Time & Perspective Quote by Helen Dunmore

“Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present” lands with the quiet authority of a poet who knows how violence can be done with soft hands. Dunmore doesn’t say “forget” or even “ignore.” She chooses “obliterate,” a word that implies deliberate erasure: records burned, names scrubbed, stories rewritten until the gaps look natural. The sentence is structured like a moral diagnosis. The harm isn’t postponed to some abstract future; it’s immediate, medical, happening now.

The subtext is political without needing slogans. Dunmore is pointing at the way power manages discomfort: if the past contains atrocities, theft, or shame, the easiest solution is to delete the evidence and call it “moving on.” But a present built on denial becomes brittle. Without an honest archive, we can’t name what’s recurring, can’t recognize who has been harmed, can’t locate responsibility. Erasure doesn’t create peace; it creates confusion, and confusion is fertile ground for repeat offenses.

As a poet, Dunmore also understands memory as a living ecosystem, not a museum. The past isn’t inert; it’s the set of patterns and language we use to interpret our lives. Try to flatten it and you don’t get purity, you get amputation: families without origin stories, nations without accountability, individuals gaslit by official narratives that tell them their experience “wasn’t like that.”

The line works because it reframes “history wars” as present-tense injury. It’s not about reverence for the past. It’s about refusing to let the present be built on a lie.