How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph), with the exception of Part V, which runs (Part#. "Short Title". Paragraph). Part V has no numbered chapters—only title headings.
Quote #1
It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. (I.2.1)
Kundera spends a lot of time talking about how the destruction of a culture or people happens when its past—history, language, rituals—is somehow erased. For Kundera, that erasure usually happens at the hands of a ruthless, totalitarian government, but it can happen on a more personal level, too. Mirek has nooo problem trying to obliterate his past love for an ugly woman (!) so that his history will jibe with the image he has of himself.
Quote #2
The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything. (I.5.1)
We see this kind of global forgetting every day: one calamity replaces another in our minds, as if we don't have the capacity to handle all the tragedy swirling around us at one time. The problem with this? History has a tendency to repeat itself (see that list above) if we aren't aware of how easy it is to fall into brutality.
Quote #3
And because not even the shadow of a bad memory should distract the country from its restored idyll, both the Prague Spring and the arrival of the Russian tanks, that stain on a beautiful history, had to be reduced to nothing. That is why today in Bohemia the August 21 anniversary goes by silently and the names of those who rose up against their own youth are carefully erased from the country's memory, like mistakes in a schoolchild's homework. (I.10.4)
Kundera makes it clear that Communism is above all things an "ideal" or "idyll"—a dream of the perfection of society—rather than just a political or social stance. The difficulty with idylls is that they're unrealistic: an idyll is something that doesn't or cannot actually exist when you start to add people and ambitions into the mix. Kundera knows this firsthand. The Communist "idyll" is shaken by the Prague Spring and defaced by the violence that follows when the Russians decide to clamp down on Czechoslovakia at the end of the summer of 1968. Hence the need for erasure. Blots are no good for an idyll.