None of these anniversaries will be collectively forgotten for a while. Yet, we cannot, individually, name more than a handful a month. The danger inherent in an individual losing the information encoded in his brain depends on his relative positioning and “value” in a socio-historical context. But when a society forgets its past, it becomes weaker, since public remembering and scholarly knowing are altogether distinct. Remembering is a political act — it invests significance in historical information, thereby enabling the use of what is remembered.

And yet, forgetting what happened centuries ago is less dangerous than turning amnesiac with regard to what occurred just a decade back. (What do we collectively remember of the bloody first half of the 20th century or of the no less significant ’80s and ’90s?) While forgetting can be natural, gradual and automatic, it is often state-enforced or market-induced — although, as witnessed in capitalist democracies, the state and the market may merely half-consciously collaborate in diverting public interest.

In totalitarian states, as in the erstwhile East Bloc, collective forgetting has been a state-enforced practice, moulded into an art. When street names and state heroes change overnight (and disappear for ever), when books burn to erase the memory of a writer and his ideas or to suppress a culture (as with the onetime Papal sport of Talmud burning), people do burn. And not necessarily the way Calvin burnt Michael Servetus. After their mass murders, Hitler and Stalin will always be accountable for their assault on the intellect — in the tradition of, say, the Reconquista and the bloody expulsion of the Moors (with the burning of their books). With every cultural death, we lose knowledge and thereby a sense of a usable past since there is little left to remember.

... contd.