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We will only remember your name

2020-09-27T02:09:13.070Z


Despite adding millions of deaths, other diseases of the past have disappeared from the collective memoryWhen I was researching to write The Pale Rider , my book on the 1918 flu pandemic, every so often I had to metaphorically pinch myself. Had at least 50 million people in the world really disappeared, as scientists and historians told me? And where were the tributes to his memory? Where were the eulogies? The novels and plays that speak of his time in this land? Why, instead of shouting their names


When I was researching to write

The Pale Rider

, my book on the 1918 flu pandemic, every so often I had to metaphorically pinch myself.

Had at least 50 million people in the world really disappeared, as scientists and historians told me?

And where were the tributes to his memory?

Where were the eulogies?

The novels and plays that speak of his time in this land?

Why, instead of shouting their names from the rooftops, did almost all the survivors keep their loss silent, as if unwilling or unable to find the words to pass it on to posterity?

Special: One million dead

In less than nine months, the covid-19 pandemic has reached a symbolic death toll in the world that will continue to grow as long as science does not find an effective vaccine

Now that we are about to reach the macabre milestone of one million confirmed COVID-19 deaths worldwide, the question arises of how this pandemic will be remembered in the future, if at all.

As unthinkable as it may seem to us now, the lesson that history teaches us is that it will fall into oblivion, and very soon.

Few of those alive today recall two previous pandemics - the so-called Hong Kong flu of 1968, which killed approximately one million people, and the Asian flu of 1957, which caused between twice and four times as many deaths - or If they do, they keep their memories to themselves.

And that they are two pandemics that are still, to use a picturesque expression, "in recent memory."

Will this pandemic be different?

German memory expert Astrid Erll recently suggested that possibility, noting that COVID-19 has an important trait that the 1918 flu lacked: an archive that is consciously being created as the disease continues to shape our present.

In this hyper-connected world, it is possible, if desired, to examine data on infections and deaths around the planet almost instantly.

The constant barrage of digital news and comments on social media keeps disease at the forefront of our consciousness and gives us a sense of what Erll calls the "planetary character" of our state.

"It is the first pandemic that we are seeing through the Internet," she writes, "a true test for the construction of world memory in the new media environment."

Thanks to this archive under construction, to which are added the diaries of the pandemic that has become fashionable to write, covid-19 may end up being the experience that defines this generation.

Memory researchers speak of a phenomenon called "reminiscence bulge", which is that people are more marked by events that occur in adolescence or early adulthood.

In a 2016 survey, the Pew Research Center in Washington found that for

Baby Boomer Americans

, the defining moments in their lives were the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War, while for those born after 1965 were the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the election of President Barack Obama.

For those born after 1980, this pandemic may overshadow those events.

However, some historical events are more memorable than others.

At this point, it is difficult to know for how long and how intensely today's young adults will remember COVID-19.

Also, what exactly will they remember?

The construction of collective memory and the writing of history are always based on a tug of war.

Hence the disputes between President Donald Trump and the Chinese government over whether to qualify SARS-Cov-2 - the virus that causes covid-19 - as a "Chinese" or "American" virus.

To observers, this fight may seem absurd and petty, as well as a manipulation of available scientific knowledge.

But politicians know that the label may be the only thing that future generations will remember about the pandemic and that it will therefore influence future political deals.

The most obvious historical precedent is the so-called Spanish flu, the 1918 pandemic, just because Spain, which was neutral in the war and had no press censorship, was the first European country to report cases.

In the short and medium term, you don't just have to agree on a name.

Will young people remember the clean water in the canals of Venice, the blue skies over Beijing, and the debates over the fact that our way of using the land - industrial agriculture, the destruction of forests - has accelerated the emergence of new pathogens? ?

Will your ideas on the pandemic mix with your ideas on climate change to foster a new international solidarity on these issues?

Or will they become obsessed with the deprivations of confinement, which the totalitarian regimes of the past, slavery and racism have evoked for so many?

It is inevitable that the pandemic means different things to different people, and the way in which those meanings are acquired exposes the strange and non-linear dynamics of historical consciousness.

Without firm memories of past pandemics, we have a hard time imagining future memories.

But when a new pandemic breaks out, it revives our interest in those of the past and makes them take on a new meaning.

The barriers between different epochs are removed for a time and, as Erll says, processes that occurred long before the Anthropocene - the agrarian revolution, 12,000 years ago, and the industrial revolution, 250 years ago - come back to haunt us in our world. present increasingly accelerated.

At the very least, then, that imminent milestone of one million deaths from covid-19 offers us the opportunity to reflect on our place on this planet and our relationship with humanity past and future, before time and memory pass again. to something else and this transcendental experience is reduced to a mere surely misleading name.

Laura Spinney

(Yorkshire, UK, 1971) is a writer and journalist, author of

The Pale Rider.

1918: The epidemic that changed the world

(Review)

Translation by María Luisa Rodríguez Tapia.

Information about the coronavirus

- Here you can follow the last hour on the evolution of the pandemic

- This is how the coronavirus curve evolves in Spain and in each autonomy

- Questions and answers about the coronavirus

- Guide to action against the disease

Source: elparis

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