Forum / A Tiny Fragment From Page 110 Of Milan Kundera's The Art Of The Novel

• 
  Chris Okum

  Sep 26, 05:24pm

  Totalitarian society, especially in its more extreme versions, tends to abolish the boundary between the public and the private; power, as it grows ever more opaque, requires the lives of citizens to be entirely transparent. The ideal of life without secrets corresponds to the ideal of the exemplary family; a citizen does not have the right to hide anything at all from the Party of the State, just as the child has no right to keep a secret from his father or his mother. In their propaganda, totalitarian societies project an idyllic smile: they want to be seen as 'one big family.'

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Sep 27, 06:47pm

  With Papa Trump holding the remote.

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Sep 28, 03:40am

  Kundera looks at this with a European experience and perspective. We've not experienced this kind of atmosphere, but the seeds are here... and if they ever could sprout, this would be that generation.
  I really like his work. If only for the perspective that isn't my own.

• Samuel Derrick Rosen

  Sep 29, 11:35am

  Britain is becoming like 1970s East Berlin.

  Down in England during the water shortage (even though there had been floods/torrential rain all summer) the media/newspapers and the local councils were urging people to spy on their neighbours and to report them for defying the hose pipe ban.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Sep 29, 02:35pm

  You been caught yet?

• 
  Gary Hardaway

  Oct 05, 01:51am

  Accountability is for midlings and underlings only. The upper echelons must have the ability to negotiate in private. TPP a good example.

• 
  Mathew Paust

  Oct 05, 02:31pm

  History may not be able to forgive Obama for TPP.

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