National memory of shared fratricide emerges from below, not from state decree alone.
Evidence
But it is surely too easy to attribute these reassuring ancient fratricides simply to the icy calculations of state functionaries. At another level they reflect a deep reshaping of the imagination of which the state was barely conscious, and over which it had, and still has, only exiguous control. In the 1930s people of many nationalities went to fight in the Iberian peninsula because they viewed it as the arena in which global historical forces and causes were at stake. When the long-lived Franco regime constructed the Valley of the Fallen, it restricted membership in the gloomy necropolis to those who, in its eyes, had died in the world-struggle against Bolshevism and atheism. But, at the state’s margins, a ‘memory’ was already emerging of a ‘Spanish’ Civil War. Only after the crafty tyrant’s death, and the subsequent, startlingly smooth transition to bourgeois democracy – in which it played a crucial role – did this ‘memory’ become official. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 739
Categorization
- XREF: Complicates the Gramscian notion of hegemony — the state does not solely manufacture national memory; subaltern imaginings coalesce at the margins first.