“The first step in liquidating a people,” said Hubl, “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 the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”
“What about language?”
“Why would anyone bother to take it from us? It will soon be a matter of folklore and die a natural death.”
Was that hyperbole dictated by utter despair?
Or is it true that a nation cannot cross a desert of organized forgetting?
None of us knows what will be. One thing, however, is certain: in moments of clairvoyance the Czech nation can glimpse its own death at close range. Not as accomplished fact, not as the inevitable future, but as a perfectly concrete possibility. Its death is at its side.
~Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
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