Álvaro Vasconcelos - Memórias em Tempo de Amnésia - Volume III

If we consider only the world of news, we are tempted to agree with apocalyptic prophecies about the end of democracy and even humanity, at the hands of the brutality of predators who hold power, nuclear holocaust, artificial intelligence, climate destruction, those who make immigrants—that is, all of us—the enemy and plunge the world into new imperial wars.

In the third volume of his trilogy *Memoirs in a Time of Amnesia*, Álvaro Vasconcelos asks himself—and us—if the main risk that humanity faces is not that of ceasing to think, contaminated by the virus of the banality of evil, manipulated by algorithms and artificial intelligence in the hands of a techno-financial oligarchy at the service of brutalism. To find the antidote, Álvaro Vasconcelos travels through the world he lived in during the years following April 25th, from Lisbon to Beijing, passing through Cairo, Jerusalem, Moscow, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and so many other corners, ending with his return to Beira, Mozambique. He alerts us to the terror of forgetting fascism, the thousand suns that destroyed Hiroshima, and the banality of colonial evil.

A pilgrimage through the memory of events, great and small, that allowed the April Revolution to triumph and transform into a regime of freedom; of many words, spoken in the languages ​​and accents of the world, like those of Gorbachev on a balcony in Belém, illuminating the path to stop the catastrophe. This journey is also that of an author marveling at cinema and how it helps us think about our common humanity.