The right to be forgotten?
The term initially emerged on the Internet: the right to be forgotten was the user’s decision to remove the traces of the network. This recognition, for example, served to ensure that once the Facebook account was closed, your personal information would disappear (all: photos, comments, interviews).
Recently, the term has been extended to oncology: the right to be forgotten is the possibility of preserving one's own private clinical history. For example, when hiring insurance or applying for a loan, companies will not be able to consider whether the customer has suffered cancer in the past.
What to do when the tortured wants to be forgotten? How do we reconcile our collective memory with their individual anonymity? Should historians accept that these facts have not been collected?
I have recently come to the forefront of the term, in connection with some recognition received by victims of police violence. I have taken into account acquaintances subjected to torture and how they have been involved in the Charlatan outbreaks: they do not like to remember what happened, and therefore lead to another place. They also seem to expect to be forgotten.
Surely many victims act as if the torture had never happened, because the wounds are still painful or because with effort they have removed from memory those terrible experiences. Of course it is understandable. As a historian, however, I fear that this silence, along with personal oblivion, will not bring with it that of the whole of society, because, if you do not tell, it is safe to lose that part of the story.
There are my doubts: What to do when the torture wants to be forgotten? How do we reconcile our collective memory with their individual anonymity? Should historians accept that these facts have not been collected? In short, is there a right to be forgotten in history?
Paulo Alberdi, historian
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