Robinson successfully defended his school from closure, fought for the unification of the teaching unions, mentored future trade union leaders and transformed teaching at the Marx Memorial Library, writes JOHN FOSTER
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
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From Gaza protest bans to proscribing Palestine Action, political elites are showing a crisis of confidence as they abandon Roy Jenkins’s apologetic approach for Suella Braverman’s aggressive ‘hate march’ rhetoric, writes PAUL DONOVAN
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The summer of 1950 saw Labour abandon further nationalisation while escalating Korean War spending from £2.3m to £4.7m, as the government meekly accepted capitalism’s licence and became Washington’s yes-man, writes JOHN ELLISON
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.
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