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At first it might appear that modern-day Mississippi has nothing in common with the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic of 1952. Red-state free-market conservatism versus a dictatorship of the proletariat? Tate Reeves versus Stalinist fellow-travelers? But metaphor and human sociopolitical behavior being what they are, there’s a connection. Let me explain.
In February of 1948, the Czechoslovakian Communist Party seized power in a coup-d’etat. On Feb. 21, the party chairman, Klement Gottwald, addressed a celebratory crowd in Prague’s Old-Town Square. To his right stood another high-ranking Communist official, Vladimír Clementis. It was bitterly cold and Clementis thoughtfully placed his fur hat on comrade Gottwald’s bare head. Photographs of the occasion were distributed by the state, with the dour Communist power couple gazing out on the citizens and bright future of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.
Gottwald became Prime Minister, while Clementis was appointed minister of foreign affairs. But authoritarian power dynamics being what they are, Clementis’ position and gracious gesture toward Gottwald did not guarantee his safety. (Are you listening, Marco Rubio?)
In 1952 Clementis was arrested and charged with being a “bourgeois nationalist,” which in Stalin’s world was usually fatal. During the requisite show trial, Clementis confessed to his “crimes” and was later hanged. Because Clementis had become a persona non grata, the state propaganda apparatus removed his face from the 1948 photograph with Gottwald, shifting most of Clementis’ head to hidden behind a microphone. The only identifiable part of Clementis that remained was his fur hat, still perched atop Gottwald’s head.
On the left, the original photograph from Feb. 21, 1948. Klement Gottwald is on the right, while Vladimír Clementis is to the left, partially obscured by the microphone. In the retouched photograph on the right, Clementis’ head is hidden by the microphone, while his fur hat remains atop Gottwald’s head.The Czech novelist Milan Kundera describes this scenario in the opening of “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” before a protagonist observes that the “struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” For Kundera, Clementis’ fur hat was both a symbol and photographic relic of how Czechoslovakia’s authoritarian regime distorted history.
In the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, history in the form of Vladimír Clementis was inconvenient and he was eliminated from the 1948 photograph, less his fur hat. Of course, Clementis’ disappearance is just one example of a broader antagonistic response to history by ideologues and authoritarians. History makes them uncomfortable, sad, angry and embarrassed because it argues against entrenched narratives, precious origin myths and stories about perceived victimhood.
Easier, then, for those in power to reprise their own versions of the opening scene from “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” symbolic fur hat of forgetting and all. But it is dangerous to ignore history, because doing so disregards a fundamental cause-effect truth described by the German writer Bernhard Schlink: “The tectonic layers of our lives (in other words, history) rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as a matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive.”
“Absolutely present and alive”: The past lives on, despite our attempts to deny it— as in Mississippi, where the forces of forgetting that animated authoritarians in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic are alive and well. Here, many of those who hold political and economic power insist on wearing magical hats of historical amnesia, substituting an antebellum “plantation owner’s” straw hat for Clementis’ Commie fur hat.
Kundera described the state-sponsored historical amnesia of Stalinist Europe as “organized forgetting.” But the phenomenon also occurs in Mississippi, where it works to misinterpret or ignore the state’s racial history.
In Mississippi, organized forgetting results from an interaction between attitudes embedded in the state’s cultural DNA and government policy. Here, organized forgetting means repeatedly vandalizing the plaque memorializing Emmett Till’s death, and flying “Stars and Bars” battle flags.
It means celebrating Robert E. Lee’s Birthday on the same day as Martin Luther King’s Birthday, along with state holidays honoring Jefferson Davis and Confederate Memorial Day. It means electing a governor who annually proclaims Confederate Heritage Month (ignoring the slavery part), while arguing that “There is not systemic racism in America.” It means electing a United States senator who joked about a “public hanging” in a state where roughly 580 lynchings, primarily of Black people, occurred between 1882 and 1968. It means a legislature that in 2025 passed a ban on teaching “divisive concepts” about race and prohibited DEI programs in public education. It means continuing policies that perpetuate the state’s poverty rate, which is the highest in the United States. It means a new, highly regressive tax structure that will heighten income inequality and disproportionately affect Black people.
Organized forgetting also means that the state GOP has fast-tracked redistricting following the Callais vs. Louisiana Supreme Court decision to diminish Black voting power, as in the Jim Crow era.
“Back to the Future,” circa 1890, when the president of Mississippi’s constitutional convention, S. S. Calhoon, stated that the constitution was being rewritten to “… exclude the Negro. Nothing short of this will do.” Now, Tate Reeves and others in the GOP explain that one goal of redistricting is to eliminate Congressman Bennie Thompson’s district, with Thompson being the only Black member of Congress from the state. Reeves has argued that the Callais decision “is a win for our Constitution and a tremendous win for our republic.”
“To secure a lie,” writes Lewis Hyde, “surround it with a moat of forgetfulness.”
Thankfully in Mississippi there are institutions working against forgetting, including the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, the Emmett Till Interpretive Center and the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument. But in our state there are not enough equivalents to the German “Stolpersteine,” or “stumbling stones”: about 70,000 small memorials to victims of the Holocaust, scattered across Europe. Here, there is insufficient collective resistance to forgetting, although the “tectonic events” of Mississippi’s racial history are “absolutely present and alive.”
Of course, organized forgetting is present throughout our country, where the “Book of Forgetting” (minus the laughter) manifests itself in many of the Trump Administration’s actions: establishing the 1776 Commission as a response to the New York Times’ 1619 Project on the effects of slavery; eliminating funding for schools that teach “divisive, race-centered ideology” or “white privilege,” and attacking DEI programs. Among the institutions and organizations targeted are the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the American Women’s History Museum, the National Park Service and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Trump administration attacks historical memory that it deems “divisive” or “revisionist” because that history makes it uncomfortable and conflicts with stories about when and for whom America was “great.”
The problem with forgetting history is that although doing so might support entrenched political and economic power, it perverts our understanding of both the past and present, and distorts our imagined futures. In Mississippi, as elsewhere, forgetting often represents an active refusal to know, which as the philosopher Karl Popper wrote, issues “from cowardice, pride or laziness of mind.” For Popper, “ignorance has an ethical dimension, and knowing is a moral obligation for human beings.”
Actively embracing a past that never existed inhibits adaptation to the world created by our history. As the historian Timothy Snyder observes, “to abandon the search for understanding (is to) abandon history.” And to abandon history is to abandon hope of healing and positive change. Instead, we remain “victims of our own incomprehension,” bound to repeat past mistakes and make new and equally harmful ones.
A flawed aspect of human nature is a deep-seated resistance to understanding the past, in all its uncomfortable complexity. So, although one quote widely but wrongly attributed to William Faulkner is apparently apocryphal, it remains devastatingly accurate, whether we’re talking about the United States, Communist Czechoslovakia or anywhere else on this earth: “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.”
And here, the hats of forgetting are everywhere: thousands of them, worn by politicians and the economic elite, worn by people who should know better, worn by those willing to follow them into darkness.
Christopher Norment holds a PhD in Systematics and Ecology from the University of Kansas and is an emeritus professor of environmental science and ecology at the State University of New York–Brockport. During his career he published over 50 peer-reviewed scientific papers and three science-related books of creative nonfiction, and received awards from the State University of New York for teaching and scholarship. He now lives in Jackson.
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