Haruki Murakami has been a favorite author of mine for more than ten years. I've read almost all of his work, at least almost all of it that has been translated into English. I haven't found any of it difficult, although some people complain. There are often parallel stories, and many of his novels and stories include magical realism. In truth, any author that we could name would leave some people to complain. Readers bring different agendas to the process. Anyway, I love Murakami.
There remained one prominent novel that I had not read: 1Q84 (2009, English translation Knopf, 2011). It was the shear enormity of it that drove me off. The book comes to about 1,000 pages. I finally decided to take the plunge recently after spending months reading, more like studying, a couple of huge history books. I was reading both of those for the second time, because they were so dense with details and they involved fascinating subject matter. After that, I thought that I was ready for a big dose of fiction. Time to tackle 1Q84. I'm very glad that I did.
I just now came across a passage that could have been written as a warning to Americans, especially this year. This is an adult man describing the plot of 1984 (George Orwell, 1949) to a precocious teenage girl:
"They rewrite history.
"Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It's a crime. Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us—is rewritten—we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.” (Quotation marks in the original. This is that rare bird, a Japanese novel written in the third-person.)
Isn't this exactly what our, what shall I call them, our leaders, are doing to us now? And haven't they been doing it to us for some time? They are rewriting history.
There is a powerful movement alive now in America to whitewash Slavery in its entirety. The 1619 Project is condemned as a hoax. They are trying to rewrite that history. “Americans were kind to their slaves!” “The slaves were happy!” “Slavery was not going to last more than another ten years anyway!” “The Civil War (aka, the War of Northern Aggression) had nothing to do with slavery.” Those are lies, and they are revisionist history at its most insidious.
No one recalls being taught in school that America flat-out stole half of Mexico by force of arms. Having trouble remembering about that one? The Marines remember it well. “From the halls of Montezuma . . .” Google “map mexico 1830.” Then Google “the mexican american war.” That was 1846 to 1848, and we stole all of the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Nevada, and parts of the states of Utah, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. There are many examples of our bloody history that we prefer to ignore now, or to lie them away altogether.
Young people today have no idea that fairly recently everyone was entitled to free health insurance with almost every job; that all health care was non-profit, including health insurance; that every state had universities that were either free or ridiculously cheap; that rents and food were cheap; that jobs were easily available.
Republicans are the chief offenders here, but everyone with any power or authority in America is involved. That insurrectionist invasion of the Capitol Building in January either did not happen, or they were just a bunch of tourists. Rewriting history, to cheat us of our collective memory, to deny us the basic facts about our own individual and collective pasts, has become one of the main tools in the ongoing effort to remove any semblance of democracy from American life and replace it with some kind of authoritarian oligarchy wearing a democracy mask.
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