Qoute: “The news spread quickly in a country still deeply divided after nearly four
decades of brutal counterinsurgent warfare, but the discovery raised more
questions and controversies than it resolved.”
Comment: I find this comment interesting because it reveals the nature of archival research. While significant archival findings as described in this book are certainly invaluable sources of knowledge, they can also raise important questions that go beyond the material in such an archive. I think this is an important point and example in the context of the silences we have been talking about. One of the earlier readings stated that archives always lack more information than they contain, and in this context, I think it is significant to understand that as an important function of the archives, to signal further research and questions that can be explored.
Questions: Once an important silence or question is raised through archival research, what are some of the next steps that can be taken to explore those questions?
I think the best next step in exploring the questions raised by silences or other topics would be to look at other records from this time period and compare. Hopefully bringing in outside information or possibly information from another perspective would help answer any questions. Also, I think in terms of silences, some questions can be answered simply by the presence of that silence in the record. Silences by oppression or silences by selection are both topics in which the silence itself can raise awareness to an issue that was never recognized before.
“Germany, eager to reckon with the atrocities of its past, created a federal authority in 1991 that would administer and guarantee public access to the records. Timothy Garton Ash writes that it came to represent ‘a ministry of truth occupying the former ministry of fear'” 42
This quote is discussing Germany’s active efforts to take responsibility for its atrocities. I can’t recall another example that we have talked about where a large entity uses archives as honestly as possible and as a way to try to provide at least some consolation to the victims through establishing access to the information that could easily be repressed by the German government. I think facing the realities of their history and doing what they can to address it is essential. Using archives to do this added a sense of honesty and credibility. This also absolutely has to do with resource availability.
Question: This may be completely hypothetical because such dominate nations probably don’t lack resources but should other nations provide support to nations that want to provide access to important but distasteful information?
Quote: “The U.S. security assistance program’s introduction of sophisticated wherewithal for sowing the ‘counter-terror,’ such as computers, submachine guns, or helicopters was, in its influence on events, secondary to the Guatemalan military’s whole-hearted adoption of the U.S. doctrine that it is correct and necessary for governments to resort to terrorism in the pursuit of certain ends”
This quote prompted me to wonder what narrative is told about the United States’ intervention in Guatemala within the U.S’ own archives. It seems pretty clear that the U.S. fully abetted and supported the PN’s death squads. Guatemalan authoritarians consistently relied on aid from the U.S. to identify so-called “subversives.” However, since many in the U.S. believe in the concept of American exceptionalism, I wonder if domestic archives even grapple with this country’s complex history of human rights abuses in countries like Guatemala. It would be interesting to know how many of the sources the author consulted were from American archives and to see if there are any conspicuous silences in archives in the United States.
Question: At what point did the documents detailing the extent of the US support of the PN become declassified within the United States?
“But to find all this documentation there- you say to yourself, this is a treasure that will help us to construct enormous histories…My emotional reaction was that of a historian!” (33)
So much can be gained from just one small piece of a document. After all I wrote nearly 1500 words on an incredibly brief slave advertisement from an 1816 newspaper. I can only imagine the reaction a person would have walking into the overflowing Guatemalan Police Archives. The amount of information stored in those pages is mind boggling. The archives are described as mounds upon mounds of paper. That’s why Cifuentes reacts in such an emotional way. Cifuentes, as a historian, realizes how much is locked away in those papers.
I think it’s also significant because as the book mentions for a Latin American country there was really no precedent on how to deal with so many documents, many of which are secret state documents. The people undertaking this project really were walking into uncharted territory. There was also an immense amount of pressure on the people sorting through the archives, naturally it was going to be emotional. As the book says the archives represented a world of wonder for the people of Guatemala. To be the people responsible for cleaning out and finding out what the nearly 80 million pages of records say, is a massive task.
“There was a strong resistance, that people didn’t want to do archival work, they wanted to do their human rights work. They didn’t understand that you couldn’t do one without the other” (Weld 80).
While Weld is describing the process of being able to organize all of the archives with archival practices, she portrays two contrasting perspectives that battled over how to organize these archives. The activists on the one hand wanted to comb only through the records that they thought would help them with their case for the human rights movement. They did not want to deal with all of the small details of organizing the archives for a later use. However, the archivists on the other hand wanted to ensure that all of the records were organized according to their original order and their provenance. This process was resented because it took a much longer time to get to the records the activists wanted. What they did not see was that this process would help them in the long run because this would make the records eligible for court and would make them more easily accessible for the future. Eventually, these two groups were able to make a compromise by the archivists prioritizing the records that the activists most desired, and then using their practices to organize them before handing them over for investigation.
Question: If the archivists first went through these prioritized documents, did this impact their ability to organize the documents surrounding the prioritized ones? How were the archivists able to change the organization of the documents from being based on chronology to being based on the bureaucracy?
As Walter Benjamin has written, “To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was.’ It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.”72 Historical memory cannot be “recovered” like data in a computer file; by its very nature, memory is a shape-shifter, morphing once an analytical gaze is brought to bear upon it.73 (pg. 19, Intro)
This quote from Weld’s introduction prompted me to pause my reading. I find this distinction between recognizing how the past really was as opposed to taking control of a memory to be quite profound. Memories aren’t exactly the most reliable, as we have discussed in–in instances of trauma, for instance, or when they’re put away for a period of time–yet they’re absolutely crucial to the work of historians and archivists. This seems so vital to Weld’s account of her work with the National Police archives.
Does an academic’s reliance on people’s personal memories require justification of some sort? When mathematicians can rely on proofs and chemists can rely on experimental data, what can historians do to justify the worthiness of our sources?
“How does the state see archives? They see them as a site of potential accountability, where they’ll be held responsible for their bad practices.” pg. 55
This excerpt is written about how the Guatemalan government viewed the presence of archives during their authoritarian rule. Evidence of the ruling parties crimes against humanity was clearly held in the rediscovered police files. This kind of information would create concrete proof of criminality taking place in the country, and who is responsible. This phenomenon is not only present in countries with unstable governments. Ever since the WikiLeaks scandal of 2006, citizens of developed nations have discovered that their powers were hiding important information as well. From the Pentagon Papers to the fall out of Edward Snowden’s decisions, Americans have plenty of reasons to distrust the government. To what extent is the right to information necessary in a state with a liberal democracy. Is there any information that hurts the power of the government to do good? What is the right amount of information for an electorate to know about its ruling powers?
“People study history in order to participate in contemporary politics; we recover the past in order to look to the future. As such, documents, archives, and historical knowledge are more than just the building blocks of politics— they are themselves sites of contemporary political struggle. We argue and disagree, ardently, about history. We interpret the same documents and events in myriad, divergent ways. We push for state records to be made public, decry their censorship, and support those whistle-blowers and document-leakers punished for violating the presumed sanctity of the state secret” (Weld Intro pg. 3)
I found myself drawn to this quote because it made me think about the ulterior motives of people in the present, and like James was saying in his blog post, about the emotion that goes into the archive. In a quasi-response to his question, I see emotions as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I think it takes pretty deep investment in a topic to come up with anything worthwhile on it, but on the other, I concede that having a personal stake in things can cloud one’s vision. Another point that this quote brought to mind was how people interact with history in terms of making it fit the present. I think that’s kind of a dangerous position—studying history explicitly for the present—because it makes it too easy to repurpose the past for one’s group or cause. I feel it is parallel but not synonymous with labeling people from the past with contemporary labels. I feel like if we do it in order to examine our concept of modernity and the origins of that, then we can only benefit. However, if it is to co-opt something that blatantly does not belong to us (like the alt-right repurposing medieval symbols), it can only be to the detriment of many.
Question: What are the historian’s responsibilities, or what should her/his process be in terms of finding balance between investment and objectivity?
“The necessity of leaving some- thing [sic] written about one’s activities is almost inherent in humanity. To link oneself with the past using proof. This causes archives to not be destroyed in their entirety, to at least be kept in part or brought together or even hidden—but not destroyed.” (Weld quoting Esteban, pg. 50)
To me, this is the most powerful quote I’ve read in this class (aside from those we encountered at the Holocaust archive in Augusta, though those were powerful in an emotional sense whereas this quote is powerful in more of an intellectual sense). Looking at where this quote came from, it adds a whole new layer: Esteban, one of the amateur archivists and historians that Weld talked so much about in Part I, offers us a perspective that we don’t usually come across in the classroom. That of an NGO worker–likely woefully underpaid, undercompensated, and overworked, as most NGO workers are–who was dedicating untold amounts of time to a project that many (the police, probably a number of rebel factions, and even some civilian government agencies) wanted to see fail.
The first thing in this quote that I find striking is the “inherent in humanity” part. It’s not far off the mark: Some peoples left archaeological evidences of their activities, some peoples wrote manuscripts, some used pictographs, and most told oral histories. It’s evident that there is something deeply wired in the human psyche that compels us to preserve our past. That leads us to how he notes that archives are seldom destroyed in their totalities. Though I could push back on this–the burning of The Library of Alexandria, and the untold numbers of incinerated documents from communist governments are the counterexamples that immediately come to mind–as a general statement, there is truth in this maxim. For every story of the complete, intentional destruction of an important collection of documents, there are scores of stories of preservation: As Weld noted in Part I, even East Germans would shred their documents but not throw them out. Moreover, the entire premise of Weld’s book is that of a woefully maintained, but nonetheless undestroyed, archive in Guatemala City.
Anyways, I just think that it’s really interesting to look at some of the psychoanalytical (yes, I know that psychoanalysis is the astrology of the social sciences, but bear with me here) foundations for archival science. We have, in this class, talked about archives as they present themselves, as they are constructed, and as they present epistemological queries, but we haven’t paid much attention to the underlying psychosocial reasons that societies everywhere tend to keep records. This line of thinking, in my opinions, opens up a number of doors: For example, we examine archives as physical collections of documents, as primary sources in and of themselves, and even as political phenomena, but how often do we look at them as psychological phenomena? How often do archival historians conduct research that individualizes an institution?
Question: If we accept as fact the notion that archives are a psychological fact of life (this would be irresponsible academically, but for the sake of this hypothetical, it’s actually pretty interesting), would that social understanding in turn render even a government archivist a gatekeeper for the kind of de-institutionalized “social memory” that Blouin and Rosenberg talk about?
My quote comes from the end of Chapter 5: “But it formed an integral element of a state terror apparatus that left the country’s social fabric in tatters. The PN’s low-level agents were overwhelmingly poor and working-class, uneducated, poorly paid, and regularly sent into situations they were not adequately trained to handle. Their histories remain to be written, and they will emerge from careful study of eighty million documents in the police archives” (Weld 150).
When I read this, I thought back to Rose’s comment from last week in this online discussion. She brought up the idea of people from Appalachia in the US, and the question of education for this often working-class. We debated, briefly, in class how much we need to consider someone’s background in order to label them with a potentially harmful term, like racist. This line in Weld’s book reminded me of that same idea. To what degree do we need to hold these individual PN “low-level agents” accountable, and to what degree do we look at them as cogs in the machine, blindly following? This isn’t a unique question to Guatemala; every country has followed similar lines of questioning post-dictatorship/genocide/abuses of power. And each country’s must be routed in their cultural views of justice and history. Weld has not yet ventured to tell us Guatelmala’s course of action.
“The Mariscal Zavala
explosions had been a cacophonous accident, fortuitously giving investigators
a mandate to access a storage facility they would otherwise never have
entered—one whose records would have been partially incinerated if not for
the foresight of one rank-and-file agent. The appearance of the police archives
was the product, like so many other linchpin moments in history, of a mix of
felicitous political conditions, longue durée social struggle, and luck. For better
or worse, the pdh began working first, and asking questions later.”
It is important that while in the present, the future is kept in mind. This idea of sightedness, sometimes seen as a virtue in many cultures, keeps someone out of trouble and is a testament to their character. However, there have been plenty of institutions throughout history who have thought they could evade this simple truth, simply stashing away the past as if it never happened at all. Of course, it seems, the truth does always come out, showing how an institution must not only keep an extensive recording of their history, but an honest and thorough one as well.
Question: Is there any archive that has extremely low creditability?
Quotes:
“…the link between access to archives and authoritarianism.” Weld, 58
“To the military, access to information had always been political. As Silvio René Gramajo Valdés indicates, hermetism and information security on the part of the army and the police were essential components of counterinsurgency strategy, particularly as the military engineered the for-show transition to democracy in the mid-1980s.” Weld, 57-58
“…the link between access to archives and authoritarianism.” Weld, 58
Comment: It is noted how information with ongoing application is guarded, implying a distinction that historical documentation is that which has gone out of extended practice, use. “History” in this way seems seems almost to have been made weaker, less influential, in comparison to administrative documentation. Yet the fact of history’s incredible influence demonstrates a different kind of influence. Still, the distinction of “history” and “what is said/believed to be history,” needs to be made and remembered in the discussion of history’s influence.
Again the concept of secrecy arises- secrecy for people’s safety, and, as here, secrecy for the military and police functions.
Question:
Is the concept of history damaged by policies of secrecy? Are there things that should be prioritized over the truth, the sanctity of history? Who is to decide? Is the making of history more important than its remembrance?
Qoute: “The news spread quickly in a country still deeply divided after nearly four
decades of brutal counterinsurgent warfare, but the discovery raised more
questions and controversies than it resolved.”
Comment: I find this comment interesting because it reveals the nature of archival research. While significant archival findings as described in this book are certainly invaluable sources of knowledge, they can also raise important questions that go beyond the material in such an archive. I think this is an important point and example in the context of the silences we have been talking about. One of the earlier readings stated that archives always lack more information than they contain, and in this context, I think it is significant to understand that as an important function of the archives, to signal further research and questions that can be explored.
Questions: Once an important silence or question is raised through archival research, what are some of the next steps that can be taken to explore those questions?
I think the best next step in exploring the questions raised by silences or other topics would be to look at other records from this time period and compare. Hopefully bringing in outside information or possibly information from another perspective would help answer any questions. Also, I think in terms of silences, some questions can be answered simply by the presence of that silence in the record. Silences by oppression or silences by selection are both topics in which the silence itself can raise awareness to an issue that was never recognized before.
“Germany, eager to reckon with the atrocities of its past, created a federal authority in 1991 that would administer and guarantee public access to the records. Timothy Garton Ash writes that it came to represent ‘a ministry of truth occupying the former ministry of fear'” 42
This quote is discussing Germany’s active efforts to take responsibility for its atrocities. I can’t recall another example that we have talked about where a large entity uses archives as honestly as possible and as a way to try to provide at least some consolation to the victims through establishing access to the information that could easily be repressed by the German government. I think facing the realities of their history and doing what they can to address it is essential. Using archives to do this added a sense of honesty and credibility. This also absolutely has to do with resource availability.
Question: This may be completely hypothetical because such dominate nations probably don’t lack resources but should other nations provide support to nations that want to provide access to important but distasteful information?
Quote: “The U.S. security assistance program’s introduction of sophisticated wherewithal for sowing the ‘counter-terror,’ such as computers, submachine guns, or helicopters was, in its influence on events, secondary to the Guatemalan military’s whole-hearted adoption of the U.S. doctrine that it is correct and necessary for governments to resort to terrorism in the pursuit of certain ends”
This quote prompted me to wonder what narrative is told about the United States’ intervention in Guatemala within the U.S’ own archives. It seems pretty clear that the U.S. fully abetted and supported the PN’s death squads. Guatemalan authoritarians consistently relied on aid from the U.S. to identify so-called “subversives.” However, since many in the U.S. believe in the concept of American exceptionalism, I wonder if domestic archives even grapple with this country’s complex history of human rights abuses in countries like Guatemala. It would be interesting to know how many of the sources the author consulted were from American archives and to see if there are any conspicuous silences in archives in the United States.
Question: At what point did the documents detailing the extent of the US support of the PN become declassified within the United States?
“But to find all this documentation there- you say to yourself, this is a treasure that will help us to construct enormous histories…My emotional reaction was that of a historian!” (33)
So much can be gained from just one small piece of a document. After all I wrote nearly 1500 words on an incredibly brief slave advertisement from an 1816 newspaper. I can only imagine the reaction a person would have walking into the overflowing Guatemalan Police Archives. The amount of information stored in those pages is mind boggling. The archives are described as mounds upon mounds of paper. That’s why Cifuentes reacts in such an emotional way. Cifuentes, as a historian, realizes how much is locked away in those papers.
I think it’s also significant because as the book mentions for a Latin American country there was really no precedent on how to deal with so many documents, many of which are secret state documents. The people undertaking this project really were walking into uncharted territory. There was also an immense amount of pressure on the people sorting through the archives, naturally it was going to be emotional. As the book says the archives represented a world of wonder for the people of Guatemala. To be the people responsible for cleaning out and finding out what the nearly 80 million pages of records say, is a massive task.
Forgot my question.
Is emotion a positive or negative when dealing with the archives?
“There was a strong resistance, that people didn’t want to do archival work, they wanted to do their human rights work. They didn’t understand that you couldn’t do one without the other” (Weld 80).
While Weld is describing the process of being able to organize all of the archives with archival practices, she portrays two contrasting perspectives that battled over how to organize these archives. The activists on the one hand wanted to comb only through the records that they thought would help them with their case for the human rights movement. They did not want to deal with all of the small details of organizing the archives for a later use. However, the archivists on the other hand wanted to ensure that all of the records were organized according to their original order and their provenance. This process was resented because it took a much longer time to get to the records the activists wanted. What they did not see was that this process would help them in the long run because this would make the records eligible for court and would make them more easily accessible for the future. Eventually, these two groups were able to make a compromise by the archivists prioritizing the records that the activists most desired, and then using their practices to organize them before handing them over for investigation.
Question: If the archivists first went through these prioritized documents, did this impact their ability to organize the documents surrounding the prioritized ones? How were the archivists able to change the organization of the documents from being based on chronology to being based on the bureaucracy?
As Walter Benjamin has written, “To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was.’ It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.”72 Historical memory cannot be “recovered” like data in a computer file; by its very nature, memory is a shape-shifter, morphing once an analytical gaze is brought to bear upon it.73 (pg. 19, Intro)
This quote from Weld’s introduction prompted me to pause my reading. I find this distinction between recognizing how the past really was as opposed to taking control of a memory to be quite profound. Memories aren’t exactly the most reliable, as we have discussed in–in instances of trauma, for instance, or when they’re put away for a period of time–yet they’re absolutely crucial to the work of historians and archivists. This seems so vital to Weld’s account of her work with the National Police archives.
Does an academic’s reliance on people’s personal memories require justification of some sort? When mathematicians can rely on proofs and chemists can rely on experimental data, what can historians do to justify the worthiness of our sources?
“How does the state see archives? They see them as a site of potential accountability, where they’ll be held responsible for their bad practices.” pg. 55
This excerpt is written about how the Guatemalan government viewed the presence of archives during their authoritarian rule. Evidence of the ruling parties crimes against humanity was clearly held in the rediscovered police files. This kind of information would create concrete proof of criminality taking place in the country, and who is responsible. This phenomenon is not only present in countries with unstable governments. Ever since the WikiLeaks scandal of 2006, citizens of developed nations have discovered that their powers were hiding important information as well. From the Pentagon Papers to the fall out of Edward Snowden’s decisions, Americans have plenty of reasons to distrust the government. To what extent is the right to information necessary in a state with a liberal democracy. Is there any information that hurts the power of the government to do good? What is the right amount of information for an electorate to know about its ruling powers?
“People study history in order to participate in contemporary politics; we recover the past in order to look to the future. As such, documents, archives, and historical knowledge are more than just the building blocks of politics— they are themselves sites of contemporary political struggle. We argue and disagree, ardently, about history. We interpret the same documents and events in myriad, divergent ways. We push for state records to be made public, decry their censorship, and support those whistle-blowers and document-leakers punished for violating the presumed sanctity of the state secret” (Weld Intro pg. 3)
I found myself drawn to this quote because it made me think about the ulterior motives of people in the present, and like James was saying in his blog post, about the emotion that goes into the archive. In a quasi-response to his question, I see emotions as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I think it takes pretty deep investment in a topic to come up with anything worthwhile on it, but on the other, I concede that having a personal stake in things can cloud one’s vision. Another point that this quote brought to mind was how people interact with history in terms of making it fit the present. I think that’s kind of a dangerous position—studying history explicitly for the present—because it makes it too easy to repurpose the past for one’s group or cause. I feel it is parallel but not synonymous with labeling people from the past with contemporary labels. I feel like if we do it in order to examine our concept of modernity and the origins of that, then we can only benefit. However, if it is to co-opt something that blatantly does not belong to us (like the alt-right repurposing medieval symbols), it can only be to the detriment of many.
Question: What are the historian’s responsibilities, or what should her/his process be in terms of finding balance between investment and objectivity?
“The necessity of leaving some- thing [sic] written about one’s activities is almost inherent in humanity. To link oneself with the past using proof. This causes archives to not be destroyed in their entirety, to at least be kept in part or brought together or even hidden—but not destroyed.” (Weld quoting Esteban, pg. 50)
To me, this is the most powerful quote I’ve read in this class (aside from those we encountered at the Holocaust archive in Augusta, though those were powerful in an emotional sense whereas this quote is powerful in more of an intellectual sense). Looking at where this quote came from, it adds a whole new layer: Esteban, one of the amateur archivists and historians that Weld talked so much about in Part I, offers us a perspective that we don’t usually come across in the classroom. That of an NGO worker–likely woefully underpaid, undercompensated, and overworked, as most NGO workers are–who was dedicating untold amounts of time to a project that many (the police, probably a number of rebel factions, and even some civilian government agencies) wanted to see fail.
The first thing in this quote that I find striking is the “inherent in humanity” part. It’s not far off the mark: Some peoples left archaeological evidences of their activities, some peoples wrote manuscripts, some used pictographs, and most told oral histories. It’s evident that there is something deeply wired in the human psyche that compels us to preserve our past. That leads us to how he notes that archives are seldom destroyed in their totalities. Though I could push back on this–the burning of The Library of Alexandria, and the untold numbers of incinerated documents from communist governments are the counterexamples that immediately come to mind–as a general statement, there is truth in this maxim. For every story of the complete, intentional destruction of an important collection of documents, there are scores of stories of preservation: As Weld noted in Part I, even East Germans would shred their documents but not throw them out. Moreover, the entire premise of Weld’s book is that of a woefully maintained, but nonetheless undestroyed, archive in Guatemala City.
Anyways, I just think that it’s really interesting to look at some of the psychoanalytical (yes, I know that psychoanalysis is the astrology of the social sciences, but bear with me here) foundations for archival science. We have, in this class, talked about archives as they present themselves, as they are constructed, and as they present epistemological queries, but we haven’t paid much attention to the underlying psychosocial reasons that societies everywhere tend to keep records. This line of thinking, in my opinions, opens up a number of doors: For example, we examine archives as physical collections of documents, as primary sources in and of themselves, and even as political phenomena, but how often do we look at them as psychological phenomena? How often do archival historians conduct research that individualizes an institution?
Question: If we accept as fact the notion that archives are a psychological fact of life (this would be irresponsible academically, but for the sake of this hypothetical, it’s actually pretty interesting), would that social understanding in turn render even a government archivist a gatekeeper for the kind of de-institutionalized “social memory” that Blouin and Rosenberg talk about?
My quote comes from the end of Chapter 5: “But it formed an integral element of a state terror apparatus that left the country’s social fabric in tatters. The PN’s low-level agents were overwhelmingly poor and working-class, uneducated, poorly paid, and regularly sent into situations they were not adequately trained to handle. Their histories remain to be written, and they will emerge from careful study of eighty million documents in the police archives” (Weld 150).
When I read this, I thought back to Rose’s comment from last week in this online discussion. She brought up the idea of people from Appalachia in the US, and the question of education for this often working-class. We debated, briefly, in class how much we need to consider someone’s background in order to label them with a potentially harmful term, like racist. This line in Weld’s book reminded me of that same idea. To what degree do we need to hold these individual PN “low-level agents” accountable, and to what degree do we look at them as cogs in the machine, blindly following? This isn’t a unique question to Guatemala; every country has followed similar lines of questioning post-dictatorship/genocide/abuses of power. And each country’s must be routed in their cultural views of justice and history. Weld has not yet ventured to tell us Guatelmala’s course of action.
“The Mariscal Zavala
explosions had been a cacophonous accident, fortuitously giving investigators
a mandate to access a storage facility they would otherwise never have
entered—one whose records would have been partially incinerated if not for
the foresight of one rank-and-file agent. The appearance of the police archives
was the product, like so many other linchpin moments in history, of a mix of
felicitous political conditions, longue durée social struggle, and luck. For better
or worse, the pdh began working first, and asking questions later.”
It is important that while in the present, the future is kept in mind. This idea of sightedness, sometimes seen as a virtue in many cultures, keeps someone out of trouble and is a testament to their character. However, there have been plenty of institutions throughout history who have thought they could evade this simple truth, simply stashing away the past as if it never happened at all. Of course, it seems, the truth does always come out, showing how an institution must not only keep an extensive recording of their history, but an honest and thorough one as well.
Question: Is there any archive that has extremely low creditability?
Quotes:
“…the link between access to archives and authoritarianism.” Weld, 58
“To the military, access to information had always been political. As Silvio René Gramajo Valdés indicates, hermetism and information security on the part of the army and the police were essential components of counterinsurgency strategy, particularly as the military engineered the for-show transition to democracy in the mid-1980s.” Weld, 57-58
“…the link between access to archives and authoritarianism.” Weld, 58
Comment: It is noted how information with ongoing application is guarded, implying a distinction that historical documentation is that which has gone out of extended practice, use. “History” in this way seems seems almost to have been made weaker, less influential, in comparison to administrative documentation. Yet the fact of history’s incredible influence demonstrates a different kind of influence. Still, the distinction of “history” and “what is said/believed to be history,” needs to be made and remembered in the discussion of history’s influence.
Again the concept of secrecy arises- secrecy for people’s safety, and, as here, secrecy for the military and police functions.
Question:
Is the concept of history damaged by policies of secrecy? Are there things that should be prioritized over the truth, the sanctity of history? Who is to decide? Is the making of history more important than its remembrance?