19 Oct 2026 Public memory, voice and visibility

People have been silenced and made invisible for centuries. In Milan Kundera’s novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), the character Mirek observes, “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”

The different forms of silencing include “repressive erasure” (obliteration, destruction, editing out); “structural amnesia” (abandoning links that are socially undesirable); and “forgetting as humiliated silence” (collusive silence brought on by collective shame).

Genocide might be considered the worst and most immoral kind of repressive erasure. Defined by the United Nations as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, genocides are recognised as having taken place in Nazi Germany (1941-45), Rwanda (1994), Srebrenica (1995), Iraq and Syria (2014-17). Allegations are currently being investigated by the UN in relation to Myanmar and Gaza.

Erasing a people also means eradicating their political, social, and cultural identity. Historical records and artefacts are destroyed. Languages are forgotten and people are assimilated.

Ideology fashions public memory and the politics of remembering or forgetting constitutes a struggle for power and domination.

Which is partly why the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany is alarming, as well as its recent attempt to ban the Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”) that commemorate people deported and killed by the Nazis and are often found outside their last known residence. Since the 1990s, many towns in countries across Europe, including Germany and Austria, have been embedding these small brass plaques in the streets to recall Jews and other victims of Nazi atrocities.

In Heidenau, Saxony, the AfD together with conservative town councillors have voted to ban the installation of new stumbling stones. It’s no great leap of the imagination to see this as the first step in revising the past and rendering people invisible. How easy it would be today – if the AfD were to take power – similarly to censor digital records and so obliterate the present.

Many governments already use digital technologies to propagate false information in support of their policies and to demonise opponents. But digital technologies can also be used to counterattack, to challenge, and to preserve public memory.

As the Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano observed in his book Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World (1998), “The right to remember does not figure among the human rights consecrated by the United Nations, but now more than ever we must insist on it and act on it. Not to repeat the past but to keep it from being repeated.”

The hope of a better future lies in guaranteeing the voices and visibility of all.

Photo: Freiburg, Germany Stolperstein for Max and Olga Mayer/The Profitcy, Wikipedia