I found Internet Archive during the months when we couldn't go to shops or travel. The very first books I read there were fiction set in the time of the Spanish flu. One was Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Porter. Another was They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell (about whom Edward Mendelson is fascinating in another book you can find on Internet Archive; I suspect he puts a similar argument here).
I loved both of these books. Given that our "pandemic" didn't turn out to be a true pandemic of the Spanish flu variety, I wonder whether works of such poignance will be inspired by people's experience of this more recent iteration. I expect that as time goes by and the consequences of the panicked public policy we were persuaded to accept become more terrible, we may see an increasing anger emerging in people's recollection of what happened.
Anyway, I think Internet Archive is a wonderful thing and the attacks being made upon it by publishers are misguided and selfish. So often it is impossible to find older books anywhere but in the Archive's collection. The Archive is doing a huge service, preserving so much that publishers cannot be bothered to keep available.
And it is not only books. Today I found this fascinating bit of footage in which you can see Ferenc Nagy being interviewed in the calm manner of a former era.
For those who may not know, Ferenc Nagy was democratically elected Prime Minister of Hungary until Mátyás Rákosi's Communist Party, aided by Soviet soldiers, kidnapped his party's General Secretary & deported him to the Soviet Union and then kidnapped Nagy's own son, only returning him when Nagy agreed to resign from office.
Once they'd achieved that, the Communist Party seized power in Hungary, despite having won only 22 per cent of the vote at free elections.
"I do not believe coexistence is possible between ideologies. Communism is an imperialistic ideology" Nagy states in the Internet Archive footage. Sadly, Communism is also a very insidious ideology, and if you look carefully enough you will see that it is the force behind many of today's problems. Along with the thing it claims to be the cure for - human greed.
