“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
—Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter & Forgetting: A Novel (Kindle, paperback, hardcover, audiobook)
You want to know why so many people erupt when you say you “didn’t know,” you “were doing [your] best,” and “mistakes were made” so we should forget about it and move on?
Because WE knew, and when we told you, you called us selfish immoral science-denying far-right-wing–extremist anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists.
But we were the ones following the science, and you were the ones following the television. We’re batting a thousand, and your “experts” are zero for zero.
We were like the bystanders in The Birds frantically trying to warn the man standing in the puddle of gas not to throw down his match, only to be persistently ignored until he self-immolates.
And yet you’ll still listen to your priests and ridicule us for sounding evidence-based alarms when the next crisis is unfurled and they promise you it’s “different” this time. This time, it really is “novel”! So you’d better listen to them or else!
As Milton Mayer writes in the foreword to the 1966 printing of They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45:
“Crisis is our diet, served up as exotic dishes and dishes ever more exotic before we are able to swallow, let alone digest, those that were just before us.”
Con artists, narcissistic abusers, and politicians always try to hoover their targets back in with “words that scream for your submission” while “their logic ties you up and rapes you.”
And you lap it up every time, just as you’ve been conditioned to.
You panicked on command. You colluded. You volunteered for kapo duty.
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