Terror and Identity: The Case of Argentina and the Importance of the Different "Representations" of the Past

Abstract

Raphael Lemkin (the originator of the concept of genocide half a century ago) defined the twin goals of genocide as "the destruction of the national identity of the oppressed group" and "the imposition of the national identity of the opressor".This chapter seeks to put Lemkin´s intuitions on a more scientific footing by apealing to evidence from neuroscience, psychoanalisis and the social sciences. The effectiveness of terror for transforming identities and behavior is explained by considering human memory as an evolutionary and adaptive mechanism whose primary objective is the survival of the organism in which it resides.Trauma can not be overcome, nor identities reconstructed, without an understanding of how traumatic memories shaped by terror work in practice. In this sense, factual accounts of historical events are much less important than the way events are interpreted.