SOLOMON HUGHES asks whether Labour ‘engaging with decision-makers’ with scandalous records of fleecing the public is really in our interests
Latest editorial
Boris Johnson: a candidate for ‘damnatio memoriae?’
STEPHEN ARNELL looks at the historical practice of erasing the memory of reviled political leaders from ancient Rome to modern Westminster
A statue of Boris Johnson covered in oil
For 80 years, survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings have pleaded “never again,” for anyone. But are we listening, asks Linda Pentz Gunter
Indian communist leader MA Baby considers the chilling escalation of violence against minorities and increasing impunity for their attackers under the Modi regime
by Dr David Lowry, Institute for Resource and Security Studies
This strike is about pay and conditions, says CAMERON HARRISON – but it also shows workers have the power to disrupt the mightiest war machine on Earth
WITH his wretched, inept, self-serving and typically duplicitous performance at the Covid inquiry, many would like to forget disgraced former Prime Minister Boris Johnson ever existed.
If we look back through history, we can see many examples when unsavoury characters (and some blameless) were totally erased from the public record, in terms of both writings and physical memorials.
This removal came to be known by the Latin phrase coined in a German academic thesis in 1689 as “damnatio memoriae” meaning “condemnation of memory.”
Forget-me-not
Back in the bad old days of the Roman empire (and more recently in the former USSR, China, North Korea, and previous Warsaw Pact countries), those who were thought to have disgraced the honour of the state — or were inconvenient reminders of how the present occupants got there — were swiftly expunged from official memory.
After his fall and execution in AD 31, the emperor Tiberius’s “Partner of my Labours,” the super-ambitious Praetorian Prefect Sejanus became a non-person, and to make sure of this, his former wife and their children, plus his extended family and supporters were also rubbed out. A scene memorably depicted in the classic 1976 BBC series I, Claudius.
More from this author
While Spode quit politics after inheriting an earldom, Farage combines MP duties with selling columns, gin, and even video messages — proving reality produces more shameless characters than PG Wodehouse imagined, writes STEPHEN ARNELL
The fallout from the Kneecap and Bob Vylan performances at Glastonbury raises questions about the suitability of senior BBC management for their roles, says STEPHEN ARNELL
With the news of massive pay rises for senior management while content spend dives STEPHEN ARNELL wonders when will someone call out the greed of these ‘public service’ executives
As Trump targets universities while Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem redefines habeas corpus as presidential deportation power, STEPHEN ARNELL traces how John Scopes’s optimism about academic freedom’s triumph now seems tragically premature
