+++
title = "Destruction of archives and historical revisionism"
glassblowers = ["marcellmars.md", "tomislavmedak.md"]
+++

> When the dominant idea of freedom in an age is that of freedom regulated by markets, the collective capacity to pursue autonomy, equality, and welfare becomes reduced to the freedom of capital flows, the freedom of competition, and the freedom of consumer choice.

> Under the coercive invisible hand of the market, the freedom of journalism tends to transmogrify into sensationalist media acting on behest of commercial and political interests; the freedom of expression into officially condoned hate speech; the freedom of research and education into sky-rocketing student fees, precarious academic labour, and intellectual self-censoring.

> When the idea of freedom as regulated by markets meets the idea of political freedom as self-assertion of ethnic domination, as was the case over the last three decades in the countries of former Yugoslavia, then the sensationalist media, the normalized discrimination, and the intellectual self-censorship turn a blind eye when books are thrown out of the libraries, documents are disappeared from the archives, and monuments are blasted into the air.

> Thus are material acts and facts created that wipe out the collective memory of a past where the emancipatory labour movement and anti-fascism defeated—even if temporarily—Nazism, racism, and exploitation of the underclasses. In their toleration of such material acts and facts that destroy memory, the media, the public, and the intellectuals are complicit in a rewriting of history anew. The monoethnic identity of new capitalist nation-states thus descends into a self-justificatory spiral of historical revisionism.

— Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, "Public Library and the Return of the Repressed", ![Stories and threads: Perspective on Art Archives](bib:f4a8c24a-071f-4080-bea4-97eadb849c93) edited by Sara Buraya Boned, Jennifer Fitzgibbon and Sezin Romi, 74–89. L’internationale Online, 2022.