{"id":367,"date":"2018-04-26T16:44:34","date_gmt":"2018-04-26T20:44:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/?p=367"},"modified":"2018-04-26T16:45:51","modified_gmt":"2018-04-26T20:45:51","slug":"367","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/fifth-blog-transitions-to-democracy\/367\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering or Forgetting?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“‘Nations are a plebiscite every day, and they are constructed on the basis of great rememberings and great forgettings.’\u00a0 If the French were still thinking about the Night of St. Bartholomew<\/a>, they’d be slaughtering each other to this day.<\/p>\n

This is a political, and not a moral, decision.\u00a0 It has to be resolved politically because it’s a political conflict.\u00a0 Uruguay didn’t fall apart by chance, and it’s not going to be reconstructed by chance, either.”\u00a0\u00a0A Miracle, A Universe<\/em>, pg. 191<\/p>\n

“How can you have a period, end of paragraph, end of story, without any preceding paragraph, let alone any preceding story?\u00a0 Here in Uruguay, we’ve had no commission of inquiry, no officially sanctioned truthtelling.\u00a0 We’ve had no trials, no verdicts.\u00a0 All we have now is this period, hovering there in the middle of a blank page.\u00a0 It’s unreal.”\u00a0 pg. 175<\/p>\n

“Neither amnesia nor vengeance—justice!”\u00a0 pg. 192<\/p>\n

What is to be done with legacies of violence, and above all, the institutions and sponsors of violence, who remain ensconced in the state structures of fledgling and newly-restored democracies?\u00a0 What is the balance between preserving the democratic gains that exist now, in the present, with the demand for justice by those who were the victims of the horrors of the past?\u00a0 What prevails, the moral or the practical?<\/p>\n

\"\"

Patricio Aylwin, right, with Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Santiago, Chile, in 1993.<\/p><\/div>\n

More on Aylwin here:\u00a0\u00a0https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/04\/20\/world\/americas\/patricio-aylwin-president-who-guided-chile-to-democracy-diesat-97.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“‘Nations are a plebiscite every day, and they are constructed on the basis of great rememberings and great forgettings.’\u00a0 If the French were still thinking about the Night of St. Bartholomew, they’d be slaughtering each other to this day. This … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1690,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fifth-blog-transitions-to-democracy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1690"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":369,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367\/revisions\/369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/18s-psci204\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}