◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

MILAN KUNDERA'S BARBARIC YAWP — PART ONE Memory Against Forgetting I am Milan Kundera. I spent my life writing about power and memory, and I gave you one sentence you may already carry: the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. In the first of these I will tell you what I meant. In the second I will tell you the thing about myself that makes me either the perfect witness or the worst one. Perhaps both. I was born in Czechoslovakia, and I watched a regime do something you need to understand, because it is being tried again, in your country, now. They did not only censor. They erased. A friend of mine put it best: the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have someone write new books, invent a new past — until the people can no longer remember who they were, or what was done to them. A nation that cannot remember cannot resist, because it no longer knows there is anything to resist. Watch for it. When they ban the book, fire the historian, tear the record from the archive, and insist the shameful thing never happened — that the country was always innocent and always great — they are not rewriting the past for its own sake. They are disarming you. Memory is a weapon, and they are taking it from your hands while telling you it was never there. And here is the deeper cut, the thing I called the unbearable lightness. History happens only once. It does not repeat, and it cannot be corrected. When a thing is done and then forgotten, it is gone — weightless, as if it never was. That is what makes forgetting so total a victory. It does not hide the crime. It makes the crime never to have happened at all. Everything you do not defend in memory becomes, in the end, as light as if it had never been. So I am the witness against forgetting. I earned it — by exile, by having my books banned in my own country, by watching my nation vanish under the tanks while the world called it peace. And in the second of these, I am going to complicate that witness with the one thing you would rather I left out — because leaving it out is exactly the temptation I have come to warn you against. PART TWO The Clean One I am Milan Kundera again. In the first of these I told you the struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting, and I called myself the witness. Now I have to tell you why I may be the worst witness there is — and why that makes the warning truer, not weaker. When I was twenty-one, a young communist myself, a police file says that I informed on a man — that I gave his name to the authorities, and that he went to a labor camp for years. I denied it all my life. I said it was not me, and I said it with fury. And the truth is that you cannot know — and I am no longer certain I can tell you cleanly either. The record is a single page. The boy is sixty years gone. Perhaps I was innocent. Perhaps I was not. Do you see what I have handed you? I am the man who told you the struggle is memory against forgetting — and I may have spent my whole life forgetting the worst thing I ever did, or denying a thing I never did, and I cannot prove to you which. I am the proof of my own theme. That is not a confession, and not an excuse. It is the truest thing I know: the machine leaves no one clean. It did not sort the world into villains and innocents. It made almost everyone a little guilty — and then counted on each of us to remember it as someone else's crime. That is why the most dangerous thing you can believe, in the time that is coming, is that you would be the clean one. The one who would never inform, never comply, never look away. Everyone believes that — and the regime is built entirely out of people who believed exactly that about themselves, right up until the afternoon they signed the paper. Your certainty that you are incapable of it is the door through which they walk in. So do not guard only the memory of what was done to you. Guard the memory of what you did. A people that can face its own guilt cannot be ruled by a man who promises it was always innocent — because it already knows the sweetness of that lie, and has refused it. Remember everything. Especially the parts that indict you. That is the whole of the war — and I am telling you as a man who may have lost it in himself. Do not lose it in yourselves.