dirty past

Says Henry James in

that all futures are cruel.

With less risk of prediction, it could be said that almost all the pasts are cruel, at least those that correspond to the public record of history.

I do not remember the name of the historian to whom I read the following opinion: "If the study of history makes you feel proud, it is because what you are studying is not history."

José Álvarez Junco goes even further in the title of his latest book, and in the interview with him by José Andrés Rojo on these very pages.

Talking about a "dirty past" seems more typical of a criminal intrigue novel than a history book,

but a historian often acts like those private detectives of the cinema and crime novels who, in search of the resolution of a mystery of the present, embark on an investigation that takes them to the past and to the discovery of an anonymous corpse and the traces of a crime that remained hidden and unpunished.

The deeper the detective delves, the darker the criminal plot becomes, and the greater the contrast between the respectability of appearances and the corruption and guilt that hides behind them.

The tremendous photo that accompanies the interview in the newspaper, the cracked and undamaged boots of a man murdered eighty-odd years ago, could be one of those revealing pieces of evidence that solve the mystery at the key moment of a novel plot, but they are relics historical, because they belonged to a republican murdered in Galicia in September 1936. Boots and shoes have an ominous presence in testimonies about war crimes.

Mountains of boots and shoes of all styles and for all ages still testify to the innumerable crimes of Auschwitz, with that tenacious ability to retain a presence that anonymous shoes always have.

In Madrid, in the confused and bloody summer of 1936, Arturo Barea saw every morning the unburied corpses of recently shot men,

The best police novels and movies have educated us in moral ambiguity, in the awareness of the difficulty of knowing without uncertainty, of establishing clear lines of separation between good and evil, between guilt and innocence.

There are, of course, completely innocent victims, and scoundrels without a grain of kindness, in the same way that there are corrupt and there are people of integrity, and also unquestionable heroes, who tend to shine less the deeper and more effective their heroism.

But between one and the other extends the wide gray zone of those who will lean in one direction or another depending on the circumstances, who out of greed or blindness or stupidity or convenience or simple human weakness will somehow support the task of the criminals, or will go to thrive under the protection of an acronym or a flag, of a noble cause or an unclean cause.

But it is easier to accept ambiguity in fiction than in history, especially in the history of the past that still appeals to the present even as it recedes, that still sometimes rises before us like those boots rescued from an unmarked grave of almost 90 years ago, within which the foot bones of the murdered man still remain.

With the efficient assistance of the educational authorities, and with the pseudo-technological enthusiasm of the pedagogical experts, the study of most of the historical past is being suppressed, in favor of a now floating smiley and a kind of blank slate Adamism in which the ideological or emotional slogans of each moment can be printed with maximum simplicity.

And the more absent is the knowledge of history,

The dirty past is always that of others;

crimes and abuses are committed only by them;

the enemy is always an external invader or, worse still, a traitor to his own

If the objective of history is to feed self-esteem, personal or collective, pride, patriotism, the inevitable consequence is the lie, or that fallacy that is now unctuously called "the story", or those forms of "historical memory". ” that erase or distort everything that contradicts the spotless nobility of the past that has been chosen to rescue.

Álvarez Junco recounts that in his youth he concentrated so much on the study of the ideals of the anarchist movement that he did not see or did not want to see the crimes that were committed in the name of those ideals during the Civil War.

In some of his earlier books, notably the monumental

revealed the way in which the history of Spain, throughout the 19th century, was built according to two opposite but equivalent fictions, because both turned the chronicle of the past into a messianic fable of pure origins, heroic age, fall and final redemption: the noble native people in their paradise, the fall at the hands of invaders or internal corruptors —in one case the liberals, in the other the fundamentalists—, the glorious present or future after an apocalyptic confrontation, etc.

The dirty past is always that of others;

crimes and abuses are committed only by them;

the enemy is always an external invader or, worse still, a traitor to his own.

It's a harmless fantasy until it starts to spark crimes.

It is paralyzing because by disfiguring knowledge it creates a political life governed by phantasmagoria.

It is as toxic to collective mental health as the lack of critical examination of one's own past actions is to personal conscience.

And it is useless because the dirty past always ends up coming back, like those unwelcome corpses that appear when digging the foundations for a new building.

In ancient fables, the dead man who was not buried with dignity or justice returns to disturb the dreams of the living.

The boots of that man murdered 84 years ago acquire that terrible presence because such a long oblivion aggravated the infamy of the crime.

Dry, rough mud scratches our hands.

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