When, a few days ago, in December 2023, a crazed murderer attacked students of the oldest Czech university and then began frantically shooting from the roof of an old building into a Christmas crowd, I had the strange feeling that I experienced the first ten minutes of the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Everyone's first reaction to traumatic reality is different. My head reacts for the first few seconds with rejection or denial: There must be other explanation. Isn't that some kind of sick joke?
And then comes the next reaction: I don't feel anything at all. I tell myself that I should be scared or sad, but instead I act like a machine. Many people feel the same way. Only the rejection period can vary from a few seconds to several years. The human brain and its system of working with reality and trauma is simply a mysterious mechanism that we still don't fully understand.
A small country of my origin (the Czech Republic) where I come from experienced its first school shooting in history. The reaction was the same as when this first happened in America. Nationwide consternation. No, it's really not normal to get used to the fact that someone kills their classmates and professors with an assault rifle.
What is normal, on the other hand, is a lot of traumatic reactions of people who are not connected to the event in any way. Every mass murder is somehow connected to the desire to provoke mass trauma. Whoever is planning it and for whatever motives. Trauma is a goal, not a circumstance or byproduct.
One Czech publicist recently recalled how one of his classmates went to a Greek exam and used the name of the guy who set the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus on fire to demonstrate his knowledge. The professor kicked him out.
When Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the people of Ephesus were forbidden by law to pronounce his name, orally or in written, lest he be glorified as he had planned. That Greek law went down in history as the "damnatio memoriae." An Ephesus court sentenced the arsonist to expunge his name and face from all documents. From then on, his name was not allowed to be pronounced under penalty of death. And students of classical Greek in Prague know that any orthodox Greek professor will kick you out of the exam when you say that name, because the sentence still stands, we just don’t enforce it anymore.
Damnatio is in fact a much older principle and its traces lead back to the ancient Egyptians (the punishment of the curse of oblivion was pronounced even on the famous pharaoh Akhenaten and the ruler Hatshepsut), Damnatio also served the Hittites and other famous civilizations. In short, for as long as the world has been standing, there have always been people with disturbed mental patterns who have longed to achieve glory through destruction and murder. And our civilization and culture have always tried to come to terms with them.
Damnatio was widely used, even in totalitarian states, for political, not moral, purposes. It took on completely bizarre proportions during communism. Various regime bigwigs who themselves became victims of purges Stalin had to laboriously erase from photographs. Hundreds of such photos have been preserved. The most famous photo is probably the one on the embankment in Moscow, where in the original, comrades Stalin and Yezhov are walking together, while in the late photo, instead of the executed Yezhov, there is only a river embankment wall next to Stalin. We Czechs had a similar case: the first communist president had his fellow party member and friend Klementis erased from history. On the day of the communist coup, Klementis lent him a cap for a speech in the freezing February cold, and then he was executed and airbrushed out of all the photographs. Just the cap on Gottwald’s head wan left behind. Well, Soviet culture.
I would probably have failed the Greek exam too, the name of the arsonist has already taken root, and unfortunately, I can also remember the face of comrade Yezhov.
Damnatio memoriae is neither ideological, nor good nor evil. It protects or distorts society. It represents a consensual or imposed form of prevention of the so-called "Mere exposure effect". A mere exposure effect is something what all propagandists know. This effect was scientifically proved in the 1960s by the American psychologist Robert Zajonc. The discovery says that the more you expose a person to one piece of information, the more acceptable and digestible it seems. Flat Earth? Why no, just say it, repeat, say it again. Let others repeat. Sing it as a song. Put it in the movie dialogue. The number of mentions counts, regardless of context.
When the horror of the first day of the murder of innocent students and professors settled in the Czech Republic, decisions began to be made about the next attitude of the media and politicians and influencers. At that moment, the American inspiration appeared. Unfortunately, the worst of American values has come. The attention economy, the hunt for the biography and details of the attacker and the victims, the portioned voyeurism, the grill on the stage, the desire for profit and five seconds of glory disguised as "freedom of speech" and "the need to inform". Amplification of trauma for the sake of fame and money. Sounds familiar?
After a pause, the Czech media split into two camps. The first one, trauma dealers, arose from the combination of the pro-Russian disinformation scene and the media, which distribute the damaged pseudo-conservative narrative of American Republicans and libertarians in the Czech Republic. "You need to know what the murderer was thinking."
The second camp, without exception, was represented by media willing to fight for endangered Czech democracy, which, like the American one, has been subverted since 2013 by propaganda and algorithms. The mentioned media understands the cultural demand for damnatio as the prevention of further terror and recognizes that the media fame of the murderer would surely soon find a sick imitator.
While we're about Damnatio memoriae violations, we shouldn't miss an important piece of the puzzle. In 1995, America's leading media received a lengthy 35,000-word essay protesting industrial society, arguing that modern technology deprived man of his freedom and ability to make and organize freely. The text also argued extensively and very intelligently why the modern left culturally threatens the foundations of society. The essay was titled "Industrial Society and Its Future," and the author demanded that if the essay were published in one of America's leading media outlets, it would put an end to the long series of bombings that had made busy both the American public and the FBI for 20 years. U.S. Attorney Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh agreed to the essay published in the Washington Post. The result was surprisingly the arrest of the attacker because the author was America's first domestic terrorist, Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. His brother David recognized Ted´s syntax and ideas in the text. The damnatio violation yielded results.
But two decades and a few election cycles later, a Norwegian named Anders Breivik took a liking to Kaczynski's manifesto and left behind a similar document. Only he replaced the word leftists with the word neo-Marxists. Breivik himself admitted that Kaczynski inspired him.
And the story goes on. Breivik's document inspired the 2019 Manifesto, where you can easily replace the word neo-Marxists with the words Muslims and cultural Marxists. One would almost say “woke” because the style is so similar. (I know that because of brilliant article by excellent Greg Olear named Dark Enlightenment: The Cathedral and the Red Ceasar )
Brenton Tarrant, an Australian who traveled to Poland to attend a meeting of the "Knights Templar", an extremist group adhering to the tradition of killing Muslims in the Middle Ages, published his manifesto called The Great Replacement on the 8chan platform and murdered several dozen people on a live camera in Christchurch, Australia. Tarrant wrote admiringly about Breivik and his ideas and "chivalry." But Breivik sent his manifesto "only" to 8,000 hard-earned email addresses. This was the time "before Peter Thiel and Big Data". Tarrant on the other hand became a global star.
No wolf is so lonely that no one wants to join him or imitate him. We live in a time of global impulses, marketing nudges, artificially squeezed emotions for sale. A spectacular murder is a meme of sorts – a highly infectious information event.
The Russian revolutionary Bakunin said that destruction is just another form of art: "The passion for destruction is also a creative power." In the case of the Russians, this is not at all surprising to us, Eastern Europeans, because, unlike the naïve Western states, we have had a rather tragic experience with them, associated with cultural colonization, torture, executions and targeted destruction of our own culture and memory for many decades. Their early political strategy of destruction as a political program that brings about social and mental change by the mere act of random murder well described Anna Geifman in her book, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917.
There is no rational reason to publicly promote the names of people who have chosen this kind of fame as their reward and goal. Indeed, this unwritten policy applied to other types of foreign terrorist acts for years under the diplomatic guidance, and it tends to be quite effective. If mass murder is also to cause trauma that causes people to make poor decisions and to create an organized series of future epigones, so let them be forgotten.
I remember how shocked the American correspondents in Prague were that the Czech police did not give the full name of the murderer and only kept his initials. This has been the custom in many European countries for a long time, and it is not just a matter of damnatio, but of the broader security and ethical context of all possible reasons. To my great surprise, even after two days, when everyone had to compulsively express themselves about anything related to the murders, the buzz on Czech networks almost died down and Czech society spontaneously and consensualy adopted the Greek approach. The murderer will be forgotten. His name and photo are no longer circulating anywhere, no one is sharing him, no one is talking about him. The power he has gained over our fears and our brains is gradually weakening.
Perhaps the most powerful symbol of organized oblivion is the famous final scene from the British film Merlin starring Sam Neil. "We don't want to defeat you, Mab, we're going to forget you. You no longer have power over us." This is what Merlin says, and then the people turn their backs on Mab and do not respond to her words. This will fulfill what Mab has fought against all her life, for which she committed all her crimes. As soon as it disappears from human memory, the power it had over people also disappears.
If only we could apply damnatio memoriae to all aspiring or actual terrorists, narcissistic psychopaths, dictators, and even to the social networks themselves, milking us like cows for the worst emotional voyeurism. The very business model of social networks provides a multiplication of the worst that the human soul contains, making it a new information authority, a norm that corrodes everything that makes our civilization exceptional.
We will forget you, Mab.
Damnatio Memoriae