Tuesday, June 12, 2007

NOT EXACTLY, MR. PRESIDENT

The Czech writer Milan Kundera once described the struggle against Communism as "the struggle of memory against forgetting."

--President Bush today at the dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington

Actually, what Kundera wrote (emphasis mine) was "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." (You could look it up.) Obviously he was writing about Communism, but he's a real writer -- he'd have said "Communism" if he'd meant to limit the statement to Communism. He said "power."

Ideologies come and go; power doesn't go away, and ordinary people regularly need to fight it.

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