EDITORIAL
On the eve of one of the gatherings we organised in Brussels, on 18 November, almost by chance, we attended a concert held for peace and against all wars, especially against the Israeli government’ s attack on Palestinian society. The event combined poetry, creative painting, various texts, music and an atmosphere of protest. It was yet another grassroots cultural action defending the right to live in peace in just societies where human rights violations are not a daily occurrence. Likewise, with the 50th anniversary of the death of dictator Francisco Franco coming up, reference was also made to Spain, raising themes such as democracy and antifascist resistance, calling for the full democratic construction of our system of civil liberties and guarantees at the local, regional, European and global levels. Past and present came together in an intergenerational and intermodal— now we would say interactive— way to remind us that society, in all its diversity, is vibrant and active, remembers its recent past, and that this memory is reflected in today’ s most pressing issues.
This act of recalling a past within the present through diverse means and methods of action and transmission is one of the objectives we also strive to achieve at our European Observatory on Memories( EUROM). Such interaction is not always evident, but it represents our core line of work.
EUROM’ s public window— its most reflective public expression— is the annual volume of the journal Observing Memories, now in its ninth edition. As its pages show, we are committed to high-quality, original texts by authors from an international and comparative perspective. Two major debates structure the present volume. One is around what we refer to as“ memorial subalternity” and the contemporary dissonance of its heritage legacy in the present. We have sought to address subaltern and historically discriminated groups whose realities remain relevant in today’ s public debates: femininity and gender, anti-racism, asociality and others.
Secondly, this year we also address the fiftieth anniversary of a Spain that fought to transition from dictatorship toward a freedom born in the streets, a struggle which linked with the antifascist and democratic resistance that had been repressed for forty years by a military and national-Catholic regime.“ The Dictator died in his bed, the dictatorship in the streets.” Indeed, EUROM is part of an agreement with the State Secretariat for Democratic Memory and the“ Spain in Freedom: 50 years” Commissioner to conduct cultural activities, colloquia, conferences and exhibitions on topical issues related to the uses of the past, always advocating for the internationalisation of the debate and the memorial and historical knowledge of the Spanish case.
My son, who had just turned 16, asked me how he could engage with a memory that is no longer his but has been inherited, and how it relates to present-day conflicts and problems. Not wanting to give him a moralistic lecture which would go over his teenage head, I proposed a palette of colours representing a multitude of values in which to place the uses of memory. I told him that he should defend access to, observation of and even creative interaction with whichever colours he freely chose. Yet his choice, among many other factors, would involve reflecting on current conflicts and their constant questioning of our human condition, the past and rights which cost so many lives to obtain. I doubt the young man fully understood me, but the acquisition of rights and freedoms, in both the past and the present, should take precedence over the challenges that he and his generation will face in a digital world of predatory economies and an endless stream of daily information, much of it toxic. He made an interesting observation: Francoism was only studied from the fourth year of secondary school onwards, and the subject was almost never covered. He had only studied the interwar period and Mussolini. Nil, as the young man is called, added that now in sixth form he sees how the fascist and racist attitudes and expressions of other young people might be avoided or greatly mitigated if the subject had been covered in secondary school as part of the compulsory curriculum. This opinion was shared by some of the more vocational teachers and also by another young student who was doing a project on her great-grandfather, a survivor of Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen, who said that they had never before covered the Franco period in order to better understand the exile and deportation of Spaniards to Nazi camps. Perhaps we should apply the teaching of history or ethical values“ in reverse”, as the great Marc Bloch proposed years ago, starting with the contemporary era.
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