Collective Memory as a process - Gaby

A good example of collective memory being a process would be the hostage crisis of 1979 and 1980 that took place in Iran. For those of you who do not know much about this event, it was when Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days (November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981), after a group of Iranian students supporting the Iranian Revolution took over the US Embassy in Tehran. Following his overthrow, the Shah was allowed into the U.S. for medical treatment.

The Iranians wanted the United States to return the Shah to them for trial of the crimes committed by him during his reign on ordinary citizens with the help of his secret police, the SAVAK. The U.S did not comply with their demands, so they decided to overthrow the U.S embassy. The really cool thing about the whole scenario was that this whole time, the CIA was working to perform an emergency rescue of six U.S diplomats and us as civilians didn’t gain knowledge of this until years later.

On the day the hostages were seized, six American diplomats evaded capture and remained in hiding at the home of Canadian diplomat John Sheardown, under the protection of Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor. And even still after that, the in depth information of the entire operation was kept under wraps. Until about a year ago when a 2012 American political thriller film directed by Ben Affleck came to our theaters that finally gave us an inside and visual look into what really happened in Iran and what the CIA had to do to rescue to diplomats. The entire rescue was coded as “the Canadian Caper” and it involved a fake film crew going in to Iran to scouting for an appropriate location to shoot a scene for the nominal science-fiction film Argo.

The way that is event ties in with collective memory being a process and that it’s continuously unfolding is that yes, people knew about this event and that people were held hostage in Iran and then they were recued – end of story. Over the years, more and more information has developed and become available to the public and then eventually a movie was made about it and all of a sudden this was a HUGE thing. Everyone was talking about how clever and brave the CIA was and how helpful Canada was. But before, it was never really talked about. All of a sudden, our memory of this event or knowledge of this event was greatly expanded because of this movie and a lot of credit was given to the people involved even years and years later.