Damnatio Memoriae

Regular readers of my column will have observed my general aversion to cancel culture and the obliteration of memory. In TheArticle I have regularly inveighed against attempts to erase history, citing heinous examples, such as the Spanish conquistadors, a small group of heavily outnumbered activists, who exerted sufficient control to eradicate a nation’s history, abolish its memories and traditions in order to sabotage its morale, then assassinate the opposing chief, confiscate the nation’s wealth and enslave the entire population.

Over recent years, for example, it would seem that some organised groups have been expending considerable effort and energy on toppling, or trying to topple, ‎monuments to long-dead, if controversial, figures of the past. Such include Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford, the Confederate General Robert E. Lee in the US, or the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol and its subsequent dumping in the harbour.

In the case of Rhodes, such gestures appear doubly pointless, or at best paradoxical. The would-be revisionists are not only refighting ‎old battles, long since won or lost, but were, themselves, in some cases, actual beneficiaries of the internationally prestigious Oxford scholarships, which Rhodes himself had originally both funded and founded. If the statue goes, do the scholarships go with it?

Much as one might prefer to dismiss such apparent vandalism as a modern aberration, there is in fact a deep rooted psychological desire, manifest throughout the centuries, to eradicate the symbols of supposed opponents, however irrelevant that might seem to prevailing contemporary conditions.

The Pharaoh Rameses II was routinely accused of replacing the cartouches of previous rulers of Egypt with his own, while the first Emperor of unified China, Qin Shi Huang, in his ambitious endeavour to redefine space and restart time, according to his own parameters, set about burning all the books of previous Chinese philosophers and historians. The future of China would be a product of his exclusive vision, or so he intended.

During the heyday of the Roman Empire, bad emperors — Caligula and Nero spring to mind — were subject to the sanction of Damnatio Memoriae, where all references and evidence of existence were officially purged. In contrast, good emperors, such as Augustus and Vespasian, received the significant bonus of deification by the worthies of the Roman Senate.

Meanwhile, during the thousand-year hegemony of the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine Empire, movements arose to annihilate all visual icons of Christ and the saints. Naturally enough, they were known as iconoclasts, or the destructors of icons. One Emperor who resisted the iconoclasts was Alexius Comnenus (1056-1118), also noted in The Alexiad, the biography by his daughter Anna Comnena, as an enthusiastic chess-player.

The suppression of memory goes hand in hand alongside the destruction of symbols, and, in parallel, Islamic conquest was notoriously hostile to images of human, divine or animal life. The followers of The Prophet famously preferred to decorate their places of worship with holy text or abstract illustration. In such cases the imperative towards abstraction was propelled by the ancient Mosaic injunction, prohibiting the worship of graven images.

Just over half a century or so after the Byzantine Empire itself fell to Islam (with the Turkish Sultan Mehmet II Al Fatih, breaching the walls of Constantinople in 1453, using giant artillery created by Urban, the Transylvanian Christian arms designer), the most celebrated Spanish military adventurer, Hernan Cortes, on the other side of the world, conquered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. In August 1521, that quintessential Conquistador installed himself as governor of the Aztec Imperial capital. Subsequently, in spite of the new Spanish rulers being hugely outnumbered by the Aztec population, Cortes instigated a process of proconsular colonial restructuring, which forcibly imposed Spanish institutions on the indigenous inhabitants. A key element of the Spanish strategy involved the deliberate obliteration of the vast majority of pre-conquest Nahua language documents.

Cortes’ actions, of course, had profound implications for the collective memory of all native societies across the whole of Mesoamerica. This annihilation of Aztec religious, historical and practical records was specifically designed to remould the character of the entire enormous conquered territory, thereby robbing the original inhabitants of any recollection of their alternative and genuine past.

Throughout England, in the years immediately following the extensive Spanish conquests in the New World, the reforms of Henry VIII resulted in the immolation of relics, books, architecture, art and even vestments associated with the recently demonised Pope in Rome.

In parallel, across Europe, such antipathy towards Catholic images reached a peak with the rise of Protestantism and Puritanism in the sixteenth century. Indeed, it may well be that the efflorescence ‎of Dutch landscape painting in the seventeenth century was a subconscious effort to replace the Catholic based art which had been annihilated by the godly.

Perhaps the surreal nadir of destruction was achieved during the riots instigated by fanatical Puritans in Riga 1524, when a violent crowd uprooted a statue of The Virgin Mary and hurled it into a nearby river. Being made of wood, the statue naturally floated, so the godly, drawing the appropriate logical conclusions, hauled it back from the roaring torrent, in order to dry it out and then burn it as a witch!

I see the same busy impetus in the arguments over the attempts to ban singing of Land of Hope and Glory at the Last Night of the Proms. A further topical casus belli centres around the relocation of the bust of Sir Hans Sloane within the British Museum, from its more prominent public plinth, to an exhibit on slavery. And this, in spite of the inconvenient truth that Sloane’s then unique collection of 71,000 items was the founding bequest of the British Museum and also a significant contribution to the later Natural History Museum. I trust that the Isle of Lewis chessmen will not now be dragged from the safety of their British Museum cabinets and incinerated, on the grounds that the Vikings, who made them, were very naughty boys, prone to pillage, looting and the periodic enslavement of their victims.

Trying to excise history would find a chess parallel in the obliteration of the brilliant games of Paul Morphy, because he supported the Confederate cause in the US Civil War, in the suppression of Alekhine’s masterpieces, as a result of his participation in Nazi-organised chess tournaments, or consigning the entire Soviet school of chess to the dustbin of history, as a consequence of their Grandmasters’ overt support for Stalin.

Airbrushing rivals out of history was, of course, a Soviet speciality, and it was amusing to observe the way in which official photos of Stalin gradually evolved to progressively eliminate unwanted former colleagues. But Damnatio Memoriae cuts both ways. After achieving independence, Ukraine demolished 1,320 statues of Lenin, a clear indication of the subtle nuances and varying takes at different times on historical ovation or censure. Do we deplore the fall of Colston, yet applaud that of Lenin, or vice versa? Or are both misguided? As the old Soviet joke, very popular with my Russian chess playing friends went: “under capitalism man exploits man, but under communism it is exactly the other way round.”

Professor Howard Zinn of Boston University adds, “History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history —while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance — might make you sceptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth.”

For “government” I would substitute: anybody claiming superior knowledge, insight or authority, in any field, be it environmental science, climatology, museum management, national broadcasting and even chess. As Voltaire once said, “dare to think for yourself.”

I do trust that our modern iconoclasts, and would-be obliterators of memory, realise what dubious intellectual company they are keeping, when striving so determinedly to expunge the ancient symbols, reminders and memorial relics of their own history — and ours. No amount of toppling of statues, sequestration of busts, or suppression of popular songs, can succeed in righting the injustices of the past. Surely it is better to embrace history, learn from all its variegated angles and multifarious refractions, and strive to do better in the future, rather than try to cancel the past and pretend that it never existed.

There is, however, an exception, where I would quite willingly rewrite history, and in this case there are impeccable precedents. The chief precursor would be the post mortem treatment of Jimmy Savile, the notorious paedophile and ubiquitous sex offender, who was routinely stripped of honours and accolades, extending even to the destruction of his elaborate funerary monument. As has been reported extensively, not least in The Article, Brian Eley has been exposed mercilessly as the Jimmy Savile of chess (see following two articles, from November 8 and December 3 last year.)

I therefore here officially and formally propose that Eley now be stripped of his 1972 British championship title and that the two joint second prize winners, Dr Jonathan Penrose and myself, be retrospectively declared champions for that year. That would permit the late Dr Penrose to have been champion eleven times, an absolute record, while the author of this column could at least claim a second title win.

I shall henceforth now rigorously apply this correction, and if The English Chess Federation wisely wish to avoid the opprobrium of a known pederast, hunted for years by Interpol, having his name besmirching the British Championship trophy, I suggest that they disqualify Eley retrospectively, correct the names on the cup and issue a revisionary press release.

Keene vs. Eley (1977)

Keene vs. Eley (1964)

The latter game finished with a strong line to enforce a finish: after 40… Kf6

41. e7!! Kf7 42. Ng5+ Kg8 43. Re6! Rc7 44. Rd6 Bb5 45. Ree6 Rcc8

41. Rxg6+!! 1-0

Black resigned, because mate must follow after 47… hxg6 (47… Kh8?? 48. Nf7 checkmate) 48. Rxg6+ Kh8 49. Nf7+ Kh7 50. Rg7 checkmate.

Raymond Keene’s latest book “Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus”, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from  Blackwell’s . His 206th book, Chess in the Year of the King, with a foreword by The Article contributor Patrick Heren, and written in collaboration with former Reuters chess correspondent, Adam Black, is in preparation. It will be published later this year.  

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