James E.

“3 Feb. 2020, from A Deeper Sickness by Erik Peterson and Margaret Peacock: “…ophthalmologist Li Wenliang died of the [covid-19] virus after trying to warn people that something terrible was happening. The Chinese government censored him in late 2019. Then, after he signed an official apology for ‘rumormongering,’ he contracted the virus….The outpouring of emotion from the Chinese people is overwhelming. One Weibo post says, ‘The only thing is not to forget.’
That’s right, of course. ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,’ penned Czech writer Milan Kundera fifty years ago. The tragedy of Dr. Li reminds us that under the weight of a powerful and callous government, one can be made to apologize for one’s own death. But one cannot be forced to forget. When the Chinese people agree not to forget Dr. Li, they refuse to relinquish to the regime the power that real history confers. They fight quietly to remember things as they were, as opposed to remembering a past that the powerful construct for them.”
― Erik Peterson