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The US Must Understand: The Story of the Gaza Genocide Did Not Begin on October 7
When those who seek to help resolve a conflict are captive to one side’s definitions and perspective, it’s a recipe for continued tension and ultimately disaster.
Aug 05, 2025
Our understanding of an historical event’s meaning is a function of two factors. The first is what we choose to identify as the starting point leading up to the event. The second is the lens through which we view it. This should be obvious, but unfortunately it is not, and the failure to acknowledge or understand it has consequences in everything from public policy to personal relationships.
This truth can be ignored due to thoughtlessness, blindness to one’s biases, or just plain ignorance. On some occasions there can be malign intent, including efforts to deliberately hide what one knows to be an event’s antecedents for political or personal reasons.
Before examining the issue that prompted this column, I want to share an example. The comedian Dick Gregory once noted that despite what we were taught in school, “Columbus didn’t discover America, because it wasn’t lost.” His point seems simple enough, but upon closer examination it reveals deeper truths.
“Columbus discovered America” erases the history, civilization, and contributions of the Indigenous groups who populated the lands that Europeans came to call the New World. Even the term “New World” was a thinly veiled masking of their imperial self-understanding and intent. “We discovered these lands, and they are ours to take, name, and exploit.”
U.S. reporters appear to be required to include a line in their stories that reads, “The hostilities began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants attacked Israel killing 1,200 and taking 250 hostages.”
The American history we were taught was an extension of European history. It began with Columbus. Then moved to the Spanish, British, and French colonialists, culminating in the Revolutionary War and the birth of the United States. The native peoples were treated as bit players in the unfolding story—at times, a footnote, at others an inconvenient obstacle.
This story of American history results from choosing Columbus as the starting point and using a lens so Eurocentric that it only sees the Indigenous peoples who populated this land as less than human and therefore less deserving of defining their own history or even remaining on their land. They were removed and massacred, their humanity was ignored, and their treatment was justified because they were of less worth than the Europeans who displaced them.
This reflection was prompted by the way Israel’s war on Gaza continues to be reported in the press and discussed in policy circles. U.S. reporters appear to be required to include a line in their stories that reads, “The hostilities began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants attacked Israel killing 1,200 and taking 250 hostages.” It isn’t accidental that this line (or something very close to it) occurs in almost every U.S. print story.
We all must agree that what happened on October 7 was traumatic for Israelis. It was a shock that their security was breached and that some horrible and condemnable atrocities were committed by Hamas and others who joined in their attacks. But history didn’t begin or end on October 7.
Recall that just a few weeks before that the Hamas attack, then-U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser noted that the Middle East was the calmest it had been in years. This statement gave short shrift to the Palestinian reality and made clear the biased lens through which he saw the region. He was ignoring Israel’s continued economic strangulation of Gaza (which made Palestinians increasingly dependent on Israel or Hamas for their livelihood) and the growing threat of settler violence, settlement expansion, and land confiscations in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
A few weeks after October 7, I met with this same individual and listened to him describe the pain and fear of Israelis and how October 7 evoked the traumas of their history. I told him that I completely understood and agreed that Hamas stood rightly condemned for what they had done. I cautioned him, however, not to ignore the trauma of the Palestinians—their pain and fears—and their history of dispossession. He became angry, waving off my comments as “what aboutism.”
As the weeks and months wore on, when I would write a comment about: the growing Palestinian civilian casualty toll; or the bombing of hospitals; or the denial of water, food, medicine, and electricity; or the deliberate destruction of more than 70% of Gaza’s buildings; and the repeated forced expulsions of families—the responses I would receive invariably included “Hamas started it,” “What about the hostages,” or worse. In other words, Israeli lives were all that mattered. And the Israeli narrative became the only acceptable one. In other words, since the story began on October 7, what followed was a justifiable response.
The Israelis’ ability to control the narrative has long characterized the conflict. They would say: “The Balfour Declaration gave Israel a legal right to Palestine”; or “In 1948, tiny Israel was attacked by all surrounding Arab armies”; or “In 1967 Israel was only defending itself.” All of these Israeli-defined “starting points” are fictions that ignore everything that led up to them and the stories they tell are seen only through the biased lens of those who have imposed them.
This problem of false narratives based on biased histories isn’t just a problem for Israel or the U.S. It is unfortunately all too common, especially in conflict situations. When those who seek to help resolve a conflict are captive to one side’s definitions and perspective, it’s a recipe for continued tension and ultimately disaster.
Peacemaking requires that an effort be made to rise above false narratives, self-serving starting points and the biased perceptions of one or another side. That’s not “what-aboutism”—it’s leadership. And it’s been sorely lacking in the U.S.
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Restorative Archaeology? Time to Return Looted Treasures to Sardinia
A range of voices continue to demand the return of the island's looted treasures from private and public venues, including the British Museum in London.
Jun 28, 2025
When the small statues of a 3,000-year-old Bronze Age priestess and her archer protector take the stage at a Christie's auction next week in London, the Nurnet nonprofit organization in Sardinia plans to make their own bid to bring the sacred bronze pieces back home.
Despite decades of protests against the sale of the island's patrimony, where thousands of UNESCO-recognized Nuragic tower complexes attest to Sardinia's central role in the Mediterranean Sea during the Bronze Age, 2,000 years before the rise of the Roman Empire, a range of voices continue to demand the return of the island's looted treasures from private and public venues, including the British Museum in London.
"We think that the purchase could be of interest to the entire Sardinian community of enthusiasts," the all-volunteer organization Nurnet said in a statement, in launching a GoFundMe campaign for the auction. °The institutions do not have regulations that allow them to intervene in the short term and allocate the funds. We decided to intervene, with the savings of the members and the help of enthusiasts."
The history of Sardinia, especially the extraordinary findings from its Nuragic civilization in the Bronze Age, remains in a state of eternal recovery.
The Sardinian group successfully purchased four bronze pieces in 2015 at a similar auction, and then donated them to a local museum.
Last week, in fact, the Monte Prama Fondation, which has recently gained international attention for its 50-year restoration of massive stone giant sculptures from the Bronze Age, called on the British Museum to repatriate thousands of ancient Punic gold jewelry and Nuragic items that had been notoriously raided in the 19th century.
Despite the massive hoard of artifacts, which have been documented in various reports and a 270-page book, only a handful are on display at the London museum, while the rest have remained in storage for over a century.
While the British Museum Act of 1963 forbids the return of artifacts obtained by the institution, critics point to the museum's ability to "loan" their treasures back to the host country.
"Returning the bronzetti," Nurnet pointed out, "is also a way to tell a beautiful Sardinia story, to bring this work of art back to domu sua," the Sardinian language for "home."
For Nurnet advocates and other Sardinian groups, the extraordinary detective work of a Sardinian policeman and actions of the Cleveland Museum could serve as an example for the British Museum and other institutions.
In fact, the bronze priestess on sale at Christie's next week shares a common origin—the shadowy Switzerland art market in the 1990s.
On a recent trip to the Ferruccio Berreca Archaeological Museum in Sant'Antioco, I visited a small bronze archer in a glass case, straddling the piece of stone, with two long unwieldy horns thrusting up on his helmet, as if challenging anyone to a charge. Yet, this miniature figure in bronze, a little over eight inches tall, which was tall for the rest of the pieces in the Bronze Age collection, stood there with a gesture of confidence, his hand outstretched in an offering, as if willing to tell the story of his twisted journey.
Centuries before Homer composed The Odyssey, the Sardinians cast miniature bronzes or bronzetti, including ships, among hundreds of other types of bronze pieces. They were vessels of stories. Found mainly in sacred water temples or a rare tomb, they served as exquisite votive offerings dating back to the 12th or 11th centuries B.C.
In 1865, a shepherd uncovered a trove of bronzetti at the Nuragic sanctuary site of Abini in the heart of the central mountains, including an otherworldly figure with four arms and four eyes, with two long horns jutting from its helmet, holding the two round shields that some associated with the ancient Shardana or "People of the Sea" that arrived in Egypt, while others believed it referred to Plato's Symposium on the original four-eyed humans divided in half by Zeus.
These tiny artifacts, often no more than 5-12 inches, spread across sacred sites on the island, including the most remote uplands, and then crossed over the sea into Etruscan tombs, at numerous sites in Tuscany, Lazio, and Apuglia. They journeyed along the Italian boot of civilizations, entering the Greek Sanctuary of Hera Lacinia at the tip of Calabria, on the Ionian Sea, on the eastern coast of Italy.
Each one of these boats, like the hundreds that remained behind in Sardinia, observed archaeologist Fulvia Lo Schiavo, was "not only a work of refined artistic craftsmanship and a precious and sacred object," but it was also "in itself a story and a message," following its own cosmology and narrative.
The Cleveland Museum had hailed one bronzetti figure as an "exceptionally fine example" of bronze work in the lost-wax method, produced by "a rather mysterious group of people who lived in Sardinia in the first millennium B.C. and who left no written records." In the catalog of their notable acquisitions in 1991, the American museum dated the artifact back to the ninth century B.C. They called it "the warrior," and used it as the logo for a section in the museum.
Anyone in Sardinia would have called it "the archer," given the extraordinary longbow hanging off the shoulder of the figure, the distinctive arm guard on the left forearm, a quiver for the arrows on his back. At least, that's what Lieutenant Roberto Lai thought when he saw the Polaroid photo of the bronze figure for the first time. Serving with the heritage protection unit of the Carabiniere police, Lai had been placed in charge of sorting through a treasure trove of documents and artifacts traced to a notorious trafficker of art in Basel, Switzerland in the mid-1990s.
Thanks to two strange, fatal car crashes in Sardinia over a 10-year period, both of which left behind briefcases of cash, diaries with addresses of clandestine diggers and their contacts, and a chart of acquisitions, Lai was able to connect the dots with the infamous Swiss brigand and his warehouse.
Turning over the photo of the archer, Lai got the surprise of a lifetime. "Grutt'e Acqua" was scrawled across the back, tracing the piece to its origins at the 1500 B.C. Nuragic site on the smaller island of Sant'Antioco, where Lai had grown up. It was neither "mysterious," that fulsome code word often trotted out to cover a lack of historical inquiry, nor legally acquired, in Lai's view.
Lai knew the legacy of the nuraghe at Grutt'e Acqua or Grutti 'e Acqua, variously translated as "the grottoes of water," or "the grottoes and water," was not just a pile of rocks, but an intricate architectural wonder of waterways and millennial planning. But he wasn't alone.
The tomb raider also knew, like any shepherd in Sardinia, that the ornate water temples or sacred wells nearby housed the bronze sculptures that had been left as communal offerings. Trudging up my same path, the raider most likely bypassed the Nuragic reservoir that sat at the basin of the hill, a green pool encased by small boulders with the mystic air of a lake in the woods.
"Electrified" by the discovery of the photo and its connection to his island, Lai followed the trail left by the trafficker, his Polaroid in hand, only to come up empty-handed with its match to any institution or collector. Where had the archer gone? No final receipts of his transactions were to be found. The cultural heritage detective didn't give up. Over the next few years, he obsessively dug through any announcements or catalogs or listings at museums, auctions, and private collections with artifacts from Sardinia and Italy. The collections were endless. They still are today.
An entire book on ancient Sardinian artifacts behind lock and key at the British Museum dated back to "boatloads" of "very remarkable" items that had been plundered at 36 tombs in the 1850s. Much of it came from the Tharros and Mont'e Prama areas. The British Museum had its own Sardinian archer, too, though he dramatically drew back his arrow, as if to protect himself. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles featured its Nuragic archer, though it differed in the details. In 1990, The New York Times featured a show at the Merrin Gallery in New York City: "Bronzes Conjure Up Images of a Fabled Past." It included the "raw power" of a Nuragic priest from the ninth century B.C. (The Merrin Gallery would be embroiled in fraud and the acquisition of "questionable antiquities" for years.)
In fact, hardly any major archaeological museum didn't have artifacts from the Bronze Age in Sardinia. While Christie's famous auction house once called off a million-dollar auction for a 4,000-year-old stone carving from the island in 2014, after the Italian police objected to the "robbery of the heritage and civilization of Sardinia," it still continues to peddle Sardinian bronzes. One five-inch Nuragic figure from the Bronze Age went for $125,000 in 2017. It also came from a private dealer in Switzerland.
The trafficking of these prized pieces, among other riches, was an old tradition, of course, dating back to the Roman period. In 1365, the governor of Cagliari brought ancient jewels dug up from a prehistoric site to the Court of Spain, as an elaborate offering from the island. The honeycombing of ruins was so bad that a law was passed in 1481 to stop the digging for treasure, especially among the clergy.
Not just for jewels. By the mid-16th century, a common proverb recounted how the stone walls of the Nuragic, Phoenician, and Roman city of Tharros were "transported away in cartloads." In 1851, the pioneering archeologist and clergyman Giovanni Spano called on government officials to protect the prehistoric sites, which he feared had fallen into the hands of "other people who will not know how to appreciate them."
In 1923, National Geographic magazine lamented the national pasttime of tomb raiders and archaeological thieves in Sardinia, as if the craze hadn't let up. Even the Nazis craved Sardinian artifacts. During a visit to the island in the late 1930s, Adolf Hitler's deputy Hermann Göering attempted to take a priceless glass-beaded necklace that had been recently excavated at a Punic necropolis dating to 300 B.C.
One evening, scrolling online, doing his usual regimen of going museum by museum, the Sardinian detective landed on the Cleveland Museum of Art site. He was stunned by the match. It was the archer in his Polaroid.
It took 18 months of high-level negotiations, including the involvement of the attorney general in Ohio, but the Sardinians managed to convince the American museum to return the stolen artifact. In exchange, in fact, the Italian government had to agree to two conditions: that the archer, among other stolen goods, would be returned to its native place, and that Italy would loan 13 exhibits of similar value for the next 25 years.
When the archer finally arrived at the Ferruccio Barreca Archaeological Museum in Sant'Antioco in 2009, Lai stood by for its installation. The archer's placement in that little glass case was deceiving with its significance. The detective would eventually write a book, as well as a graphic novel, on the true crime adventure, as well as other histories of Sant'Antioco. Lai declared the Nuragic archer had returned to "where history had placed it."
Or recovered it, perhaps. Just like the Nurnet effort today with the bronze figures at the Christie's auction.
In effect, their campaign amounts to a new trend that should be called "restorative archaeology." In a period of cultural revival, it speaks to the process of "re-storying" the island and its history.
Meanwhile, the history of Sardinia, especially the extraordinary findings from its Nuragic civilization in the Bronze Age, remains in a state of eternal recovery.
At least until tomb raiders, and institutions like the British Museum, follow the example of the Cleveland Museum.
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Deleter in Chief: How Trump Is Waging War on Our Knowledge of Ourselves
The Trump administration is functionally acting to rewrite the prevailing narratives of our past—a past of progress toward equal rights, fact-based education, and lessons learned from mistakes and achievements.
May 15, 2025
In these first 100-plus days of the nation’s 47th presidency, President Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk have cast a frightful spell over the country. As if brandishing wands from inside their capes—poof!—offices and their employees, responsibilities and aims, norms and policies have simply disappeared. The two have decreed a flurry of acts of dismantlement that span the government, threatening to disappear a broad swath of what once existed, much of it foreshadowed by Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for drastically reorganizing and even dismantling government as we know it during a second Trump administration.
To my mind, the recent massive removals of people, data, photos, and documents remind me of the words of Czech novelist Milan Kundera in his classic novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Dismantling the Institutions
By the middle of March, the new administration had already eliminated dozens of departments and offices, as well as thousands of staff positions, with the supposed goal of “government efficiency.” Buyouts, layoffs, reassignments, and a flurry of resignations by those who preferred not to continue working under the new conditions all meant the elimination of tens of thousands of government workers—more than 121,000, in fact, across 30 agencies. The affected agencies included the Department of Energy, Veterans Affairs, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service, as well as multiple offices within Health and Human Services, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health. The Department of Education lost nearly half its staff. And then there was the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). By the end of March, the administration had closed its offices and reduced its staff from approximately 10,000 personnel to 15.
The gutting of such offices and their employees is—I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn—expected to cripple significant government services. At the Department of Education, for example, billions of dollars of institutional aid as well as student loans will be affected. Cuts at the Office of Veterans Affairs, which faced one of the largest staff reductions, are predicted to deprive veterans and their families of healthcare services. USAID’s end will cut programs that addressed poverty, food insecurity, drug trafficking, and human trafficking globally. At the Department of Health and Human Services, the availability of vaccines, the tracking of infectious diseases, and all too much more are threatened and could, according to the executive director of the American Public Health Association, “totally destroy the infrastructure of the nation’s public health system.”
But, as novelist Kundera reminds us, the toll won’t just be to government officials and the positions they’re leaving in the dust of history. The cuts also include a full-scale attack on the past.
Records Gone Missing
As part and parcel of this bureaucratic house-clearing, an unprecedented attack on the records of government agencies has been taking place. Basic facts and figures, until recently found on government websites, are now gone. As I wandered the Internet researching this article, such websites repeatedly sent back this bland but grim message: “The page you’re looking for was not found.”
Many of the deletions of facts and figures have been carried out in the name of the aggressive anti-DEI stance of this administration. As you’ll undoubtedly recall, in the first days of his second term in office, Donald Trump declared DEI programs to be “illegal” and ordered the elimination of all DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) “policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.” A Pentagon spokesperson then tried to explain such acts this way: “History is not DEI.”
The assault on the facts and figures of the past includes an adamant refusal to keep records for the future.
And indeed, at the Pentagon’s website, at least 26,000 portraits, ranging from a World War II Medal of Honor recipient to the first women to graduate from Marine infantry training, were scheduled for removal in the name of the administration’s anti-DEI agenda. In addition, articles were deleted from the site, including a story on baseball great Jackie Robinson, who had served in World War II, as well as mentions of women and minorities. On the website of Arlington National Cemetery, information about Blacks, Hispanics, and women went missing as well. At the Smithsonian Institution, where Vice President JD Vance was put in charge of the world’s largest museum enterprise, consisting of 21 separate museums and the National Zoo, the mandate similarly became to “remove improper ideology” from those museums, as well as from the education and research centers that its portfolio includes.
Following a storm of protest, some efforts at restoration have occurred, including the material on Jackie Robinson, The Washington Post reports that “the categories ‘African American History,’ ‘Hispanic American History,’ and ‘Women’s History’ no longer appear prominently.” Yet some information and artifacts, officials predict, have been lost forever.
The attack on history is perhaps most strikingly apparent in the disruption of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the institution whose mission is precisely to preserve government records. As The Associated Press summed it up, “As the nation’s recordkeeper, the Archives tells the story of America—its founding, breakdowns, mistakes, and triumphs.” The attack on NARA has come in the form of staff reductions, including the firing of the Archivist of the United States and the departure, owing to firings, buyouts, or resignations, of half of that office’s staff. (Remember, NARA was central to the federal criminal case brought against Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, a case which was eventually dismissed.) Notably, the Department of Justice reportedly removed a database which held the details surrounding the charges and convictions that stemmed from the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
At USAID, an agency founded more than 60 years ago and now utterly eviscerated, the destruction of past records has been a top-line item. As ProPublica first reported, and other news sources later detailed, employees at USAID were ordered to destroy classified and personnel records. “Shred as many documents first,” the order read, “and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break.” Meanwhile, massive layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are expected to drastically curtail the access of Americans to public records. At the CDC, cuts have included gutting the public records staff (though HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has claimed that he plans to reverse that).
Perhaps not surprisingly, the assault on the facts and figures of the past includes an adamant refusal to keep records for the future, a tendency that also marked the first Trump administration and has already proved striking in the first 100 days of his second term.
The Signalgate scandal is a case in point. In the group chat held by then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz on the Signal app, instead of a designated classified communications channel, discussing an imminent attack on Yemen, national security officials communicated classified information outside of approved channels. In addition to violating norms and laws governing communications involving classified information, the fact that the app was set to auto-delete ignored the law that mandates the preservation of official records.
Nor was Signalgate a one-off. Trump administration officials have reportedly taken to using Gmail, while Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been relying on Google Docs for the drafting of government documents, in each case attempting to bypass laws regulating the archiving of public records by potentially “failing to preserve all iterations of its drafts as well as comments left on shared documents.”
Of course, the president’s aversion to creating records in the first place long predates the present moment. During his first term, for example, he had a tendency to rip up documents as he saw fit. “He didn’t want a record of anything,” a senior official told The Washington Post. Notably, he refused to have notes taken at several meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin and, after one encounter with the Russian president at a Group of 20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017, he confiscated the interpreter’s notes.
Evading the Law
In such an ongoing obliteration of the records of government activities, the violations that have already taken place have essentially rendered the law invisible. The Federal Records Act, as Lawfare reminds us, requires any federal agency to ”make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency.” And when it comes to presidential records, the Presidential Records Act categorizes them as the property of the United States and requires the president to take “all such steps as may be necessary” to preserve those records.
There is, however, a giant carve-out to that requirement. During his tenure in office, the president can seek to withhold certain records on the grounds that the documents have ceased to have “administrative, historical, informational, or evidentiary value.” In order to make such a decision, however, the president must first consult with the national archivist, a position that at present belongs to the now four-hatted Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is currently the acting head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and USAID, as well as the National Archives. It’s worth noting that there is no enforcement mechanism in place to address a decision to dispose of documents, or to challenge the legality—or even the wisdom—of such a decision. The law, as one scholar argues, remains essentially “toothless.”
Why History Matters
Historians like me are particularly sensitive to the destruction of government records. Archival materials are our bread and butter. Who knows what new information we might find and what new insights we might gain from a fresh look at the letters of John Adams on the eve of the outbreak of the American Revolution or the records of the dissenters in George W. Bush’s administration in the run-up to the War in Iraq? With the new insights that documents and records provide can come new understandings of who we are as a country, what ills our leaders have (or haven’t) addressed, what tragedies might (or might not) have been avoided, what successes might (or might not) have been more likely to come about. In sum, the records of the past hold innumerable lessons that could guide us into a more sustainable and just future.
That documentary record helps—or at least until this fragile moment, helped—us understand the pathways that have brought us here in both moments of glory and times of trouble. The record feeds us, inspires us, and allows us to feed and inspire others. It’s through the telling of history that we have come to understand our collective selves as a nation, our individual selves as actors, and our leaders’ decisions about the future.
Expunging history was an early tactic of the Nazis, who sought to turn the clock back to a time before the French Revolution and its values altered the course of history.
All that is, of course, now changing and the spell cast by the administration’s ongoing destruction of those records, the emptying or altering of the nation’s cache of documents, has been enhanced by another spell—that of suspicion over the contents of what documents remain, based on accusations that the record itself is partisan and tainted, and so deserving of eradication.
For historians and the public we serve, when record-keeping is marred or even annihilated by a political agenda, as is happening today, such acts can carry special interest for scholars of the past. After all, purposeful deletions from and false additions to the historical record offer a truly grim possibility: the creation of what could pass for a new history of this country. As of now, the Trump administration is functionally acting to rewrite the prevailing narratives of our past—a past of progress toward equal rights, fact-based education, and lessons learned from mistakes and achievements. In sum, to alter or erase the historical record amounts to erasing our knowledge of ourselves.
David Corn, in his newsletter Our Land, recently posted a piece entitled “Trump’s War on History.” In it, he quotes George Orwell from his classic dystopian novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” As Corn points out all too ominously, expunging history was an early tactic of the Nazis, who sought to turn the clock back to a time before the French Revolution and its values altered the course of history. As Corn puts it, for the Nazis, “the animating ideas of the French Revolution, such as liberty, civic equality, and human rights, were to be crushed.”
For Orwell, as for Kundera, owning history with a firm grip is a power of immense consequence, never to be lightly dismissed. Memory and the records that sustain knowledge of the past are essential to humankind’s struggle against the worst sort of naked power grabs, never more so than now.
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