The Commissar Vanishes...
A few interesting concepts and tidbits that I've found more about on Wikipedia. This is one advantage to a crowd-sourced encyclopedia: after awhile, it gets into the nooks and crannies of human knowledge.
• Damnatio memoriae — The strangely enduring concept that a person can be erased from history. Pursued by almost every civilization in some form, from Romans striking faces off mosaics to Stalin's comrades disappearing one by one, becoming, in Orwell's words, "unpersons." Widely considered impossible in eras of much more widespread documentation.
But with more media becoming electronic however, this paradoxically might become easier. Ironically, a version of Orwell's works recently disappeared from Kindle.
For the lower class, decentralized equivalent, see Going Ghost.
• King in the Mountain — Once upon a time, we had a leader who led us to victory against the odds, with more to come. Then a tragedy happened. But the leader was too great to die, we know that (somehow).
The leader must be sleeping, somewhere, waiting. Someday they will come back. The good times will come again, and everything since reduced to a bad dream, a footnote in a golden age.
• Terminus — In Latin: "boundary stone." Sooner or later everything ends. Every country has its border, every life its final day (unless they're sleeping under a mountain, naturally). The Romans were bright enough to turn this into a god. It's the basis of every tragedy (everyone reaches their limits) and every sense of relief (this will eventually end)
The original name of Atlanta was Terminus, and in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Terminus is a planet that serves as the final refuge of humanity's knowledge in the face of a dark age. For awhile, anyway.
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