Click on OC-16 Hawaii's weekly newscast on Things That Matter to Tech, and to Hawaii. I'm Elise Anderson. And I'm Kauai Lucas. In our show this time, we'll cover Let Them Eat Dirt, a popular book co-authored by scientist Brett Finley from the University of British Columbia. He was here at the University of Hawaii last week to talk about what in the world he means by suggesting that kids should eat dirt. Brett Finley is Canada's number one microbiologist. His book is about the development of microbiomes in humans from the pregnancy of the mother through childhood, and is important not only for scientists but for the public. The book came out last year and will soon be published in nine other languages. He's well known for his contributions to understanding how microbes cause disease and for developing new tools for fighting infections, as well as the role the microbiome plays in human health and disease. He took his Bachelor of Science and his PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Alberta and did post-doctoral work at Stanford University. He is the Peter Wall Distinguished Professor of Microbiology at the University of British Columbia and a professor in the Michael Smith Laboratory there. He is co-director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Humans and Microbes Program and has an international team of 20 scientists all the way from the Pesture Institute in France to Shanghai Jitong University in China. Among his interests are the dangerous and unnecessary use of antibiotics worldwide and the desperate lack of clean water and good sanitation in the undeveloped world. His lab engages in multidisciplinary research exploring how microbes affect human health and disease. His research has resulted in tools for fighting infection. He is best known for his work with Salmonella and Estorica coli E. coli, how these pathogens develop in the early stages of infection and avoid our self-defense mechanisms. He is one of the world's leading experts on how bacteria infect their hosts and has developed a vaccine for SARS and a bovine vaccine for E. coli. His research focuses on the role of the microbiome in infections, asthma and malnutrition. He has been researching microbes for 30 years and has published some 500 articles. He is also a founder of various biotech companies and is a member of the prestigious Order of Canada. Keep in mind that humans and microbes are intrinsically linked. Microglyph forms are found in our skin and in our guts. Often we blame these microbes for making us sick, but most microbes play beneficial roles in our lives. The collection of microbes living in us, our microbiome, has played a crucial role in our survival and evolution. There is much to be learned and gained from studying the human microbiome. Comparing the microbiome composition of people in North America before and after European colonization also sheds light on disease and human evolution. Only recently have we begun to understand how the microbiome affects obesity, bowel disease, diabetes, asthma, nutrition and brain development. In developed countries, we have gone to great lengths to minimize our exposure to microbes, both pathogenic and harmless, but perhaps we have gone too far. After all, our species has evolved in a virtual sea of microbes and actually we need exposure to microbes early in life to develop normally. So this book is called Let the Meat Dirt, saving your child from an oversanitized world and was authored by Finley and co-author Marie Claire Arietta of the University of Calgary. Their study, connecting asthma and babies to missing key intestinal bacteria species, was deemed a breakthrough and reported around the world. The key points of the book are that one, an attitude adjustment is in order. Two, the study of the microbiome is cutting-edge science. Three, the first five years of a child's life are crucial. Four, birth and pregnancy choices matter in establishing the child's microbiome. Five, breast milk is the jackpot for friendly microbes. Six, cleanliness may actually be harming us. Seven, antibiotics are in fact overused. Eight, finally, surprise of surprise, kids need dirt. The book tells us about the development of the neonatal gut and immune system and why it is crucial to expose all kids to good microbes and let them eat dirt and things even worse. True to his wish to educate the public about these things, Finley gave a number of talks while he was here, including one at the UH Campus Center. It was well attended by scientists from UH and the public. I want you to kind of think about, you know, what's precious in this world? So you think, you know, diamond rings, yachts, whatever, swimming pools, but you know, what did you get beyond that?  And the answer, of course, is kids. And you know, here's a lovely baby and we do everything we can because we know this is our future as a species. So that's what a kid looks like, right?  This is kids coded in microbes. And so we're going to discuss how these microbes interface with kids and we'll not also talk about adults and how they affect us. And what I hope to encourage you by the time the evening's out is, you know, even those microbes, you can't see them. They actually have a big role in both health and disease. And that's kind of what the upshot of tonight's going to be. So where do we start? Well, let's do, let's go back when microbes first discovered. There was this guy named Anthony Van Lievenhoek and way back in 1683. So he was a textile merchant. He sold cloth and as a hobby, he ground lenses because he could then start to look at his cloth and the fibers in these claws. But he got, he got really good at grinding these lenses. He got so good, he actually made the first microscope. So he's a creative guy. Okay, I got a microscope. Now what do I do? So he started looking at things. He started looking in rainwater and other things. And then he did what I think was a profound experiment. He scraped out his mouth, put it on the microscope, and lo and behold, he saw all these things called animicules jumping around. And he said that there are more of these animicules in his mouth than all the people living in Holland or the Netherlands, which is where he lived. That was the birth of microbiology, 330 odd years ago. So the question of where are all these things living in and on us? It's basically wherever your body is exposed to the environment. So they're up in the nasal area of your nose every time you breathe.   You do an oral swab. You have lots of these things. They're all over your skin. They're, you know, it's neat. You can actually, we can now swab. I can swab a forehead of a person, characterize those microbes, and I can tell how old that person is within 10 years just by looking at the microbes on the forehead. I can also tell whether they're bald or not, but it's easier to look at a person and say you're bald. But they're different environments, right?  That's normal.  There's actually very different microbes there than growing, say, on your skin. One of the amazing things is the microbes on your right hand are different than your left hand. How come? Your right hand's doing different things. It's typing or holding this thing or whatever. And that's just because they're different. And it turns out the vast majority of microbes are in your gastrointestinal tract.  But as you go beyond the stomach, heading towards, as I say, the light at the end of the tunnel, the other end down there, there's more and more microbes as you go down the intestine. And it's lower intestine that we see these phenomenal numbers of microbes. That's the majority of these.  When you get them, what do they do? Well, you get them basically from the second you're born. And as an infant, they bounce around. All these little color circles just represent different kinds of microbes. So then you become a kid. And a kid's microbes are pretty constant until a kid hits puberty. But once that child hits puberty, then they're stable. And basically for your whole adult life, if you live without changing things, like moving to a different country or becoming a vegetarian or becoming drinking beer or something, it's pretty constant. And as I get older, the worrisome thing is that once you turn 65, your microbes actually become very unhealthy and become very different. And we'll talk about this later on in the talk, how that might influence aging. So the moral of this is that basically your microbes are pretty stable unless you're really insult them in some way or another for most of your life. Okay, so we have microbes.  Do we need them or not? The answer to that's also been done, and the answer is yes. We know that these microbes are actually really essential for life. And the experiment's done a couple of ways. Here's this child who was about to be born in California several years ago that he didn't have, they knew he didn't genetically have an immune system. If you were born in this world of immune system, you're dead. So they said, okay, let's birth this boy by cesarean sections, which keeps him from being exposed to microbes. And let's put him in a sterile container and basically keep him there. Now they knew that he wouldn't live unless they fed him key vitamins. These microbes make key vitamins you have to have to live. So they fed him key vitamins. And he actually did live to age 12, and then he died of infection. He became known as what we call the bubble boy now. So they could keep him alive. But the problem is that he didn't develop normally. And we've learned an awful lot from experiments just like that, but using animals. You can do the same things with mice and other animals. We call these things germ-free animals, but really that should say micro-free. And you birth them sterile by cesarean section. You keep them in these sterile things, you feed them sterile food and water. These things are not normal. They do not develop normal, these animals. Their immune system does not develop normally. Their gut doesn't develop normally. Even their brain doesn't develop normally. So all these kind of studies are showing that, well, if you have the right vitamins, you can kind of stay alive. But you just don't become a normal organism. So I had a first year graduate student, she was just starting the lab. And she was coming to my office the first time to discuss what she was gonna do her PhD on. And everyone in my lab worked on E. coli and Salmonella. And so I took a flyer, said, hey, Shannon, how'd you like to work on asthma? And what does a first year graduate student say to this big boss you're about to work for? So she says, sure. I said, well, if it doesn't work, we'll go back to E. coli and Salmonella. So Shannon set up some really neat experiments where they're pretty simple. Often the most elegant experiments of science are things that are actually pretty simply set up, and they actually have a really definitive answer. So it's a pretty simple experiment in a sense. We were gonna take both really young mice and adult mice, treat them with antibiotics, so we really shift their microbial composition. And then there's a most asthma model that you can actually induce asthma in these mice. And then we were gonna test them to see if we could actually shift asthma rates. And what we found was really amazing is that if you treated mice early in life with antibiotics, they got profound rates of asthma. The guy that I worked with, Kelly McBangby, that does this asthma model, he'd never seen asthma like this in this mouse model. He just couldn't believe it. It was just off the charts. And all we had done is pre-treat these young mice with antibiotics. If you treated the adult ones with antibiotics, you didn't change it. Basically, it was too late. So that argued that early life microbes are somehow actually being involved in asthma. So that's most asthma, that's gonna make it really famous, right? Wrong. So we thought, well, what about kids? Can we do something like that and actually sort out what's going on with kids? So we then joined something called the Child Cohort, which is basically a group of 2,500 Canadian kids that were being studied for asthma.  Did you have antibiotics? And they were following these kids from age zero to age five. And so I called these guys up and said, hey guys, you gotta collect feces. This is really cool.  Why would we ever wanna collect feces? We're gonna lung disease. I said, no, no, really, just trust me sort of thing. So for whatever reason they did, and they were collecting the feces at three months, one year, two year type thing. So that gave us basically the power to go in and look at what the microbes were doing and composed of these kids. And we chose three months of age and one year of age, because we knew it was gonna be early in life from our animal studies. But we didn't know how early. We're all getting older, right? We don't want to admit it, but heck, it actually just happened. What about microbes and the other areas of life, and how do we live healthily? Here's the top ten reasons of why you're gonna die, great morbid slide, I know. But if you look closely at this slide, how many of these things have microbes involved in this? Only one, influenza pneumonia, that's microbial, right? But when you look really carefully at these things, I can actually convince you that nine out of ten of these things actually have microbial links. And no, I'm not smoking whatever wine smoke here. This is actually based on science. The only one I can't show has microbial links or accidents. So you can't say the microbes made me do it. So I'm just gonna deviate a bit, and we're gonna dig into just a couple of these to give you examples of how these things are actually affecting things. So cardiovascular diseases, so this is heart attacks and strokes, right? Hardening arteries, atherosclerosis type stuff. Turns out that when you eat red meat, there's a component red meat called choline, that microbes convert in something called TMA. And then your body converts in something called TMAO. And it turns out that this chemical called TMAO is what causes atherosclerosis. If you have germ-free mice, no microbes, if you eat them on a red meat, they want, they don't get atherosclerosis. They don't have the microbes to do this, that's neat. It turns out that vegans and vegetarians, for example, they have very low rates of atherosclerosis because they're not eating red meat.  And we're actually making these microbes disappear. We know that microbes in cities are getting less and less diverse. And they're actually, maybe they're endangered species. Maybe we should rethink about these poor microbes, we're hurting them. These are important to us. So I don't have an answer for this. There's some people that talk about bio-banking microbes. You can't go back to have the microbes your great-great-grandparents have. There's just no way. And what about your great-great-grandkids?  They can't go that way. So it's a very interesting problem. These are microbes we evolved with and we're taking them out of our equation. And what are we going to do? I do want to say one quick thing about vaccines. The book, I talk about it quite a bit, vaccines work. There's an awful lot of nonsense on the web and fraudulent scientists talk about vaccines. But if you're interested in this, read the chapter in the book where we really try and go through what do vaccines do and how they work, but they have been a wonderful tool medically. So that brings me to the end of this. And of course, the book, there's a lot more. There's also a website called letthemeter.com that has much of this information on there. And so I guess what I'd like to end on is the idea that we live in this microbial world. They're part of every part of this world. They're part of us. They're a normal part of us. This is how we evolve. And we know that now know that these things actually play a big role in our health and our disease. And so it's really still an early field. I've told you some of the areas it's going. I think in the next 10 years, this is just going to have drastic and huge influence on all aspects of medicine because of this. And I think it's a very exciting time. Thank you very much. There's more. He also appeared at one of our ThinkTech research in Minoa talk shows to talk about his book and about his science. Well, let's talk about your book, which is a scientific bestseller and readable. It's called Let Them Eat Dirt with Brett Finley. And as they say, it's an earthy book. Yeah. Well, I said I always want to read a dirty book, so there we go. Dirty book, okay. Yeah, I mean, I guess the title's a bit misleading. It should be Let Them Eat the Microbes that you find in dirt. But really, the idea of the book is to write a layperson book. So the science is there, but it's not up front and center. We don't have references so much in it. And it's to basically educate parents, anyone of interest, really, the effect that these microbes are having on kids early in life and knowing that, how can you do better things for your child to help them raise them with your microbes instead of without them, which is what we're trying to do now? So what do microbes do for me? I know that microbes are part of the deal, and if I had no microbes, I could not live. Yeah. But what do they do for me? I do a lot of things.  The numbers are astounding. At least as many microbes in and on you as are our human cells, there's 15 times more genes than genetic material. So I love to tell my students they're more microbial than human, which they always get upset at. And they live, like I said, on the skin, scalp, armpits, wherever it's moist, urinary tract. Most of them live in the intestine, especially way down low in the intestine. And I don't jokingly say diaries, my bread and butter, because that's where we're at. So we're gonna restrict this for fecal content. But to put it in perspective, if you had one gram of feces, which is basically kind of the tip of your finger, there's more microbes in that in your intestine than all the people in the world. So it's just there's 100 trillion microbes in and on us. What kind of microbes are they? All sorts. Most of them, especially in the gut where there is no air, they live, they call it anerobes. There's no air, so they metabolize differently. But they're very different. And the microbes on your scalp are very different than your armpit, than in your intestine, because these are different environments. And what's interesting is everyone's different. There is no conserved human, there's no one species that's found in all people. So they're very different. So they're, even though you and I are 99.9% genetically identical, our microbes are at best 50%. So I argue that's what makes us individuals, that's what makes us different. It's not like a great way to do a CIS. You can make an identification of somebody that would be unique in the world by taking a profile of his microbes. They're already doing that. They're actually pretty good at digging up dead pigs and checking out their microbes change. You can't really identify which one it was. The other things they do is they help break down our food.  They don't do much with white shirt and white flour because that's already broken down, which is actually bad diet-wise. They help us develop our immune system and that's why they can push you towards allergies and asthma or other ways. And probably the most fascinating area I'm finding these days is they affect the brain and they affect how the brain develops. And there's animals that don't have any microbes in them. We call them germ-free animals. Their brains are screwed. They actually do not develop normally. So they're part of our normal development. So then all the brain diseases such as ADHD and autism and stress and anxiety and depression, these things now all seem to have microbial lengths too. So we knew they were there. Ever since Anthony Van Lievenhoek made the first microscope 330 years ago, but we didn't know what they did. And the last five years as sequencing came online, so you don't have to grow them. We now realize they're there and that's where this world is just exploding. Yeah, wow, really interesting. So how do I get my microbes? Am I born with them? Yes. So generally thought it's thought the fetus is sterile but there's some argument not, they can find.  Sounds terrible, but that actually is really important for setting up life. And if you're born by cesarean section, your microbes will be more like the mother's skin than the vagina. And the reason that's important is vaginal microbes and fecal microbes are the one that break down breast milk and do this. And so if you're born by cesarean section, you don't have these. And also the simple fact of born by cesarean section puts you at much more risk for getting asthma and obesity later in life. We need to learn much more about the microbiome, how it works, how it relates to our health. We have many exciting discoveries ahead of us. It's a great area for scientific research and careers. So this is a call to arms for all prospective science students. Consider microbiology and cellular and molecular research on bacteria, fungi, viruses, and plant and animal toxins. The discoveries to come will benefit science, food, health care, and the welfare of our species in general. And guess what? The complete video of Brett Finley's remarks at the campus center will be posted on pbrc.hawaii.edu. The website of the Pacific Biosciences Research Center at UH. Watch for it there. And now let's take a look at our ThinkTech calendar of events going forward. There's so much happening in Hawaii. Sometimes things happen under the radar and we don't hear much about them, but ThinkTech will take you there. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on OC 16 several times every week to stay current on what's happening in government, industry, academia, and communities around the islands and the world. ThinkTech broadcasts its daily talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends. If you missed a show or if you wanna replay or share our shows, they're all archived on demand on ThinkTechHawaii.com and YouTube. The audio is on ThinkTechHawaii.com slash radio. And good news, we're now posting podcasts of all our shows on iTunes. See our website for links. Visit ThinkTechHawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and YouTube links or sign up on our email list and get the daily docket of our upcoming shows. ThinkTech has a high-tech green screen First Amendment studio at Pioneer Plaza. 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Be a guest or a host, a producer, or an intern, and help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks so much for being part of our ThinkTech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification, global awareness, and the human biome. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Elise Anderson. And I'm Kaui Lucas. Aloha everyone.


We are in the Aerospace Village at DEF CON 30 checking out the Aerospace Badge, which you're the designer on. I am. CyberTest Pilot. This is great. So what I love about it is the fact that there's not one, not two, but five SAO ports on it. Can you tell me what you did in this badge? Certainly. So this is the third year the Aerospace Village has made a badge. And, you know, with the pandemic, microcontroller chip shortage, right? So knowing that the theme of DEF CON was going to be community, like we're doing all these meetings, like what could we do with limited product? And so kind of something we came to the idea on, and I'll coalesce to, was the whole shitty add-on platform, right? It doesn't need a microcontroller. The parts to like support it are fairly ubiquitous. And then it was also like very serendipitous because we could take the idea, the concept of a shitty add-on, and we can export it to other volunteers within the organization, right? You're saying within the Aerospace Village? Within the Aerospace Village. So the core volunteers. And so what we ended up doing, myself, I was working with pubs and some others. We did a lot of iterations back and forth. I had worked with my same artist friend, Dan Ropp, who I'm a fly surreal. And he had done the artwork and then we really liked the layering. So you can get like the PCBs are stacked so you can get kind of like that diffused glow. Yeah, I noticed that one of the things I really like about it is as you say, like it doesn't look like there's like, there's not tons of microchips or something like that. It's a very simple board. It is incredibly simple. But what's so cool about this is you focused on the art of the badge. You focused on the multi-layering. You focused on these. I really love the clouds on it because they're like, they stick out. It's not like a simple circle. Normally on badges, you're like circle, square, circle, square. With these, you had these nice cool cutouts and then you have the art, like the constellations, the clouds. Yeah. It like, it could complete kudos to my friend who did the artwork. Like he did the outline of the shape. And I loved it. It came together. We went back and forth on the colors. Like the purple against the black was, we had to keep it. It looked better than white, right? Now, one of the questions I have also with this is it's a multi-layer board. I'm assuming people have to assemble it themselves or are they coming together? We assembled them ourselves. So we used a volunteer organization. So we had a partner back in Maryland and we had their lab space and we just soldered parties. Oh goodness. How are these things actually attached? Oh, that was clever. So you just did little extenders through each one and then soldered them all together. Terminal pins. So the silly add-on standard is the two by three at six pin connections. And so it's two, two and two. It gives it stability, separating them. And then the same connections are carried through the terminal pins to the next subsequent layer of board. So that we can get the SAO. That was incredibly clever. So yeah, your mounting ports are the ones that hold up the board. And then you're leveraging those not just to hold up the board but also the SAO ports. So that they carry the signal and they're structural, right? Included in the board, you also have your own add-ons here. Yes. So the lanyard, the five ports, the space shuttle, we have this removed before flight. And so it comes with the ability, it's unsoddered at purchase, at donation. And so you can orient the removed before flight differently. So like ideally someone, what they could do, right, is if they could integrate that into the Defcon badge. Did that turn on? There we go. Oh, you know what I've done? I've hacked my warning light. That's the only reason that I'll explain that. But the idea is we kind of had a head start that the Defcon badge was going to have a port.  The microchip shortage. My badge is different. I've hacked it, but this was intentional. So this microchip is unpopulated for the normal sale, but it fits an 80, tiny 85. It maintains the silly add-on standard, the clock line, day line, pin one, pin two. And so what I've done is I've hacked my warning light.  And all that does is it moves the voltage from the LEDs from the voltage line over to GPIO one. So it's, you know, it's a silly add-on, but this is why mine blinks. A normal one wouldn't. So it's hackable, right? So we do things with the badge. There's a few like puzzles on here. So this is the airport of the Harry Reid Airport here in Vegas. I recently visited the Outer Banks. And so the Wright brothers first flyer there, homage to the first flight. And then this is kind of silly, but this is a barcode boarding pass. And it's for Buzz Aldrin to board Apollo 11. Oh, that's so cool. So it's just fictitious information put in there. But it's present for someone to discover. This is so cool. Thanks for making something. I love the fact that these SAOs are really becoming more popular and really pulling in a lot of the cool art that you get to see on search reports. Thank you so much for designing it. Thank you for watching. And as always, hack on.


I'll have, ahead of us, my name is Diego Blasquez, I'm the director of Democratic Memory, and today I will moderate and introduce the speakers that we have in this roundtable too, very well-known people, and unfortunately our first speaker. And the CERP couldn't make it in person, and the CERP couldn't make it here, but the fact is that we were able to organize our session so that the La Fida School did us here. I asked the speakers to use some 20 minutes so that we have the minimum possibility of having a further dialogue between them, or establish a dialogue, and we'll start with Professor CERP, she's a professor of European Studies at the University of Maastricht. She's a doctor in history and compared politics, European politics, and she also worked on the how camp, she's the author of several books and articles on transnational history, and she's a responsible person of the Center of Studies of the Memory Center in Maastricht, I don't know. Translation, but I did introduce you, your profile, and at the same time I established the rules for this panel. I will ask you, as you know, because of my previous email, I give you around 20, 25 minutes, each panelist in order to open a minimum debate or dialogue with the public and also with both of you. So I open the floor. Thank you very much, Aline. Yes, thank you very much. Thank you for this kind introduction. Thanks for all of you coming, despite the fact that this is a hybrid event, which is obviously not ideal. I would have wished to be with you in person in Barcelona and said I'm sitting in Maastricht, but I hope that we can still have some fruitful debate here. I will share my screen so that you can follow a little bit on the power point. Yeah, so I was asked to provide you with the European frame of the topic that we're discussing in this panel, the evolution of memory policies with special attention, of course, to the laws and legislative initiatives of the European Union. I'd like to start by saying that the European Union is, of course, not a state. It has no legal competence when it comes to memory, and it certainly cannot pass memory laws. So there we have a fundamental difference compared to the Spanish case. So again, just start. So what I was asked to do was to provide you with the European frame, the evolution of memory policies with special attention to the laws and legislative initiatives of the European Union. And I have to start really with a premise, which is that the European Union is not a state. It has no legal competences when it comes to memory, and it certainly cannot pass memory laws. So in that sense, we have a very different situation compared to the Spanish stage, which we will discuss in the second presentation. I think the only element that comes closest to some sort of memory law is the Council Framework Decision of 2008, with an obligation to criminalize all kinds of genocide denialism across the European Union. However, if you look, and I really tried to see what the EU is doing in that context, if you look at the judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union, then you can see that there's not one single judgment where the Council Framework Decision was cited as a principal instrument of secondary law. So let's see if Eurom is doing that. Maybe it works during my presentation. I will continue working, I think. I will continue to talk. So basically, there's no explicit references to memory laws per se either. And when I talked to a colleague who's a lawyer and he's been dealing with this topic for years, she indeed said that in all interviews that she's been conducting, EU officials usually say that they are not some sort of memory police and they also don't want to be some sort of memory police. Having said that, it doesn't mean that the European Union is teethless. Opinions, of course, are expressed by the European Court of Human Rights. That's a Council of Europe institution. And of course, you have the so-called soft law, if you so want, in the shape of resolutions of the European Parliament. And this is exactly what I'm going to concentrate on in the next 20 minutes or so, to give you a bit of an overview of the historical development of memory policies in the European Union and the initiatives that are stemming from this to determine the European context of the Spanish law. So memories, especially of World War II, have played an important role in the establishment of many international organizations. The whole issue of memory and identity was really running like a red thread through most thinking of supernational organizations. Just think about the organization for European Economic Cooperation, the Council of Europe, I cited earlier, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And then, of course, the European Coal and Steel Community, which was the predecessor of what we now call the European Union. Memory and the reference to World War II played a really important role for the founding years of the European Union and became some sort of EU founding myth. It was especially this idea of a peace project in response to the experiences of war and dictatorship and the memories of the first decade of the 20th century that made the memories of the first decade of the 20th century ever present in the early years of European integration. The determination to avoid another war has since the Schumann Declaration on the 9th of May, 1950, been central to the master narrative. It's repeatedly being evoked in official documents and political speeches and, to a certain extent, influenced the setup of the Union's institutions. Considering this, considering this, it's actually quite surprising that EU activism remained exclusively on the level of symbolic politics. We have to keep in mind that, of course, that European competencies have been and still are very limited in that area. No active attempt was made to devise concrete EU policies until fairly recently. Now, this changed in the 1970s. In the 1970s, probably remember the oil crisis and the ensuring loss of confidence in the European integration project. It's called often a period of heuristiclerosis. This was the moment when policymakers understood that, and I quote directly from Delors, one could not fall in love with a common market. This was the moment really when culture and cultural policies acquired a new meeting as some sort of glue that could hold Europeans together in times of crisis. If you look at the efforts that were made by European institutions in this context, they initially concentrated on activities that were promoting a common European heritage. The most obvious example of this is the European capitals of culture program that you're probably familiar with. A program born in 1985 that incarnated the idea of a common European memory identity going beyond abstract political principles. The earliest of this program, the focus was really put on positive heritage. Then in the 1970s, the history of European integration itself became the focus of commemoration and some sort of teologological narrative was created that in many ways is still present in today's European Union, but did not prove to be very successful with European citizens. Now the willingness to include also negative elements of example references to concentration camps in the list of heritage sites that warranted protection developed rather slowly. It really took until the 1990s before this changed. If you compare it to developments on the national level then you can see that this is a parallel development. It's not very different on the national level. Now the end of the Cold War exacerbated those developments further, especially the breaking open of the bipolar world led to an eruptive return of memory and the reawakening of history. The crumbling of national myths made a new confrontation with questions of guilt and responsibility necessary for both East and West and that included also a new element, which was the Holocaust. The Holocaust had played no role for early European integration and was certainly not considered to be a point of reference. The silence is obviously again similar to what happened on the national level. The interpretation of the Holocaust as a founding act is thus only plausible from an exposed perspective and it has to be understood within a certain context, namely an attempt to create an overarching political identity beyond the institutional framework of the European Union by adding a transnational layer to national identities and memories. The EU debate in this context is part of a much larger debate that takes place transatlantically and goes beyond the very narrow boundaries of the European Union. The result of this was a flurry of activities starting in the 1990s on the institutional level with the aim to anchor its memory firmly to the institutional setting. The European Parliament especially passed several resolutions that were addressing what were true in the murder of the European Junes and the EP resolution in 1995 declared the 27th of January as European wide day to commemorate the Holocaust. If you look in the Eurolex repository and you search for your Holocaust and you can see that it has occupied more space in EU documents since 1990s than most other events in European history. The Holocaust has become the yardstick with which many other political developments are being measured and evaluated. And the nation's ability to face up to its national past in some way or another has become a soft entrance criterion for joining the EU. Which is one of the reasons why it has become one of the linfins of the more recent debates on memory politics on the European level because it had profound implications for the accession of the center and eastern European states in 2004. This was not really the case when Spain joined. I looked into this how much the Spanish transition for example played a role when it came to the accession of Spain and there is not very much there. So this is interesting that this is again a fairly new development. Now from the very first sitting of the European Parliament many of the newly admitted EU member states challenged this very western European representation of World War II and the Holocaust. For them of course the end of World War II had meant the beginning of a new period of repression by the Soviet Union which meant that the new experience of communist dictatorship had superseded the memory of what had happened before. The requirement then to accept the EU endorsed narrative as part of the accession process was perceived as an imposition. MEPs from the new member states questioned the western interpretation of history and used the European Parliament as a platform to put forward an alternative memory narrative according to which the experience of suffering under Nazism and Stalinism are comparable and should as such receive equal recognition. This came in the minds of a lot of western MEPs close to a falsification of history and was met with very fierce resistance and interestingly enough most rulings of the European Court of Human Rights are indeed on this topic. So for example the denial of communist crimes, the struggle of remembrance etc. If we look at the more recent incidents of memory clash it also becomes clear that memory and remembrance continue to be used as political tools to underline differences or legitimize political action or inaction as in the case of Ukraine. The impression of attention and conflict-free European memory policies as might be suggested by the resolutions of the European Parliament is thus certainly quite deceptive. This does not mean however that the EU memory politics is ineffective because of the inherent impossibility to create a conflict-free policy. Indeed if you look a bit closer at the initiatives of the European Commission it is revealed that debate and conflict are welcomed and why is that? Because they're probably seen as elements that can contribute to the formation of a European public sphere. The most emblematic memory initiative by the European Commission is the Europe for Citizens program. It's not called the European for Citizens program anymore but the initial program you're probably most familiar with and this was launched in December 2006. It was based on the belief that an open memory culture thrives only with citizens engagement and the aim was really to mobilize grassroots action by research institutes, museums, human rights organization and civil society associations and it was through the promotion of citizens initiatives and thus targeting a level that lies below the official state level which is I think a very interesting point. A civil understanding of history is being aimed at that allows for an active exchange between different memory cultures. In contrast to those very ambitious ideas of the program stands the amount of funding that is actually available. Considering the importance that has been attached by European policymakers to memory identity issues in the past years the discrepancy between aims and financial means remains striking. Now to conclude I think I've almost reached my limited speaker time and since I lost something I must better conclude quickly is that yeah to conclude I'd like to say that in a way recent EU policies seem to closely adhere to the considerations of scholars who've postulated the idea that there's no such thing as collective memory but that there can very well be collective conditions for memories. The attempt of the commission to support initiatives that aim at creating a democratic culture of discussion needs to be understood in this context. There's also deeper lying reasons however. Memory conflicts are seen as damaging for the integration project. The importance of remembering the past is clearly linked in both European Parliament resolutions and European Commission initiatives to what is perceived as threats to the current state of democracy and the basic values lying at the heart of European integration. The way in which the EU tries to connect past present and future says a lot about the self-image it wants to convey and the vision it wishes to foster among its citizens equally telling those what is being overlooked and that's for example the memory of colonialism and imperialism. The EU has remained curiously quiet about both despite the fact that the history of colonialism is intrinsically linked to the history of European integration. It seems as if by concentrating its remembrance efforts for decades almost exclusively on the experience of Nazism, fascism, natural socialism, and Stalinism it has excluded the memory of Europeans as perpetrators of colonial crimes from a shared past. It's also curious and that's how I link I think a little bit to the debate we will have later, curious is also that fascism in southern European states does not play much of a role. During the debate on the 2009 resolution establishing a European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism those other totalitarianisms were included. They also played a role in the accession debates but there were no specific recent debates or rulings also not on the on the memory laws that were passed. I really carefully checked everywhere there was some media debate and of course EU media outlets reported about this but otherwise I couldn't find anything so there's no debate for example in the European parliament. I should say yet because this can still come we are very early in the process here. I think it remains to be seen how the EU will deal with those evident gaps in remembrance landscape in this future and how it will also deal with memory laws that are being passed by the different member states. Thank you very much. Hello sorry I was saying I didn't thank you very much you really fulfilled with the time we have agreed including the problem with your presentation we are very sorry for the disturbances and sure next time we will have you together. I think it's been very interesting to see well I have a screen that I don't quite understand well there it goes as I said it was very interesting to see the present general presentation made by Dr Aline Sirpe on the European framework and challenges conditions limits etc the issue of collective memory that we do share collectively particularly in all European countries about colonialism and parallelism and that the colonization is something that yesterday was evidenced by the two representatives of the commission both Anna Galler as well as Gilles Pelaio and probably this is an issue that in some other time we should approach as Aline Sirpe well each member state has its own characteristics and circumstances and in our case things are very specific in all this talk in this European framework that for us is very important and about the new low democratic memory from October 19th we have Prof. Oscudero is currently the secretary in general of consumption it's very difficult for me to present his public his bio published in the transparency portal because I am connected through other scholarly links I learned I learned a lot from him when he began teaching I was starting my my PhD studies and he's a person that have a hard time introducing I will try to introduce the four points as I introduced his professor at Carlos Darcero University in Madrid international public law and philosophy his doctor in law and currently he is the secretary general of consumption at the ministry of consumption he's been the director of human rights office in the city castle of Madrid where we also coincided working for some time and he's the author of a large amount of books and articles in covering legal theory studies on democracy and human rights he's an expert in democratic memory I cannot underscore any of his works because each one of his works has been well referenced for other people and so to us it's a real pleasure to listen to him and his opinion about our law and the mandate that the general directorate has thank you thank you Diego good afternoon good evening everybody first of all I'd like to thank the Eurom and the University of Barcelona and the secretariat of state for historical memory they are invitation to participate in the event as you may have noticed Professor Blasquez and I are colleagues at the department of university we've also been together in Madrid's city council we have the same teacher Professor Pérez Barboso yeah I mean it's an academic lifetime together and yeah I find it not worthy I would like to congratulate the organization and the reputed speakers they've had on the event I feel very proud of being on the same list of all those illustrious speakers I so much learned from and also I congratulate them on the opportunity at a time in Spain where we've just passed a new law this is completely new and I think events like this help us think help us reflect on the policies that we need to develop now once that the law has been passed my presentation is titled towards new legislation in Spain and the first word in the title is towards so there is a time reference which makes sense given the subject but if I want to stick to the title I must start by going back to the origin of where we are at now with the approval of act 20 stroke 22 new Spanish legislation let me tell you that any historical selection of historical information has a discretionary element so these are the elements which for me have been most striking to take us to where we are at with a new law which takes us to a completely new field for the implementation of new memory policies to guarantee the victims rights so let me mention four elements I'll try and be brief so that we can then focus on the law and stick to the 20 minutes that I have so first point from our past law 52 stroke 2007 which recognizes rights and measures for those who were object of persecution during Franco's times it used to be known historical memory law although that wasn't its proper name it was highly criticized both by the memorialist movement and the academia researchers and academicians basically because of the scope of its implementation because it had limits it didn't accept international background limitations on how to approach these violent pasts for example the framework of sectional justice it didn't even define victims of Francoism and it didn't respond to the philosophy which underlies the concept of historical memory if you look if you google if you search for historical memory in that law it it wasn't mentioned there was only one reference to a particular fund it didn't cancel the court rulings from francus times which was something that had long been claimed for and it externalized or privatized the exhumation of the disappeared people through a kind of weird subsidy system which was highly criticized so this presumed failure of the law was spotted well in advance when the law was passed and it was corroborated with the poor regulatory distribution it had and it was clearly seen with the approval of the new law which in fact derogates the old 52 strokes 2007 law second point in my two words the judicial moment state courts and international courts legal courts in generally the attempts of victims to have their rights exercised has been negative except in some honorable exceptions for example we can quote the garthon case which closed the door on any other court cases in spain for the same reason but also any other attempt at getting remedy before the law that was all put an end to buy the constitutional court let me remind you of the attempt to revise at the criminal court of the supreme court of the communist poet migel ernan death's case before the european law court of human rights things haven't gone much further either so apart from those few positive results in terms of guarantee of rights if there's anything positive we can say about this legal journey has been the internationalization of the spanish case internationalization which is twofold first because there is an advancement of the thesis of the application of the international law in the spanish case and second there is also an advancement in the normalization of the spanish case with other cases seen in europe in the 20th century thus avoiding the persistence of a kind of spanish exception which kind of justified the non-implementation of international categories in what was often mentioned as the spanish war third point the new regional law from 2015 some regions in spain had already before 2015 initiated legal procedures to have their own regional legal framework it was after the elections of 2015 where there is a clear political push to regulate the matter today please correct if i am mistaken there are 12 regions in spain with their own memory laws plus two which i believe still have some lower level regulation so there are only three regions which have no regulation on the matter i think that these new generation regional laws which are to be added to the old ones from 2015 shared some traits although they are obviously different and this affects their implementation they share the idea of human rights for victims they talk about historical memory even democratic memory and in fact they develop the duties of the regional authorities to have rights protected and finally our final point is the exclamation of the dictator from what is now rightly called baye de cuelga muros the former valley of the fallen the exclamation of francus remains was the result of the joint efforts of the three powers of state which is something completely new there was first the political will from the government they pushed the process along and they pushed the reform of the historical reform of the law adding a new clause to section 16 that said in that in the valley of the fallen there could only be the remains of the people who died during the civil war nobody else then this was accepted by the legislative and finally the supreme court rejected the appeal by francus families who wanted to avoid the exclamation so it is the first time that all three powers of the state support a measure which means a huge step forwards and with this i would kind of finish this brief historical contextualization saying that the new law in 2022 comes from all of that it accepts that the law in 2007 was not enough then it accepts that victims rights have to be protected and it accepts that there is now political will at regional and state level and there is always the presence the active and critical presence of the memorialistic movement associations of human rights defenders and academia now i'd like to mention the general guidelines of the law i'll mention the main aspects and the main measures which emanate from these lines first there is the resource to international law this is present throughout the law so they accept the thesis of the applicability of this framework to the victims of serious crimes against humanity during the coup d'etat and then francoist times so there are three main elements here the crimes of francoist times are crimes against humanity two the victims can't receive all the regulations that protect their rights and three that the spanish state has obligations not just towards the victims and their citizens but also towards the international community this internationalization kind of overcomes if you remember the approval process for the law in 2007 during the debate one of the criticisms was the argentinization of the spanish process because of the figure of the disappeared people so this internationalization what i would call the normalization overcomes those complaints and this is expressed in two elements one the legal configuration of the category victims of francoism which didn't exist before in our legislation into the legal treatment of the disappeared people because of francoist repressions let me go back to number one the law defines francoist victims translating to the spanish case the definition of victims of serious violations of human rights adopted in 2005 by the association by the general assembly of un so all international law recommendations are accepted so the victims are not only the people whose rights are violated but also they are direct relatives and people close to them just as international regulations do article three which defines victims of francoism first has this general definition and then it has a series of collectives and i think it is not numerous clauses so it's not exhausted which people who suffer victimization they might be private individuals associations or non tangible bodies this list of groups covers another international requirement which is the visualization of victims their names and the motives the reasons why they were victimized and from this obligation thereby emanates the drafting of a state census i think a lot has been said on this already so i won't go into that just two points a census which needs to be de-aggregated with specific identification of the different groups of victims for example women or LGTBI community in order to make them visible and also specifying reasons and circumstances of the victimization so all the doctrinal recommendations are complied with for this part of the law and the legislator also covers forced disappearances and therefore they cover the argentinization of the spanish process and this means that the reparation measures that had been approved during the transition which had been considered not to be enough but then if they were to start they were limited to people who died as a result and i quote as a result or upon the occasion of the civil war and that meant that it was just sort of dead combatants and it left aside so without having reparation extra judicial uh killings or the people who had not been found in 2007 an attempt had been meant to repair this unsuccessfully but with the new law there is this new category and it is established and i believe that this is another star measure in the law that it is an obligation for the state to find trace uh excimate identify all disappeared people this is one of the big steps forwards in the law we all have to be aware of it and we have to be aware of the fact that this is one of the big demands of victims associations who always thought it was essential to have this state's obligation specified so here it is second theoretical paradigm which is present in the new legislation about historical memory democratic memory and the rights this entails something that Walter Benjamin taught us is that the past demands rights in this case those of right truth and preparation but before we go on to these rights let's talk about the implications of the fact that the regulator talks about democratic memory so let me talk first about the noun memory and then the adjective democratic on memory the legislative power talks about memory i mean forgetting is not an option in our democracy the belief that the recovery of memory those lower case history or histories it is essential for society to avoid repetition and to make sure that we have a collective identity based on human rights and on citizenry values we will only have this collective identity if we comply with our duty to memory to all those victims who were tortured killed or made prisoners as Reyes Matissez without memory there is no justice because facts disappear victims disappear and responsibilities disappear and this is why the legislator opts for the adjective democratic rather than historic memory i think that the recovery of the memory so active policies to guarantee the rights that memory entails have to focus on the memory of those who were victimized because they were defending the republic all their rights not just to repair the historical neglect towards the victims of the so-called other side or because that is what international law says but also because it is those victims those who were victimized because they stood up for democracy their struggle and their memory which need to be extolled in a democratic society if they are to be understood as reference so the memory is a moral duty and an instrument to create collective identity and that's why the law tells us powers public powers that we have to implement a series of policies that go beyond guaranteeing individual people's rights and we then they talk about collective rights the collective right to memory a right which is held by all citizens apologies for speaking so fast i'll just quote some points for example the policies and symbologies in public spaces these policies are easily understood if we analyze them not so much as tools for reparation for the victims although that's also true but also if we analyze them from the point of view of education and culture the public space needs to be in principle devoid of symbolic references for example statues or names of street that may extolled people or events which are against human rights the public space is a mirror in which citizens could reflect themselves and therefore the points of reference have to be fitting with democratic cultures on the culture of human rights so the law insists on regulating the spaces of public democratic memory these public spaces are conceived as having a reparative function and a didactic function one of the challenges for the future is that public administrations have to make sure that those public spaces remain there for our young for future generations i believe the law also covers the issue of removing franco symbols from public spaces making sure that we don't see any more cases like we saw in madrid where some judges demanded that old names have to be reused or also the use of artistic religious reasons which appeared in 2007 public administrations are told that all those symbols have to be removed and also the titles and nobility titles which were granted during franco's times have are removed all those symbols the removal of those symbols i believe is also compatible although it is controversial with the maintenance and first signification of relevant spaces or spaces which are useful for the creation of recreation of our past the legislator talks about the educational use of those spaces for example in europe concentration camps as a tool to convey democratic values this is clear in case of the legal treatment of the valley of cuelga modos the former valley of the fallen i think that something similar happens in the case of fuerte de san cristobal or the palace of the summit in the basque country but there is another challenge for our future here which is the complex intervention which is going to be required in the valley of cuelga modos sorting out the signification and sorting out the issue of those human remains which are still there without even their relatives being aware of it so i think that cuelga modos remains a challenge third general principle the end of the equidistance between republic and dictatorship which had ruled over a memory laws after the transition for the people who were who protected the transition said that the pact had to be to forget the past so that the past could not be used by either side this hypothetical pact had worked against the claims of the victims and it had made us close our eyes to our democratic successes i think the new regulation breaks away from this equidistance it uncores its roots in the democratic threat that was started in 2012 recognizing the republican successes and the authoritarian regime of franco the all this historical thread translates in judicial terms in some of the elements of the law what could not be done in 2007 because there were judicial safety matters can now be done which is the declaration of a nullity of the rulings that came from franca's times the nullity is the legal formula used to get rid of the legal effects of a court ruling i think that this is better than the hybrid formula used in 2007 and this is more in line with what international laws is my fourth general principle of the law this is my selection obviously you could make your own is the treatment of the right to justice for the victims this is highly controversial united nations defines this right as their right to initiate court cases because all these investigations need to be made public the thing is that time and law are never good partners i mean we've seen that clearly this week in spain on other matters but when the law starts ruling things that came from the past yeah this is never comfortable this is never easy there is a derogation nullity i mean we're talking about splitting hairs the law establishes two measures to satisfy this right first the creation of a court attorney for cases which are about the violation of human rights and second it goes back to the a file for regulation for perpetual memory which disappeared in 2015 i believe as a way to obtain a declarations on the events that happened and this makes it possible to proceed to estimations and then the third point appears at the end of the law article 23 which introduces the principle of generality of the understanding of the law it says that all laws have to be interpreted according to international law according to which crimes of war genocide crimes against humanity and torture are do not prescribe and are not liable to amnesty so article 23 specify what it's already said on article 10 that says that all laws on human rights have to be interpreted according to international law but the political message is important it's important what is being said to the people who have to implement the law which is the judges so they're saying when it comes to looking into facts to do with human rights violations you have to take into account that these facts do not prescribe and are not liable to amnesties i don't think anything else can be done by the regulators i mean that's the most they can do from that on it is up to the judges to apply this and to apply the law legislators cannot go beyond that they just all they can do is to give this clear message even if the law had derogated the famous law of amnesty this wouldn't have put an end to the problem because judges have to also bear in mind other elements at hand for example the death of the presumed killers or victims so the derogation of the law of amnesty would not have solved the matter and that was also a claim from academia and many associations that wouldn't have solved anything because this needs to be taken to judges let me finish and apologies for taking so long with two challenges i believe that tackling this matter of compensating or offsetting the fact that they cannot go beyond with other measures well we need to think about that in the future in order to move forwards in other fields and also we have to bear in mind that this law and the implementation of this law is going to have economic costs and budgetary costs for all administrations and this is going to be complicated at a time of post pandemic reconstruction of our country and finally our third challenge is the implementation that the implementation of the law requires considerable political will by the corresponding political bodies which are all of them without that political will the law could just die out so we need authorities who believe in this law and who are willing to implement it apologies for having taken so long and spoken so fast well thank you very much i think it's been really worth it to have this extra ten minutes no one really cared about it but i would like to open up for debate i don't know if we have time or not maybe just this opportunity to to debate about some of the topics that have been presented can you hear me aline can you hear me okay if you got it also any questions please feel free to ask or or to interact with uh with our public i will i will let you know because i the problem is that i think that you cannot hear them okay so i will translate for or not not translate but i will translate you uh be beyond the microphone i had a question uh before we heard the colonial issue and it's necessary to have a legislative evolution on this matter but the law democratic memory was not the right because we might fall on the trap of believing that the lonely colonialism that deserves a revision is franco's colonials i don't think this is the issue but i would really like to ask if in the new law of democratic law there's a margin of recognition with respect to the colonial frankism they will have identified these groups because colonialism affected all people that lived there but there were groups that were negatively affected and they were victims of repression in guinea in 1959 or the consequences of the civil war in the city of butta or such type of things i don't know if there's a possibility of recognizing this these these groups of people to compensate them in one way or another we understand that there is well the all the the brigade participants the international brigade participants the regalists uh we recognize is it a difficult issue or is there a real margin law that can allow this type of recognition thank you briefly i am not i'm not intervening here i'm simply introducing uh the speakers and and listening to what is being said the law is flexible enough as to approach different questions in fact in the law text and and and in the parliament in the poly participation some questions have been included connected to the social development i would point out to the issue of polio and and and gypsy land gypsies that approach this issue i think that one of the reasons for the change of objective of a democratic memory is to be able to make an analysis from a critical standpoint of our global past i believe that for the development of all these questions it's not only a matter of decision where we need a legal basis but i also coincide with the raffle that we need a political will i believe that this law would allow this flexibility to progress in that path and we can see around us uh france and uk etc the netherlands are approaching the issue of colonialism and decolonization in different spheres of action culturally basically in culturally but also repression not a very important element that i would place in amongst the challenges that raffaello who that talked about is the maintenance of a the maintenance of the of of a pulse of civil society and the academia i believe this law will also require uh will need a lot to continue with that tension to continue with attention and progress towards no spaces i asked something yes of course yeah thank you very much um this was very interesting for me to to listen to professor scudero um from what i understood is that this this law has gone through quite a genesis right um building on previous legislation um and i was struck by some of the um attributes that that you used um democratic identity etc like there's there's lots of thinking behind that when it comes to um spanish society i think and i was wondering to what extent um was there also um inspiration from other countries so if we talk about the european frame um to what extent was uh were memory laws in other countries looked at um in in positive and negative terms um was there any kind of exchange between different actors for example um uh or processes in other countries that um had taken place before um the spanish law passed yes in fact inspiration from other countries making a comparative law analysis the problem here is let me go back to to what i said before the problem is time because uh now we're surrounding countries for example to uh academically we had worked on this concept countries that had uh countries that had implemented the nullity of the sentences like france or germany took him a little longer but these were process of transitional justice what they happened on right on the spot this helps our case for example an expert politologist pretends to say that our case in spain is a post transitional case when speaking about nullity well a long time has gone by and this makes things more complex that's why the comparison between uh or with the countries of our sphere of action is not so valid because circumstances are very different i think this is the differential element and also because these are questions that in other societies had been quote unquote already solved one going from dictatorship to democracy in france or italy after the nazi occupation it was more clear in spain in spain we have not solved this yet the spanish exception is still present in many spheres of action by listening to to listening to the director of the museum of the holocaust in tel Aviv no did not tell aviv in well the director of this museum observed questions that for his society in his context seem to be very simple and very clear our society is still very divided in that respect i think that was another question i have a question for professor aline sirp i hope she can hear me uh can we consider european union narratives on memory as an attempt to build a framework to harmonize different national memory politics or instead european union symbolic narratives and debates on memory show us that european memory european memories are still profoundly divided both on national and political lines thank you very much aline you got off the floor sorry yeah um yeah i think the answer is very clear i mean i'm definitely there's lots of divisions still present in europe and i think i hinted hinted to that these divisions are often used politically as well to push forward specific claims and i think there's also no way of of getting to some sort of european memory a harmonized kind of narrative this will never happen i think however if you look at the initiatives by the european union i have the impression that the aim is not really to create some sort of top down harmonized smallest common denominator narrative that policymakers have understood fairly early on that that is a lost case that that will not be very successful and instead the aiming at exchange so if you look especially at the initiatives that are being supported they really try to get people to talk to each other on on the society level so less initiatives that are aiming at the national level i think that's that's not being tried to be influenced but it's really rather on the society level for example fostering initiatives that are getting people to talk to each other exchanging their different narratives exchanging their memories to create some sort of yeah understanding for the differences that they are in europe and you can see that almost everywhere i mean we have those different experiences and it just it would be impossible to create some sort of unifying narrative people would not identify with that may i add something i would like to add something because i think this is very important what now we call the european memory narrative well it's clear what the origin of the european union is there is a common narrative and there it's a memory against destruction against the war this is clear as time goes by things sometimes change a little bit but the tension or the temptation of going back to a national narratives to strong values is forgotten and all but i believe that it would be more convenient only european standpoint it would be more convenient to go back to two concepts that are closer to the german term of constitutional patriotism than go back to the idea of narratives because now we have the temptation to look for the identities in strong values or ethnic values and their or ethnics or religions or identities having to do with language etc there is where things are lost and going back to the essence of values i think it's very interesting that's why the commission has a very good idea while connecting these questions with the policy of european values strengthening this the state of law and the energy for democracy i'm sorry for participating the debate i don't think there are any further questions hello this morning we were speaking during our argentinian colleagues intervention about the laws of final full stop abuses and state terrorism and with respect to this the full stop laws indicate what happened in the transition in spain i came here to learn i'm not going to to argue with two teachers of law but it would be a real disaster to see the derogation of the law of amnesty taken as a whole but i believe that laws have an area of implementation that can maybe temporary maybe local maybe sectorial etc maybe this is the question maybe it would it would have been a good thing to derogate to completely derogate some at least maybe this would have meant to go back to prison but that's the question maybe it was possible to although that fought for democracy should be separated from the those that tortured others we have clear cases such people like billy the kid it was a policeman that was condecorated this happens in other verses of europe thank you well the arguing maybe not discussing definitely law on amnesty is a topic that generates a great deal of food for thought the problem in terms of human rights on the law on amnesty is articles to a and f where we incorporate at the end of the parliamentary management of the law of amnesty we have all those facts perpetrated by the law enforcement agency the rest is not part of it but what i wanted was to avoid the debate in pragmatic terms in pragmatic terms even if these two articles had been derogated and what legislator says according to constitution that well they have to be interpreted according to the international regulations but if even if they had been derogated under a standpoint of judiciary processes little would have changed because judges can implement other elements at stake when rejecting to investigate good good arguments i'm not i'm not minimizing them they can be used therefore what i i'm speaking about now to be more pragmatic is to avoid a debate let's debate as much as we want but let's avoid a debate that is a false debate let's avoid this because judges may end up saying that not only there's an amnesty or there's no amnesty they may say that these facts cannot be submitted to investigation because the victims passed away that was my only intention when i talked about the law on amnesty it's a false debates in pragmatic terms for the rest well there's a long debate behind it all about amnesty and we have the legal formula derogation or nullity in the argentinian style but currently the moment we are living in or it's very important in the political course to get in order to guarantee the rise this debate can distort the image with respect to other challenges that are key and that will be discussed next year that was my point my point was a very pragmatic one thank you i don't think there are any questions that we don't have much time because professor scudero has to take a train so i would like to thank you all for focusing so much of your time into the patience that you've had during today's session and i would like to thank professor scudero and our speaker from master is aline the possibility to share with you our own problems and to also set the spanish own experience on memorial policies in this european context thank you everyone and tomorrow we'll go back to the sessions we'll be back within a very intense day with two round tables and the closing of the event thank you for your participation thank you


The next question is from the grumpy Yeti. The front squat is now often regarded as more functional than the back squat. It doesn't allow for as great of overload, but allows for a greater range of motion and is more quad focused and core and upper back demanding. Plus, if you deadlift, the hamstring and glute emphasis is already there. Should the front squat take the pedal stall from the back squat? No, I don't think so. I mean, could it for someone? I guess, sure, but I don't think so. The idea that this exercise works those muscles, therefore we don't need to do this other exercise. I can see the rationale there, but again, when you build strength, there's a lot of specificity to how that strength is applied. So if I deadlift a lot, yeah, I'm working my glutes and hamstrings quite a bit, am I developing squat strength by doing that? You're developing some squat strength, but not a lot of back squat strength. Yeah, well, I would argue that we're already very much anterior driven. Like there's like in excess, like everything is anterior driven. And so the opportunity to present more exercises that address the posterior chain are invaluable because we just don't focus on that. And a back squat is essential for that. Yes, the deadlift covers that as well. You want more exercises to specifically cover that portion. You need that support system to be in balance. So that way you're not overly dominant with your quads, which most clients I've had, especially athletes, are quad dominant. Well, this is just another thing that highlights why I get annoyed by our space so much too. It's like the truth is they both belong there. And there's nothing wrong with maybe for a while, you're focused heavily on the front squat and there is no back squats.  Or I'm doing something or I'm lunging, doing unilateral with Sal. Just came off of this recently, I believe, right? You eliminated that. I didn't squat for almost three months. Right, so there's nothing wrong with that. But when camps try and make cases for this is more functional and this is better and there's no need to do this or it's like the truth is, why would you not do both? They both have tremendous benefits and you can probably have one in each camp argue why one's more, the truth is, have them both. Like why subject yourself to saying that, oh, I'm only going to do this or it should take the front stage opposed to another movement. It's like, no, they're both, I mean, if you look at our programming, there's always front squats and back squats incorporated because we see the tremendous value in both of them and Justin's right. I think we are extremely anterior driven, but this person's very right too. You get deeper in the squat, you have to have better shoulder mobility to do it. So there are some great benefits to becoming a good friend. It's a great exercise. Right, but like to your point, we don't do enough posterior chain work. So, you know, why not have both included in there because they both are so functional and so great.  So front squat, maybe it's more functional from this standpoint. If you're likely to squat with weight in the real world, it's probably going to be something you're holding in front of you. Yes, a lot of people can go lower in a front squat. In fact, I would more often than not be able to get a everyday client to be able to do a good front squat before I could get them to do a back squat. So oftentimes when I'm training someone and we're in the beginning stages of training, they're front squatting way more often than they're back squatting. Just your form, it's easier to get somebody in a better position. Okay, that being said, there's also the amount of strength that you gain sometime washes out some of these factors. So if I take a back squat, I can squat more with the back squat than I can with the front squat. And my gains in the back squat, once I do it right, tend to go up really fast, faster than a front squat, a little bit faster than a front squat. So if I'm able to squat back squat 400 pounds, but only able to front squat 250 pounds, the front squat might edge it in functionality in terms of movement. But because of the overall strength gains I get from the back squat, it still wins. Now, I'm not saying I'm not making the argument that one is better than the other. It really depends on the individual. But my argument is you got to look at the whole thing. You can't just look at, oh, the functionality. Because then you get into the craziness, like, well, you know, we should do everything split stance since we walked that way. Let's do everything on one leg. Well, that's the truth, though. If you're going to make the functional argument, then I would argue back to you that, well, okay, well, a goblet split squat, a goblet squat, or a walking lunge is more functional, or even a zercher squat is more functional.  I don't ever carry anything like that. I carry it more like a zercher squat or like a goblet squat if I carry something. So yeah, the default to this is more functional than that. All that does is it appeases all of us nerds that are really into fitness and it loses all the general population that really need the good advice.