#343 / Oblivion And Politics

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ob·liv·i·on

The state of being completely forgotten or unknown.

Anything that has become truly "completely forgotten or unknown" ceases to exist within our human world. A recent posting to the blog published by the Hannah Arendt Center argues that totalitarian societies can only endure so long as they can achieve the elimination of uncomfortable and discordant truths. The blog posting tells a hopeful story of how an attempt to achieve just this sort of suppression of the truth, in China, has recently failed, leading to an unexpected change in the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. This is all to the good, but it does not appear that totalitarian behavior patterns have completely disappeared from that country. According to an article that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on Friday, December 7th, China has confined Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo (and his wife) to house arrest, as the government's reaction to the award of the prize to Liu. 

Shakespeare has asserted that "the truth will out," and Arendt claims that "holes of oblivion do not exist."

But for the truth to be known, and oblivion banished, those who know the truth must speak - as the wife of Liu Xiaobo just did. 

Speaking truth to power is the only way we can counteract and conquer the oblivion of lies that otherwise will prevail within that "political world" that is our most immediate reality.