The better question for me is why I should want to? Things always happen for some reason. If we get rid of history from our memory, how will we learn from the mistakes of the past?
The Romans had a term for this, namely damnatio memoriae, which was known as ‘condemnation of memory’. It involved removing a person or an event from the historical record.
George Orwell’s 1984 points out that danger: history is deleted, altered, and replaced with falsehoods. Truth matters because, for example, 2 + 2 equals 4, not 2 + 2 = 5, no matter how hard those in power may want us to believe it.
There is also the law of cause and effect; if one tragic event had never taken place, if one person had never died, what difference would it have made? Would we still be here, having been shaped by the same sequence of events, or would our lives have never come into existence?
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