A picture paints a thousand words. A famous photograph was taken of Joseph Stalin’s visit to the White Sea Canal sometime between 1936 and 1938. The small man to Stalin’s left was the “poison dwarf” Nikolai Yezhov, the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs and the man responsible for executing the Great Purge in which 700,000 to 1,700,000 citizens – the true number will never be known – were executed and many times more sent to labour camps, a period of time called “Yezhovshchina” – “the Yezhov Era”. Yezhov, himself, was to fall victim to the Great Purge and was “erased” from history as shown in a later publication of the same photograph on the right.
Damnatio Memoriae is a Latin phrase which means “damnation of memory” in which a judgment could be passed by the ancient Roman Senate that a person must not be remembered. As the famous Yezhov photograph attests, the practice of erasing from memory certain people or events survives to this day. The names of Hosni Mubarak and his wife Suzanne have been erased from all Egyptian monuments. Pictures of French President Francois Hollande’s ex-wife were deleted from the official website of the Elysee after their divorce.
A small Asian nation with claims to 1st World status too has its own Damnatio Memoriae shown by the recent banning of “To Singapore, With Love”, a film about Singaporeans exiled from their homeland. Perhaps, the film is deemed not to convey the prescribed “realism”. Obviously certain aspects of history are too dangerous for well educated citizens to discern and interpret and are best erased from memory.
Of course, this does not extend merely to the banning of a film. In recent discussions of the founding of the nation, the state-directed media conveniently “forgot” the contributions of Albert Winsemius or that Singapore was already a thriving port in a valuable strategic location before independence, something which was not due to the governing regime. Of course, the internet which the leader of the regime has sought to disparage renders Damnatio Memoriae ineffectual.
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past” – George Orwell, 1984
Chris K
*Chris K holds a senior position in a global financial centre bigger than Singapore. He writes mostly on economic and financial matters to highlight misconceptions of economic policy in Singapore.