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 struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of memory and cultural identity in resisting oppression.
Milan Kundera's quote highlights how the erasure of a people's memory—through the destruction of their culture, history, and literature—leads to the dissolution of their identity. He underscores that when a nation forgets its past, it becomes vulnerable to manipulation and control, reinforcing the idea that the fight against oppressive power is fundamentally a fight for collective memory and historical awareness.
In practice
In a speech about preserving cultural heritage, one might quote Kundera to emphasize the importance of remembering history.
Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.
Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
Fruits are always of the same nature with the seeds and roots from which they come, and trees are known by the fruits they bear: as a man begets a man, and a beast a beast, that society of men which constitutes a government upon the foundation of justice, virtue, and the common good, will always have men to promote those ends; and that which intends the advancement of one man's desire and vanity, will abound in those that will foment them.
...Where and when God finds you ready, he must act and overflow into you, just as when the air is clear and pure, the sun must overflow into it and cannot refrain from doing that.
We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not.
I can truly say, after an experience of seventy years, that all the cares and anxieties, the trials and disappointments of my whole life, are light, when balanced with my sufferings in childhood and youth from the theological dogmas which I sincerely believed. . . . The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion.
It’s not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds.
One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen.
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