The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. ~ Milan Kundera
A central theme for 93 year old Milan Kundera is The Power of Forgetting, or historical amnesia - could not be more relevant given our current state of affairs. In our country and around the world too many valuable lessons are lost to us.
Kundera’s great theme emerged from his experience of the annexation of his former homeland Czechoslovakia by the Soviets in 1948. The process of deliberate historical erasure imposed by the communist regime on the Czechs.
As Kundera said: 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.
