Memory: Collective Memory

The mental integration and appropriation of one’s own past.

Just as an individual can’t act if he’s forgotten his past, a people becomes impotent and defenceless if it loses the collective memory of its history. What is memory? It’s a reserve of information about oneself that structures one’s experience and permits activities in the present to anticipate those of the future.

The dominant ideology aims today at making Frenchmen and Europeans amnesic. This is done in several ways: by deculturation, by the slow destruction of historical learning (or, similarly, by making Europeans feel guilty for being who they are or by systematically negating their genius), by fabricating a ‘false memory’ based on the memories of other peoples, by the cult of presentism, etc. If one speaks of the ‘work of memory’ today, it’s to make Europeans repent for what they have allegedly done to others: not only is our memory lost in this way, but whatever of it we do conserve is for the sake of self-flagellation. All strong, ambitious, vivacious peoples and civilisations exalt in their historical memory.

Long-living peoples never forget their past and possess tenacious memories. Muslim peoples haven’t lost the memory of their Qur’an and from this comes their force. Marxism never succeeded in eradicating the historical memory of Serbs, Russians, or Chinese. A people deprived of its history is a people debilitated.

‘The man of the future is the man with the longest memory’: this archeofuturist formula of Nietzsche suggests that it’s necessary to project one’s memory into the future as will and project. An amnesic civilisation condemns itself to a short life. To dominate space, it’s necessary also to dominate time — to pursue one’s future destiny, one has to proudly take hold of one’s past.

(see archeofuturism; identity; people, long-living; tradition)