Six Ways to Rewrite History III: Damnatio Demoriae
Six Ways to Rewrite History III: Damnatio Demoriae
Condemn what you don't like.
Like if you want using the keys below; only I can see who you are.
Another riff on the Nicole James article from October 2023.
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
Eric Blair/George Orwell
A Horrible Practice with a Very Old Origin
Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase for “condemnation of memory,” meaning that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. Several stones bear the chiseled name of a ruler of a Sumerian rival city, dating back to the 3rd Millennium BC Mesopotamia. In ancient Egypt, a pharaoh tried to have the name of one god removed, and ended up having his name removed after his death. The Greeks removed Timotheus’ name from the naval catalog after his conviction for treason. The Macedonians smashed a memorial tablet to Aristotle. Not to be outdone, the Romans routinely eradicated (or tried to) the names of unpopular emperors and consuls. The impossibility of actually erasing the memory of an emperor has led scholars to conclude that this was not actually the goal of damnatio in the ancient world. Instead, they understand damnatio:
…not so much as an attempt to obliterate memory entirely as to transform honorific commemoration into a form of visible denigration. That is: the power of an act of damnatio relies, at least in part, on the viewer of a monument being able to supplement the gaps in an inscription with their own knowledge of what those gaps had once contained, and the reasons why the text had been removed.
Polly Low, Remembering, Forgetting, and Rewriting the Past
As an ancient practice, there have been many, many instances of this defacement. In the Americas, Spanish authorities destroyed “idols” that were, in fact, images of pre-Columbian kings and their deeds.
Robert the Bruce, Slaver?
A newer example of damnatio memoriae occurred in June 2020, when, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, a statue of Robert the Bruce in Bannockburn, Scotland, was spray painted with graffiti, calling Bruce a "racist king." These clever kids did not know that there was no slave trade in Scotland until after Bruce’s death in 1329. After this incident, Neil Oliver, a Scottish historian, remarked in the National Scot,
“If we’re already making token gestures like taking down Fawlty Towers and Gone With The Wind, then I do worry and wonder and I am equally anxious about the genuine motivation—is this about addressing racism and the existence of slavery in our world community, or is it simply an attempt by anarchists, communists, to eat into the built fabric of Britain and thereby to bring down British society?”
Black George Washington, Female Pope?
Not to be outdone, Google’s (in)famous supposed "artificial intelligence" tool Gemini image creator runout in March 2024 could not produce a picture of a white male…period—damnatio memoriae by default. It couldn't make a plausible or near-authentic picture of George Washington (you got black or brown), nor Abraham Lincoln (the same), nor a single pope (either female or non-white). It couldn’t even retrieve a historical image of Dwight Eisenhower. The press rightly derided this experiment in either DEI or political correctness, leading Alphabet to shut down Gemini for a time. However, this somewhat sadly amusing incident showed what happens when politics overrides sense. It also showed the ideological leanings of the programmers. Finally, that “AI” is a misnomer; it’s a sophisticated computer application that can only do what its creator tells it to do. How well it can learn can only depend on what its creator tells it to learn.
The Peculiar Case of the Disappearing Commissar
In The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia, David King carefully documented how Stalin’s Russia routinely altered photos to remove those who fell out of favor from the presence in shots of those who were in favor. King was a British graphic designer, design historian, and writer, who assembled one of the largest collections of Soviet graphics and photographs before his death in 2014. While he was a Trotskyite, he took great pains in his book to show that Russia took great pains to deface much of their past to make their present look better.
No matter what else you call it, damnatio memoriae is recasting the past.
Simple defacement, of course, can't change everything, but since it's been going on since the beginning of writing, how much of our past has simply disappeared because someone didn't like it?
Why the Samurai Lost Japan: A Study Of Miscalculation and Folly
Why the Samurai Lost Japan is many things, chief among them is a failure analysis. Japan lost its bid at resource autarky because it miscalculated its chances against the entire world. But what did not happen, and what many “scholars” insist must be true, was that Japan surrendered on its own.
It’s not a quibble, because Japan was told to surrender by their Emperor, who by August 1945 had had enough. This postwar defacement of the terminal role of the Emperor, while it made Japan seem less determined to fight to the death than they really were, has caused unending trouble with postwar perceptions. Available from your favorite bookseller or from us if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
Antietam Reconsidered
Leviathan Awakening
And Finally...
On 31 August:
1897: Ernest Frederick McIntyre Bickel/Fredric March is born in Racine, Wisconsin. March’s ability to play any role, from Jekyll and Hyde to a larcenous Old West banker in Hombre to an evangelizing lawyer in Inherit the Wind, to a banker turned WWII veteran turned banker again in Best Years of Our Lives, earned him two Academy Awards and two Tony awards in his long career.
1994: Russia announces its withdrawal from Eastern Germany and Baltic states. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the move seemed anticlimactic, but after nearly fifty years of occupation was not that easy to walk away from. The process, painful and expensive, would take almost another two years.
And today is NATIONAL MATCHMAKER DAY. While in these days of “swipe left/right” and other electronic tools the existence of matchmakers might seem anachronistic, the business of finding love is still alive and well, apparently. Whatever happened to “hey, baby, wanna get together?” Yeah, that never worked for me, either.