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The pessimism of Walter Benjamin in his ninth thesis on the philosophy of History 1 in the face of the destruction of “progress” not only contrasted with the interested Anglophile triumphalism of historians like Toynbee, but also pointed almost prophetically to the bitter end of the civilizational order that the industrial capitalist model had been designed since its colonial expansionist beginnings. A pessimism confirmed by the extreme violence of the war, in which Benedetto Croce recognized the signs of the arrival of the “new barbarians” 2 , capable of destroying any trace of civilization , showing us the mirror of our own time, in which we observe stunned by the systematic annihilation of what we have always considered the roots of Western culture without making a minimum collective reflection on the path that has been taken up to this point. Prison and the stalking of death led Marc Bloch to write one of the most striking essays on the meaning of History in the 20th century in which he raised his doubts about society's ability to wonder about its past and the objectivity of the historian to face it 3 .
Coal and diamonds have always rained on History. Contaminated and manipulated , their speeches have handled the past with the viciousness of a butcher or with the subtlety of a surgeon, and whether it is the ham knife or the most precise scalpel, our memory has been cut into scraps , and, in the majority of In most cases, its demiurges have presented BTC Users Number Data it to us as the result of a long process of "scientific" construction. The historiography is so varied that, following the model of the parable of Saint Augustine and the boy who tried to draw all the water from the sea bucket by bucket, we could equally read dozens of methodological discourses on the analysis of historical facts, and we would never finish to find a minimum objectivity. Some are justified and others are reviled according to changing ideologies or following the guidelines of a predatory power eager for flatterers. Even so, the mediums of memory continue, like the ancient sibyls, to be necessary in a society that is always disoriented. And, among the garbage and the media noise that does not understand patience, there are still historians with capital letters who try to find, like.
Theseus after killing the Minotaur, the thread that Ariadne left him to get out of the labyrinth. A labyrinth of events that has entangled our present to the point of making it incomprehensible, because that labyrinth is full of traps that hide miseries that we refuse to face.
There was a time when philosophy provided us with the self-criticism necessary to moderate mistakes and look to the future with some confidence. There was a time when there was the possibility of flying over the space of our lives to be able to read the past and identify with its interpretation. Now we seem to be on the bus from Woody Allen's Stardust Memories , whose passengers ended up in a desolate landscape without understanding what they were doing there, or worse still, on the one from Midnight Cowboy , trying to reach the Florida sun while death lurks outside the window. . And meanwhile, the last bastions of the study of that time, which is ours , and which we now perceive as a fog that clouds the present, are disappearing: the teachers who taught us to perceive the invisible lines.
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