“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”
So says Milan Kundera in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Kundera remarks on his native Czechoslovakia under the communists that politicians who had fallen out of favor with the party would be air-brushed out of history, their images literally removed from official photographs of political events. This kind of sinister “forgetting” can work at different levels, political and personal. How many times have people told you to forget about your past problems because they don’t matter or are too awkward? Well at some point they often do matter.
I think it is an issue that has come to the fore with the emergence of cancel culture and the attempts to demolish any memorials to historical figures who were in any way objectionable. There seems to be an “air-brushing out of history” in the works.
Here are two interesting essays in this regard. The first was written in March 2019, before the violent protests over George Floyd et al. happened, but it is prescient: https://quillette.com/2019/03/31/historical-amnesia-and-kunderas-resistance/ The second was published just yesterday and begins with the disturbing visual image of a recently vandalized statue of President George Washington: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-captive-mind-and-americas-resegregation-11596222112?mod=hp_opin_pos_1 Milan Kundera is still alive at 91, and I wonder what he would have to say about what is going on now in the US.
In his short story “The Destructors,” Graham Greene showed the way callow youths bent on demolishing for sport a centuries-old house that survived the Blitz in World War II ridicule the home’s elderly proprietor, Mr. Thomas. The story ends with a lorry driver who had helped destroy the house responding to the old man’s cries for help from a nearby outhouse where the youths imprisoned him:
The driver again became aware of somebody shouting. It came from the wooden erection which was the nearest thing to a house in that desolation of broken brick. The driver climbed the smashed wall and unlocked the door. Mr Thomas came out of the loo. He was wearing a grey blanket to which flakes of pastry adhered. He gave a sobbing cry. ‘My house,’ he said. ‘Where’s my house?’
‘Search me,’ the driver said. His eye lit on the remains of a bath and what had once been a dresser and he began to laugh. There wasn’t anything left anywhere.
‘How dare you laugh,’ Mr Thomas said. ‘It was my house. My house.’
‘I’m sorry,’ the driver said, making heroic efforts, but when he remembered the sudden check of his lorry, the crash of bricks falling, he became convulsed again. One moment the house had stood there with such dignity between the bomb-sites like a man in a top hat, and then, bang, crash, there wasn’t anything left – not anything. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t help it, Mr Thomas. There’s nothing personal, but you got to admit it’s funny.’
Update: Another bad joke: Have you heard the latest newsflash from the CDC? “An estimated 95% of Covid-19 masks contain asbestos. But by all means continue wearing them whenever in public. And await further instructions.”