La historia y la memoria parecen confundirse, pero no son la misma cosa. La historia es la ciencia que revisa el pasado y a esa revisión le exigimos que sea hecha con la mayor objetividad posible. La memoria, en cambio, es un intento, por parte de una persona o un grupo, o una institución o un Estado, de ir hacia atrás y sopesar algún acontecimiento que ha marcado traumáticamente el presente que vivimos.

In this perspective, an exercise of historical memory is done when we attend testimonies of men who were tortured and massacred, when we listen.

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By raising this difference, perhaps, a type of supremacy from scientific speeches is detached.But both history and memory are exercised by human beings.And there is nothing more circumstantial and veleidos.It is true that memory, as Tony Judt says, executes manifestations about the past and they end up being partial, insufficient, selective.But how to deny that the historian is protected by a respectable academic tradition, is frequently constrained by political, nationalist and religious principles.

Historical memory is more or less recent.The ancient men, the medieval, the Renaissance and even the modern ones, have referred to both categories, but they have not understood how it is done today.In Europe it has to do, above all, with the remembrance of the Holocaust.In Latin America, the crimes committed by military dictatorships are linked.Argentines, somehow, are precursors with the report on the disappeared and the complaints made by the mothers of Plaza de Mayo.In Spain, historical memory has investigated the Civil War and in the ways in which Franco eliminated the Republican opposition.The French and the Germans, in particular, have confronted Nazism and concentration camps.The countries of the old communist bloc, the Stalinist repression and the establishment of the Gulags.But all this remembrance of terrible past and more or less close, has thrown historical memory further back: towards the crimes committed against Afro -descendants, against native populations, against women and children, against sexual minorities.

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In what has to do with Colombia, everything began with the creation of Justice and Peace, in 2005, and the National Center for Historical Memory, which is its consequence.Since then we have entered the continuous practice of historical memory.From that date so far, we have filled ourselves with congresses, museums, chairs, documentaries and different types.And this situation has increased even more with the peace agreements signed between the Government and the FARC, in 2016.Exercising historical memory has undoubtedly become an ethical imperative that we need as a community.By practicing it, we feel worthy, supportive with the aggrieved, and we believe that we better draw the hard present we live.Although a kind of cultural fashion has also been manifested.Something similar happened in the France of the nineties of the last century when this country was distinguished by its frenzy of historical liturgies and its commemorative mania of the past.If we will qualify, both countries, for the amount of memories, we would win a very first place in their respective period.

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It does not stop around, however, the idea that there is something contradictory in this horizon.In France, intellectuals, academia and a good part of civil society, looked at the Jewish holocaust and everything should point out that frightening collapse could not be repeated.But, at the same time, the French State sold weapons everywhere, contributed to the genocide in Rwand.

In Colombia, you save the distances, a similar case is observed.We go to the past to make the balances of the war that the country has suffered in recent decades.We count massacres.We elaborate victims lists.We lift memory museums.WE CONFORM COMMISSIONS OF TRUTH.We establish precautionary measures from the JEP.We perform symbolic acts of forgiveness.And, at the same time, the massacres do not cease.Social leaders continue to be killed.Popular protests are repressed wildly.In addition, the great responsible for the false positives are not punished.And, as to complete this panorama of social degradation, forced disappearance remains the huge sore of an anomalous country.

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The question then arises as a suspicion and as a distrust: what is the use of historical memory in Colombia?If we are not able to dismantle the endemic violence that has characterized us as a nation, from 1810 to the present day, historical memory and all its symbolic paraphernalia runs the risk of presenting itself as a mechanism of sentimental playfulness.Actually, when witnessing this behavior, sometimes I conclude that we are figurines of a staging of the absurd that is coordinated from the instances of power and that the population allows naivety and impudence.

Tzvetan Todorov published in 1995 the abuse of memory, a small book that emerged from the conference that the thinker gave at the Auschwitz Foundation, three years ago.There Todorov prevents the danger that the memory leads to sacralize.Do it, he says, it means making it sterile.It concludes, likewise, that there is an exemplary memory.This, perhaps, is the one that could preserve us from evil.Of that evil that consists in exercising systematic violence on the other under any justification.But the most important thing that Todorov points out is about the type of living memory that we should maintain.One that is not dedicated only to asking for reparation for the offense suffered, but that which puts us alert to new situations of violence.One that does not get drunk in the mere celebration and that, instead, conjure, with lucidity and courage, the horror we have let it commit it.

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