to do with the traumas of the recent past and its legal, economic, cultural and social effects. There are good and bad memory policies (simplification and ideological reductionism should always be avoided), but the democratic State has a duty to remember us, the citizens. A duty that embraces the complexity of the recent past and avoids presentism while explaining the facts without disfiguring them. It is impossible to establish a homogeneous collective memory, since memories are plural in every society, but it is desirable that democracy reclaim its foundations when it becomes a commemorative and remembrance agent. Everyone has the right to their particular memory, but the pedagogy of a democratic collective memory cannot be done without marking the line that separates victims and perpetrators, which establishes the responsibilities of one and the other, without diluting them in an abstract and generic whole. .
Historian Keith Jenkins reminds us that “people literally feel the need to root their today and tomorrow in their yesterday” and adds that “explanations for present lives are found in these pasts and programs for the future are drawn up”. Knowing the past is essential because, as this British historian explains, "history is the way in which people create, in part, their identities."
We come from where we come from. Francoism was more sociological than ideological (that makes it different from other European fascisms) and this has consequences on the consistency of our democratic system. Hopefully this new memory law allows us to look back without anger, but also without cheating.
