Damnatio Memoriae
Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo.
José Ortega y Gasset, Meditaciones del Quijote
One of the first principles the diplomatic corps inculcates is that we mustn’t judge a society by how it appears at the present moment, but by how far it has journeyed from the barbarity of its past. In matters of diplomacy, this framing is essential. If you cannot train yourself to view foreign lands through generous eyes, then you won’t last long in our line of work. We diplomats are told to recall the dark days when a country’s heretics burned at the stake, for example, whenever we witness its denizens amassed in protest against vaccine distributors or rights for the marginalized. The corps teaches us not to fixate on the hostility toward such obvious scientific or cultural advancement, but to appreciate that the resistance has grown peaceful and comparatively harmless—that its violence has sublimated from the body to the body politic. The throng that in olden times would beat a dissident bloody now inflicts no physical damage upon themselves or others beyond the stress of raised voices. Privilege this progress, the corps advises; remember that we, too, once affronted the world’s enlightened powers, as our own history now affronts us.
(Is this not why the saying in our language goes, “Clean gloves hide dirty hands?” Like all received wisdom, it whispers of hard-won truth, freighted with generations of reckoning. I have always taken it to mean that the pursuit of the moral course often stems from a duty to atone— though I have no reason to believe mine the definitive interpretation.)
In that spirit, I submit the report you now read. My aim in writing this account is neither prescriptive nor proscriptive. I intend only to relate, without fear or favor, the details of our newly discovered neighbor Etescanate’s most unique juridical innovationfor, as your earlier letter requesting this study indicated, it is in
