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Charles Pierce: When We Forget
Donald Trump will rise, and keep rising, until we remember what came before.
In Lenin's Tomb, his lucid account of the end of Soviet Russia, David Remnick uses as an epigraph a famous quote from Czech author Milan Kundera. "The struggle of man against power," Kundera wrote, "is the struggle of memory against forgetting." The philosophy was central to Remnick's contention throughout the book that one of the critical weaknesses of the Soviet state, and of all of its satellite governments in Eastern Europe, including Kundera's Czechoslovakia, was that it required its citizens to fight against their own memory, to unknow what they clearly knew. Sooner or later, the effort to forget and to unknow becomes too much of a burden for too many people and they force the collapse of the system. Humans are driven to remember. Humans can crack from the effort it takes to deny and to forget. The consequences can be therapeutic or they can be catastrophic, for people and for the political societies into which they organize themselves.
...
The 2016 presidential campaign—and the success of Donald Trump on the Republican side—has been a triumph of how easily memory can lose the struggle against forgetting and, therefore, how easily society can lose the struggle against power. There is so much that we have forgotten in this country. We've forgotten, over and over again, how easily we can be stampeded into action that is contrary to the national interest and to our own individual self-interest. We have forgotten McCarthy and Nixon. We have forgotten how easily we can be lied to. We have forgotten the U-2 incident and the Bay of Pigs and the sale of missiles to the mullahs. And along comes someone like Trump, and he tells us that forgetting is our actual power and that memory is the enemy.
The first decade of the twenty-first century gave us a great deal to forget. It began with an extended mess of a presidential election that ended with the unprecedented interference of a politicized Supreme Court. It was marked early on by an unthinkable attack on the American mainland. At this point, we forgot everything we already knew. We knew from our long involvement in the Middle East where the sources of the rage were. We forgot. We knew from Vietnam the perils of involving the country in a land war in Asia. We forgot. We knew from Nuremberg and from Tokyo what were war crimes and what were not. We forgot that we had virtually invented the concept of a war crime. We forgot. In all cases, we forgot because we chose to forget. We chose to believe that forgetting gave us real power and that memory made us weak. We even forgot how well we knew that was a lie.
Twenty-odd years ago, at the urging of a great editor, I wrote a long piece at another magazine about my family's experience with Alzheimer's disease, which eventually took my father and all of his siblings. It is a terrifying disease for a writer because it attacks those aspects of the individual that are so crucial to the act of writing—namely memory and language. Without memory, there can be no connection with the world, nothing salvaged or brought forward. Without language, memory is orphaned. Without both of them, history is mute.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a44438/donald-trump-remembering-forgetting/
In Lenin's Tomb, his lucid account of the end of Soviet Russia, David Remnick uses as an epigraph a famous quote from Czech author Milan Kundera. "The struggle of man against power," Kundera wrote, "is the struggle of memory against forgetting." The philosophy was central to Remnick's contention throughout the book that one of the critical weaknesses of the Soviet state, and of all of its satellite governments in Eastern Europe, including Kundera's Czechoslovakia, was that it required its citizens to fight against their own memory, to unknow what they clearly knew. Sooner or later, the effort to forget and to unknow becomes too much of a burden for too many people and they force the collapse of the system. Humans are driven to remember. Humans can crack from the effort it takes to deny and to forget. The consequences can be therapeutic or they can be catastrophic, for people and for the political societies into which they organize themselves.
...
The 2016 presidential campaign—and the success of Donald Trump on the Republican side—has been a triumph of how easily memory can lose the struggle against forgetting and, therefore, how easily society can lose the struggle against power. There is so much that we have forgotten in this country. We've forgotten, over and over again, how easily we can be stampeded into action that is contrary to the national interest and to our own individual self-interest. We have forgotten McCarthy and Nixon. We have forgotten how easily we can be lied to. We have forgotten the U-2 incident and the Bay of Pigs and the sale of missiles to the mullahs. And along comes someone like Trump, and he tells us that forgetting is our actual power and that memory is the enemy.
The first decade of the twenty-first century gave us a great deal to forget. It began with an extended mess of a presidential election that ended with the unprecedented interference of a politicized Supreme Court. It was marked early on by an unthinkable attack on the American mainland. At this point, we forgot everything we already knew. We knew from our long involvement in the Middle East where the sources of the rage were. We forgot. We knew from Vietnam the perils of involving the country in a land war in Asia. We forgot. We knew from Nuremberg and from Tokyo what were war crimes and what were not. We forgot that we had virtually invented the concept of a war crime. We forgot. In all cases, we forgot because we chose to forget. We chose to believe that forgetting gave us real power and that memory made us weak. We even forgot how well we knew that was a lie.
Twenty-odd years ago, at the urging of a great editor, I wrote a long piece at another magazine about my family's experience with Alzheimer's disease, which eventually took my father and all of his siblings. It is a terrifying disease for a writer because it attacks those aspects of the individual that are so crucial to the act of writing—namely memory and language. Without memory, there can be no connection with the world, nothing salvaged or brought forward. Without language, memory is orphaned. Without both of them, history is mute.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a44438/donald-trump-remembering-forgetting/
15 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
it was covered up and the criminal corporate media hid it from us.
