By Mark Antony Rossi

Maniacal mass-murdering utopians Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin had an institutional fondness for burning books and doctoring photographs. The recent ethnic killing fields of Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda began their brief bloody reigns in the exact same manner seeking to rewrite or erase history. And why? You ask.

Mainly because History is Memory and Memory is Identity. Dictators, by nature, are insecure paranoid creatures who cannot settle for disrupting the present and the future. They must radically stage or sterilize anything from the past that could remotely be in conflict with their presence and programs. They see total control demanding total intervention into Time and Space.

The megalomaniac has an insatiable drive to control every element and event lest we discover the true limitations of his power. A power, I must add, singularly fueled by collective prejudice and how it finely edits what was clearly remembered only yesterday. And yesterday becomes a hole today, a vacuum, a void quickly filled with robotic rhetoric spat by an army addicted to the affirmative.

Today’s technological advances allow incredible alterations to visual and audio communication. Modern surgery is capable of completely changing physical appearance and sexual gender. It is not alarmist to realize this science in the hands of a police state could be used against its perceived enemies. Your history erased. Your gender forcibly revoked. Punishments beyond incarceration or termination since those methods still leave a trace of existence. Erasure is eternal.

We have been under the mistaken belief that swords, guns and bombs are the mightiest instruments of murder but the most heinous weapons of tomorrow will be used against the mind; not the flesh. If History is not protected with the more than the force of arms it will be relegated to just another story reimaged and reimagined. And since our Memory and Identity are directly tied to History whomever seizes control wins the war without a bullet fired. We will be born only not to be born but deleted by diabolical edict meant to eradicate freedom like an extinct species paraded colorfully in your children’s schoolbooks.

About the Author: Mark Antony Rossi is a poet, playwright and author of the bioethics volume “Dark Tech” now available from Amazon. His most recent plays have been produced in Liverpool and New York. http://markantonyrossi.jigsy.com