Não é isso que eu quero dizer. Mas não é verdade que a identidade Cultural de um povo, não faz parte desse povo?
Como a cultura dos Incas é dos Incas. Como a dos Gregos é dos Gregos ou dos Romanos é dos Romanos.
Mas o que fez alguém romano era algo cultural e não genético. Tinhas romanos em África até ao norte da Europa, eram todos romanos e com genética diferente. Tu podes ter genética africana, nasceres na Noruega ou Japão ou viveres lá desde muito novo e isso não te faz culturalmente africano mas muito possivelmente norueguês ou japonês.
E culturas não são estáticas, mas dinâmicas. Nenhuma cultura manteve os mesmos costumes ou valores eternamente, mas transformou-os, substítuiu ou aculturou novos.
Não acredito muito nisso. Não precisas de ir muito longe, aqui em Portugal os Africanos, a maioria deles não é muito “culturalmente Portuguesa” ou que quer queira dizer.
Claro que não preciso ir longe, basta-me olhar pela janela e ver por exemplo asiáticos que só falam inglês com sourthen accent e cuja comida preferida é fish and chips. Outro exemplo interessante é o Richard Ayoade, pai nigeriano e mãe norueguesa, nascido em Londres com accent e humor completamente british.
Pois se assim é no UK muito bom, aqui não é.
Leao88 concordas ou aceitas a possibilidade defendida por alguns geneticistas e historiadores de que os povos Celtas da Irlanda, Escócia, Gales, Cornualha e Bretanha sejam descendentes dos povos da Península Ibérica.
Existe também uma teoria engraçada em relação à origem dos Celtas em geral, é que eles não provinham da Europa Central mas sim descendiam de povos do Norte e Ocidente da Península Ibérica.
Entretanto, mais um estudo genético “comprova” que todo o Português é descendente de berberes, árabes, judeus, negros e quiçá uma hipotética ascendência antiga Chinesa datada de 6900 AC!!!
Se eu acharia? Se me dissessem que eram qual é o problema? Claro que acredito. Todas as nacionalidades têm indivíduos de todo o tipo de raças, etnias, aspectos e feitios… só se tivesse sido num país totalmente isolado do restante mundo, tipo tribos indígenas da Amazónia, só aí é que as pessoas dessa nacionalidade teriam background genético idêntico… e mesmo aqui a diversidade intrínseca já é mais que muita.
Essa teoria de que os suecos são todos loiros, altos e de olhos azuis é retrógrada e totalmente desajustada à realidade… hoje, ontem e há 1000 anos atrás.
Os Suecos nativos (aqueles que são descendentes de Suecos que viviam já na Suécia antes das enormes ondas de Imigração) duvido que a maioria não seja Loira.
Não sei é que a julgar por muitas pessoas o Sul da Europa é só Morenos de olhos castanhos e no Norte e Centro é só loirinhos de Olhos azuis, ate já ouvi neste forum a alarvidade de que os “verdadeiros brancos” eram os Alemães e os Brits e os Nordicos. Nada que me surpreenda.
Quanto à da homogenidade genética de um povo, concordo que os das Amazonas são próximos. Mas na Europa tens alguns exemplos, e logo um na Península Ibérica, os Bascos são um povo um pouco à parte de quase toda a Europa, e os testes genéticos lá feitos mostram sempre uma grande percentagem (90%) de indivíduos pertencentes ao haplogrupo R1B.
Bem, eu como sou chato como tudo, sou muito cuidadoso quando as pessoas me fazem esse tipo de perguntas, porque tende a existir uma ideia geral de conceito X e depois a complexidade desse conceito que por vezes não tem de relacionado com o que a pessoa pensava inicialmente ser.
Depende do que chamas povos celtas. Eles não são grupos unificados e identicos genéticamente. Ainda há tempos num artigo publicado na revista Nature se mostrava como no na Grã-Bretanha haviam vários grupos ditos celtas com variações genéticas normalmente associadas a territórios.
É possível que certos povos que habitaram a GB tenham vindo da PI e o inverso também. Aliás durante a minha dissertação o que pude observar era uma certa forma de relacionamento cultural e económico entre povos da costa atlântica e principalmente o norte e centro da PI durante chamada “idade do Bronze”. Existia também algo semelhante, com diferenças refira-se, com o mediterrâneo e norte de África no centro sul e sul da PI.
O problema é que não há ainda estudos suficientes sobre esta matéria e em Portugal e Espanha publicar coisas em formato lógico parece ser um desafio complicado :wall: Antes de mais, tem atenção ao que chamas de celtas, não os enfies a todos num pacote. Com a rainha Vitoria desenvolveu-se uma ideia mitificada do povo celta, quem eram, como se vestiam, o que comiam, tradições etc. Grande parte é treta ou generalizações.
Além disso é o cuidado de entender que independentemente do se tenha passado, culturalmente em Portugal não temos nada de relacionado com estes povos. É como a doideira do somos lusitanos. Não, não somos. Culturalmente nem sabemos muito deles, não temos sequer língua em comum ou outros traços culturais que nos liguem a estes povos. Foram infelizmente usados para um propósito nacionalista que desvirtuou quem eram e quem nós somos.
Report interessante que desmitifica certas concepções relacionadas com a transição de humano recoletor para sedentário, construção de grandes obras e coexistência de grupos diferentes.
[size=12pt][b]Archaeologists discover Maya 'melting pot' [/b][/size] Archaeologists working in Guatemala have unearthed [b]new information about the Maya civilization's transition from a mobile, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary way of life[/b].Led by University of Arizona archaeologists Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan, the team’s excavations of the ancient Maya lowlands site of Ceibal suggest that as the society transitioned from a heavy reliance on foraging to farming, mobile communities and settled groups co-existed and may have come together to collaborate on construction projects and participate in public ceremonies.
The findings, to be published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenge two common assumptions: that mobile and sedentary groups maintained separate communities, and that public buildings were constructed only after a society had fully put down roots.
“There has been the theory that sedentary and mobile groups co-exited in various parts of the world, but most people thought the sedentary and mobile communities were separate, even though they were in relatively close areas,” said Inomata, a UA professor of anthropology and lead author of the PNAS study. “Our study presents the first relatively concrete evidence that mobile and sedentary people came together to build a ceremonial center.”
A public plaza uncovered at Ceibal dates to about 950 B.C., with surrounding ceremonial buildings growing to monumental sizes by about 800 B.C. Yet, evidence of permanent residential dwellings in the area during that time is scarce. Most people were still living a traditional hunter-gatherer-like lifestyle, moving from place to place throughout the rainforest, as they would continue to do for five or six more centuries.
The area’s few permanent residents could not have built the plaza alone, Inomata said.
“The construction of ceremonial buildings is pretty substantial, so there had to be more people working on that construction,” he said.
Inomata and his colleagues theorize that groups with varying degrees of mobility came together to construct the buildings and to participate in public ceremonies over the next several hundred years. That process likely helped them to bond socially and eventually make the transition to a fully sedentary society.
"This tells us something about the importance of ritual and construction. People tend to think that you have a developed society and then building comes. I think in many cases it’s the other way around," Inomata said.“For those people living the traditional way of life, ceremony, ritual and construction became major forces for them to adapt a new way of life and build a new society. The process of gathering for ritual and gathering for construction helped bring together different people who were doing different things, and eventually that contributed to the later development of Mayan civilization.”
The transition was gradual, with the Maya making the shift to a fully sedentary agrarian society, reliant on maize, by about 400 or 300 B.C., Inomata said.
“The most fascinating finding is that different peoples with diverse ways of life co-existed in apparent harmony for generations before establishing a more uniform society,” said Melissa Burham, a study co-author and a graduate student in the UA School of Anthropology. “Discovering an ancient ‘melting pot’ is definitely the unexpected highlight of this research.”
Partilho esta noticia mais pela curiosidade que outra coisa. O esqueleto de um camelo que data da segunda guerra Otomana no século XVII foi descoberto na Áustria.
E até a ideia que as comunidades indigenas da Amazónia vivem em isolamento é mais um mito que outra coisa. Cada vez que se vê na tv e jornais e que população X foi descoberta e nunca tinha sido contactada é quase sempre mentira. Neste último ano vi 3 casos destes, dois no Brasil e um no Peru e todos acabarem por não ser nada do que se dizia. Num dos casos brasileiros há mais de 5 anos que havia contactos com a FUNAI, uma organização que lida com as questões indigenas.
Além do mais, muitas comunidades amazónicas são exogamas e por isso ainda mais difícil é ter um background genético isolado do resto do mundo.
Por conta de mitos desses tivémos o escândalo do James Neel que fez experiências genéticas de todo o tipo com os Yanomami da Venezuela nos anos 60. Morreram centenas ou milhares por conta de um suposto fieldwork antropológico que na verdade era financiado pelo US atomic energy commission.
[size=10pt][b]Neel held the view that "natural" human society, as seen before the advent of large-scale agriculture, consists of small, genetically isolated groups in which dominant genes - specifically a gene he believed existed for "leadership" or "innate ability" - have a selective advantage[/b][/size].In such an environment, male carriers of this gene would gain access to a disproportionate number of females, reproducing their genes more frequently than less “innately able” males. The result would supposedly be a continual upgrading of the human genetic stock.
He says Neel believed that in modern societies “superior leadership genes would be swamped by mass genetic mediocrity”.
“The political implication of this fascistic eugenics is clearly that society should be reorganised into small breeding isolates in which genetically superior males could emerge into dominance, eliminating or subordinating the male losers in the competition for leadership and women, and amassing harems of brood females.”
E há casos de amostras de sangue levadas indevidamente por médicos e antropólogos, relacionadas com o James Neel, do Yanomami do Brasil que só agora ao fim de 3 décadas voltam dos EUA para Yanomami. Isto para um povo que não só crema os corpos como todos os pertences do morto. Para eles é crucial que tudo o que fosse o corpo do falecido e seus bens sejam destruídos por via a permitir à alma desapegar-se do mundo material.
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Este artigo acho que será interessante para informar algumas discussões deste tópico.
[size=12pt][b]How Europeans evolved white skin[/b][/size]Most of us think of Europe as the ancestral home of white people. But a new study shows that pale skin, as well as other traits such as tallness and the ability to digest milk as adults, arrived in most of the continent relatively recently. The work, presented here last week at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, offers dramatic evidence of recent evolution in Europe and shows that most modern Europeans don’t look much like those of 8000 years ago.
The origins of Europeans have come into sharp focus in the past year as researchers have sequenced the genomes of ancient populations, rather than only a few individuals. By comparing key parts of the DNA across the genomes of 83 ancient individuals from archaeological sites throughout Europe, the international team of researchers reported earlier this year that Europeans today are a mix of the blending of at least three ancient populations of hunter-gatherers and farmers who moved into Europe in separate migrations over the past 8000 years. The study revealed that a massive migration of Yamnaya herders from the steppes north of the Black Sea may have brought Indo-European languages to Europe about 4500 years ago.
Now, a new study from the same team drills down further into that remarkable data to search for genes that were under strong natural selection—including traits so favorable that they spread rapidly throughout Europe in the past 8000 years. By comparing the ancient European genomes with those of recent ones from the 1000 Genomes Project, population geneticist Iain Mathieson, a postdoc in the Harvard University lab of population geneticist David Reich, found five genes associated with changes in diet and skin pigmentation that underwent strong natural selection.
First, the scientists confirmed an earlier report that the hunter-gatherers in Europe could not digest the sugars in milk 8000 years ago, according to a poster. They also noted an interesting twist: The first farmers also couldn’t digest milk. The farmers who came from the Near East about 7800 years ago and the Yamnaya pastoralists who came from the steppes 4800 years ago lacked the version of the LCT gene that allows adults to digest sugars in milk. It wasn’t until about 4300 years ago that lactose tolerance swept through Europe.
When it comes to skin color, the team found a patchwork of evolution in different places, and three separate genes that produce light skin, telling a complex story for how European’s skin evolved to be much lighter during the past 8000 years. The modern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes. And the new data confirm that about 8500 years ago, early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary also had darker skin: They lacked versions of two genes—SLC24A5 and SLC45A2—that lead to depigmentation and, therefore, pale skin in Europeans today.
But in the far north—where low light levels would favor pale skin—the team found a different picture in hunter-gatherers: Seven people from the 7700-year-old Motala archaeological site in southern Sweden had both light skin gene variants, SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. They also had a third gene, HERC2/OCA2, which causes blue eyes and may also contribute to light skin and blond hair. Thus ancient hunter-gatherers of the far north were already pale and blue-eyed, but those of central and southern Europe had darker skin.
Then, the first farmers from the Near East arrived in Europe; they carried both genes for light skin. As they interbred with the indigenous hunter-gatherers, one of their light-skin genes swept through Europe, so that central and southern Europeans also began to have lighter skin. The other gene variant, SLC45A2, was at low levels until about 5800 years ago when it swept up to high frequency.
The team also tracked complex traits, such as height, which are the result of the interaction of many genes. They found that selection strongly favored several gene variants for tallness in northern and central Europeans, starting 8000 years ago, with a boost coming from the Yamnaya migration, starting 4800 years ago. The Yamnaya have the greatest genetic potential for being tall of any of the populations, which is consistent with measurements of their ancient skeletons. In contrast, selection favored shorter people in Italy and Spain starting 8000 years ago, according to the paper now posted on the bioRxiv preprint server. Spaniards, in particular, shrank in stature 6000 years ago, perhaps as a result of adapting to colder temperatures and a poor diet.
Surprisingly, the team found no immune genes under intense selection, which is counter to hypotheses that diseases would have increased after the development of agriculture.
The paper doesn’t specify why these genes might have been under such strong selection. But the likely explanation for the pigmentation genes is to maximize vitamin D synthesis, said paleoanthropologist Nina Jablonski of Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), University Park, as she looked at the poster’s results at the meeting. People living in northern latitudes often don’t get enough UV to synthesize vitamin D in their skin so natural selection has favored two genetic solutions to that problem—evolving pale skin that absorbs UV more efficiently or favoring lactose tolerance to be able to digest the sugars and vitamin D naturally found in milk. “What we thought was a fairly simple picture of the emergence of depigmented skin in Europe is an exciting patchwork of selection as populations disperse into northern latitudes,” Jablonski says. “This data is fun because it shows how much recent evolution has taken place.”
Anthropological geneticist George Perry, also of Penn State, notes that the work reveals how an individual’s genetic potential is shaped by their diet and adaptation to their habitat. “We’re getting a much more detailed picture now of how selection works.”
http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=facebook
Mapa (mais ou menos simplificado) das Línguas e dialetos europeus
[size=12pt][b] Royals told: open archives on family ties to Nazi regimeHistorian urges that secret correspondence be made public to reveal the truth after Queen’s Nazi salute footage released
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor meet with Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1937.[/b][/size]
Buckingham Palace has been urged to disclose documents that would finally reveal the truth about the relationship between the royal family and the Nazi regime of the 1930s.
The Sun’s decision to publish footage of the Queen at six or seven years old performing a Nazi salute, held in the royal archives and hitherto unavailable for public viewing, has triggered concerns that the palace has for years sought to suppress the release of damaging material confirming the links between leading royals and the Third Reich.
The Sun was right to publish scoop of the Queen giving a Nazi saluteUnlike the National Archives, the royal archives, which are known to contain large volumes of correspondence between members of the royal family and Nazi politicians and aristocrats, are not compelled to release material on a regular basis. Now, as that relationship becomes the subject of global debate, historians and MPs have called for the archives to be opened up so that the correspondence can be put into context.
“The royal family can’t suppress their own history for ever,” said Karina Urbach of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. “This is censorship. Censorship is not a democratic value. They have to face their past. I’m coming from a country, Germany, where we all have to face our past.”
The Sun was subjected to a backlash on social media, after publishing 80-year-old home movie footage from the grounds of Balmoral Castle, in which a laughing Elizabeth, her mother, Prince Edward (later Edward VIII) and Princess Margaret, were shown making Nazi salutes. Barbara Keeley, Labour MP for Worsley and Eccles South, retweeted a message that read: “Hey @TheSun, if you want to stir up some moral outrage about a misjudgement in history, look a bit closer to home.”
The Sun’s Stig Abell defends publication of Queen’s Nazi salute footage
Many expressed incredulity that the paper had published the actions of a child. But the managing editor, Stig Abell, defended publication. “It is an important and interesting issue, the extent to which the British aristocracy – notably Edward VIII, in this case – in the 1930s, were sympathetic towards fascism,” he said. The paper declined to comment on how it acquired the footage. Legal experts suggested a police investigation was unlikely, especially given the collapse of recent cases in which Sun reporters walked free after being accused of paying public officials for information.
Advertisement“On the face of it, this information has been obtained legitimately and used in accordance with what the newspaper feels is appropriate interest,” said John Cooper, QC.
“It’s really a question not so much on the law but whether it’s in the public interest for this material to find its way into a newspaper. The public interest in this document being produced is nothing to do with the royal family but how startling it is that in 1933 people were so naive about the evils of Nazism.”
Urbach, author of Go-Betweens for Hitler, a new book about the relationship between the royals and the Nazis, has spent years trying to gain access to documents relating to Nazi Germany held in the royal archives. She described the archives, in Windsor Castle’s Round Tower, as “a beautiful place to work but not if you want to work on 20th-century material … you don’t get any access to anything political after 1918”.
She described seeing shelves of boxes containing material relating to the 1930s that no one is allowed to research. She suggested that much of the archives’ interwar material no longer existed.
“We know that after ’45 there was a big cleanup operation,” Urbach said. “The royals were very worried about correspondence resurfacing and so it was destroyed.”
Helen McCarthy, a historian of modern Britain at Queen Mary University of London, echoed Urbach’s comments, tweeting that “if Royal Archives were more accessible & welcoming to researchers, ‘shock’ discoveries like Sun’s front page could be put in better context”.
AdvertisementHistorian Alex von Tunzelmann suggested on Twitter that the lack of access to the royal archives for historians and the public “is profoundly undemocratic. We need much greater access. We need to be grown up about it. The history of this country belongs to the public”.
Paul Flynn, Labour MP for Newport West, a member of parliament’s influential political and constitutional reform committee and a prominent supporter of the recent release of Prince Charles’s confidential memos to politicians, said the royal family needed to allow full access to its archives, including those relating to Germany in the 1930s.
“It was a very interesting part of our history, when we had a future king who was flirting with the Nazis and the Blackshirts, and we need to know the truth of it,” Flynn said. “We need more openness. The royals have great influence still. Charles is still the most important lobbyist in the land.”
The Sun’s decision to publish the 17 seconds of footage, thought to have been shot in 1933 or 1934, has served as an unwelcome reminder for the royal family of its past links to the Nazis. The Queen, then aged six or seven, joins her mother, then Duchess of York, and her uncle Edward, the Prince of Wales, in raising an arm in salute as she plays alongside her younger sister, Princess Margaret. Her mother then raises her arm in the style of a Nazi salute and, after glancing towards her mother, the Queen copies the gesture. Prince Edward is also seen raising his arm.
Edward, who abdicated to marry the American socialite Wallis Simpson, faced numerous accusations of being a Nazi sympathiser. The couple were photographed meeting Hitler in Munich in October 1937.
A palace spokesman said: “It is disappointing that film, shot eight decades ago and apparently from Her Majesty’s personal family archive, has been obtained and exploited in this manner.”
[size=12pt][b]Genetic Evidence Could Rewrite History of First Americans[/b][/size]Did more than one wave of prehistoric immigrants travel from Asia to America?
Picture of a group of Surui Indians in Brazil
The Surui people of Brazil are related to indigenous Australians, a new genetic study shows. The research suggests that the prehistoric settlers of the New World could have arrived in two separate waves.
Since the 1930s, it’s been a generally accepted theory that indigenous Americans are descendants of Siberians who came to the New World by crossing a land bridge into Alaska around 15,000 years ago.
But, the details of that migration remain a source of contention. Did the Asians who trekked across the Bering Strait arrive in one or several waves? Were some of them isolated from the rest, settling on the land bridge until it submerged beneath the water of melting glaciers?
Two new studies—relying on genetic data from living individuals and ancient skeletons—offer possible answers, albeit with different interpretations.
The first research paper, published this week in Nature, suggests that there were two founding populations. The investigating scientists, led by Harvard University geneticist David Reich, discovered that present-day Amazonian peoples in South America can trace at least part of their ancestry to indigenous Australasian populations in New Guinea, Australia, and the Andaman Islands.
Native Americans in Central and North America lack these genetic signatures, leading Reich and his team to conclude that the Amazonian peoples are descended from a distinct, second immigrant population—although they are uncertain as to precisely how and when they reached South America.
“The new genetic data is surprising, but importantly the authors don’t make the claim that indigenous Australasian travelled to South America by boat,” University of Adelaide ancient DNA expert Jeremy Austin told an Australian news site. “Instead, it seems that a small group of Australasians may have travelled around the Pacific Rim, leaving no genetic trace, finally settling in and surviving only in the Amazon Basin.”
The second research paper, published in Science, suggests its own simple solution to this mystery: there was no second migration to the New World. The study, conducted under the supervision of Eske Willerslev, an expert on ancient genetics at the University of Copenhagen, likewise found traces of Australasian ancestry among Amazonians. However, the scientists propose that those genes were already among the population of Siberians from which all Native Americans descended.
Willerslev’s research team found evidence indicating that genetic differences among Native Americans emerged after they had already arrived in the New World.
They believe this diversification began some 13,000 years ago, when the prehistoric immigrants split into two separate branches—a literal fork in the road, when, according to the study, warming temperatures opened “habitable routes along the coastal and interior corridors into unglaciated North America." The Native Americans might have gone their separate ways along these routes, dividing and isolating the populations, which ultimately spread across the continent.
Por acaso acho engraçados esses rumores de que a família Real Inglesa simpatizava com Hitler. É que a Inglaterra nunca assinou nenhum pacto de não-agressão com os Nazis. Se é que me entendem…
71 anos depois é finalmente prestada uma justa homenagem às vítimas do Sürgünlik .
No tribunal da História os crimes nunca prescrevem…
Слава Україні! Героям слава!
Excelente documentário, de visionamento obrigatório. :venia:
Apesar de derrotados militarmente, o tribunal da História concedeu-lhes o merecido estatuto de heróis da sua Pátria…
[b]Uma memória dolorosa a revisitar 20 DE FEVEREIRO DE 2016[/b]
Há alguns dias, a propósito do lançamento em Espanha dos diários da poeta russa Marina Tsvietáieva, Antonio Muñoz Molina escreveu o seguinte no suplemento literário do El País: «Dizia George Orwell que a grande cegueira da esquerda europeia nos anos trinta tinha sido querer ser antifascista sem ser antitotalitária: em termos mais claros, denunciava a Hitler, Mussolini e Franco [em Portugal, acrescento, também a Salazar], fechando os olhos aos crimes de (…) Estaline. Essa antiga cegueira continua sem se dissipar de todo: a diferença é que agora a ninguém falta a informação contrastada necessária para curar-se dela.»
Não sendo este um tema premente nas preocupações políticas da esquerda internacional, ou sequer da portuguesa, com toda a justeza e sentido mais preocupada com as prioridades do presente, estamos agora em bom tempo para olhá-lo sem temores e interditos. Como é sabido, varrer fantasmas para debaixo do tapete só os esconde temporariamente, e quando saímos das declarações diplomáticas das direções partidárias e viajamos até aos mitos e às crenças profundas de uma parte dos militantes – por vezes, até dos mais jovens, com escasso ou deturpado conhecimento da história – verificamos que eles continuam lá.
Para além do interesse associado à condição de investigador e de professor de história contemporânea, a curiosidade pelo interdito levou-me um dia a viajar até aquela parte da memória mais dolorosa do século XX que durante décadas permaneceu omitida ou deturpada e assim permanecia quando a descobri. Recordo como nos finais da década de 1970 li quase secretamente O Arquipélago do Gulag, o documentado relato de memória de prisão e exílio de Alexandre Soljenitsine, por este ser tomado, nos ambientes políticos que então frequentava, como mera e abjeta «propaganda do capitalismo». Distanciei-me rapidamente do trajeto político pessoal do escritor russo, mas fui depois acumulando muitas leituras de outros que passaram por idênticas experiências e sobreviveram para poder descrevê-las.
Memorialistas, escritores ou simples testemunhas, às centenas – Shalamov, Ginzburg, Ulitskaya, Grossman, Pasternak, e tantos, tantos outros –, foram legando uma recordação vívida e dramática de vidas ceifadas ou destruídas em nome de um projeto político que, demasiadas vezes, colocou a defesa do dogma ou o interesse de alguns grupos acima da prática da liberdade e dos valores do humanismo que fazem efetivamente parte do património identitário da esquerda. Nas últimas décadas, aliás, muitos historiadores reputados têm confirmado e ampliado o reconhecimento, sustentado em fontes idóneas, desses desvios.
Todos nos falaram, de forma intensa e comprovadamente, da realidade repressiva consubstanciada no antigo sistema de campos de trabalho e concentração soviéticos, o Gulag, cuja instalação começou logo em 1918, atingou dimensões colossais durante as décadas de 1930-1940 e serviu depois de modelo àqueles que foram erguidos noutras paragens. Mais do que de números assombrosos, esses testemunhos falam principalmente da irracionalidade de um sofrimento que envolveu muitos milhões de seres humanos, e que ainda há quem insista em ignorar ou desvalorizar. Tal como existe um negacionismo do Holocausto, tendente a minimizar ou mesmo a negar o terror nazi, existe um fenómeno idêntico em relação ao Gulag. O dever de memória, porém, não pode valer mais para as vítimas de um que para as do outro.
Esta forma de negação do universo concentracionário, que aliás hoje ocorre na própria Rússia apesar do volume imenso de vítimas sobreviventes, possui dois rostos, sem que seja possível decidir qual o mais monstruoso. O primeiro visa o apagamento do passado, com o colocar de obstáculos à divulgação de documentos e de testemunhos que tinham começado a ser divulgados nos últimos anos da vida da União Soviética e na década que se lhe seguiu. O segundo rosto é representado pelas convicções daqueles que consideram o regime repressivo estalinista como justificável por se destinar a defender uma «boa causa», sem atender, para não ir mais longe, a que muitos dos milhões de vítimas foram dedicados militantes comunistas, objeto de purgas e de execuções, ou cidadãos comuns sujeitos a iniciativas paranóicas de natureza ditatorial e a punições traduzidas em prisões, exílios, deslocações em massa, assassinatos e silenciamentos compulsivos.
Para quem desta situação tenha consciência, e apesar da passagem do tempo, essas são posições que afetam a confiança perante a autenticidade democrática de quem possa manter tal entendimento. Por isso, independentemente das prioridades de um sentido essencialmente prático, a confiança a estabelecer entre as esquerdas, tão necessária para desenvolver compromissos duradouros e eficazes, passará sempre por uma revisitação sem complexos das memórias mais negras e dos erros gravíssimos que parte delas cometeu sem deles se ter distanciado criticamente e sem rodeios. Sem dramas, mas também sem branqueamentos ou omissões. Para que todos possam encarar o futuro sem o peso dos mitos e o façam de consciência tranquila.
