Do heroes, martyrs, and leaders really exist in the world you live in? That's right, their glorious deeds are written in textbooks, TV shows where they played their heroic exploits, their stories are spread in people's mouths, and there is even a square named after him. But does that alone prove they must exist?
The Yugoslav film "Underground" vividly shows how power can mourn a living person as a martyr and manipulate the collective memory of the masses. Before the victory of the revolution, Ma Gao and Xiao Hei led a group of people to hide in the underground arsenal factory to manufacture arms. Ma Gao was the only contact person who could get on the ground. Out of self-interest, he concealed the news of the victory of the revolution from Xiao Hei and the masses. In this way, in the underground world, Ma Gao often pretended to be beaten and told everyone that the outside world was dangerous, while in the land on the ground, Ma Gao became Tito's close comrade-in-arms and one of the country's founding fathers. In the underground world, Xiao Hei anxiously waited for Tito's call to lead troops to fight, while on the ground, he had been declared dead, and as a heroic martyr, he was pushed to the altar of national sacrifice.
As Halbwach said, many official social activities are often aimed at emphasizing certain collective memories, in order to strengthen the cohesion of a certain group of people. The "past" in people's minds is not an objective reality, but a social construction. In "Underground", it doesn't matter whether Xiao Hei is dead or not. What matters is that he, as a martyr, is one of the symbols of the Communist Party to defend the people against foreign humiliation, and has become part of the Yugoslav national narrative.
The collective memory construction model of modern social identity politics is often a process by which political or cultural elites reproduce a certain past experience and endow the experience with a special symbolic meaning related to a certain collective identity. However, the process of reproduction is actually the process of rewriting history. In the 20th century, the establishment of communist regimes was based on the reconstruction of past history. The role of the Communist Party and its leaders in the war is deliberately exaggerated, becoming the glue of this imagined community of nations. In a sense, this is a historical necessity, and we cannot just attribute it to communism. In some primitive tribes in Africa, the fusion and division of families is also achieved by remembering some ancestors and forgetting some ancestors.
Collective memory needs to be preserved in some materialized carrier. Ma Gao built the statue of Xiao Hei not to remember his revolutionary comrades, but to consolidate power in the process of construction and commemoration. After the Republic of China, many roads in various cities in China were named "Zhongshan Road". This is not only to promote the unity and stability of the country by remembering Sun Yat-sen, but also to realize the administrative means in the exercise of the power of the central government to order the local government to change the name of the streets. proficiency.
In "The Metamorphosis", Kafka said a terrible truth: your existence or not is not necessary for other people. In the political arena, those in power are actors, whether they are martyrs in war or traitors, they are props that are manipulated arbitrarily.
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