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 that nation
will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man
against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
-- Milan Kundera. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979).