In the very long term, forgetting is inevitable and even reasonable: it's good for wounds to cauterize. It's quite another thing to shorten their time, to force forgetfulness out of self-interest. In political terms, forgetting then ceases to be reasonable and can easily transform into irresponsibility. Let me propose an extreme example. Caesar's campaign in ancient Ilerda, present-day Lleida, was a crucial episode in the Second Roman Civil War in 49 BC. It happened very close to my town, all of that, but I would be incapable of declaring myself a supporter of Caesar, his rival Pompey, or the Ilerget leaders. There, on the banks of the same river, the Segre, which the Romans called Sícoris (Verdaguer still speaks of the golden Sycoris), the beginning of the fall of Catalonia at the end of the Civil War also became effective. In January 1938, the Republican military defense had been decapitated in Seròs, seven kilometers from Granja de Escarpe, and Colonel Juan Perea ordered the abandonment of the line of fortifications. My mother came into the world a few days later, in the midst of that chaotic and desperate atmosphere. What happened next is sufficiently well known and assumed as their own... bysome generations. For others, this knowledge is beginning to feel very schematic, or at worst, nonexistent, as can be seen in certain nonsense spread today by the acne-stricken far right. Despite referring to the same place, this second oversight has no justification; we'll see in a thousand years.
For minimally informed people of a certain age, the great historical reference with a moral undertone is still represented by the Second World War, by its causes and consequences, by the characteristics of its unhealthy background landscape. For a decent human being, Auschwitz is not, or should not be, a historical abstraction, but a monstrous wound that still festers. Using the expression "mass deportations," for example, pretending that those that occurred in the 1940s already belong to prehistory and can be as reasonably forgotten as the brawls between Caesar and Pompey, constitutes indecency in a moral sense, beyond any other political consideration. This expression, however, has become dangerously normal both here and across the Atlantic. Even the figure of a figure like Kim Jong-un is being normalized thanks to the great Asian autocracies that parade him like an equivocal mascot. There are certain dividing lines that have become blurred in a very short period of time. Most are based on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that is, on the ethical legacy of the end of the Second World War. Is 77 years an eternity? Has the Declaration already expired, and has a happy-go-lucky every-man-for-himself approach begun in international politics? I think it's a bit hasty, to say the least: there are still survivors of the "mass deportations" of just over 80 years ago. Many live in Israel, where, paradoxically, chilling things are being done to the defenseless population of Gaza.
To the extent that identity issues have become a central issue in advanced societies—perhaps because they have replaced the role played by traditional ideologies until the end of the 20th century—memory has become a fundamental fact. Identity is constructed, deconstructed, or reconstructed with a certain articulation—almost management– of collective memory, and this therefore has a very strong political component. This expression – "collective memory" – was coined in 1925, when the French sociologist of Jewish origin Maurice Halbwachs used it in his work The social cadres of memoryDrawing on Henri Bergson and Émile Durkheim, Halbwachs notes that individual memory only exists thanks to the social frameworks that make the reconstruction of memory possible. When in 2025 we normalize the expression "mass deportations" or downplay the image of bloodthirsty satraps, we are acting in the opposite direction: we are losing the Second World War retroactively.
This article is called "Dangerous Forgetfulness," but it could just as easily be called "Dangerous Ignorance." The key to propaganda's power is that it doesn't feel like propaganda. Constantly surrounded by screens and other small screens, many people believe they are more informed than their parents or grandparents. But the reality is different, and the incessant consumption of enormous millstones confirms this with each passing day.
