Damnatio memoriae

Last weekend has been as interesting as it has been tiring. A three-day excursion to Donostia in the Basque country left me with the usual lack of sleep and slight excess of alcohol levels. It seems I am old enough to have noticed the first of the side effects of such abuses. My otherwise strong long-term memory attenuates. I am not talking about memory lapses regarding the previous night but slight long-term memory failures, resembling more a "slow disk access" (to speak like the geak I am supposed to be). To cut a long story short I cannot remember things, names of songs or writers, books or films or dates I would normally remember. The whole things is a bit disturbing but gets resolved with a bit of sleep and a little bigger effort to keep the disks running.

Some names though, cannot be easilly forgotten. Augusto Pinochet's is one of these names. It is funny that my trip with its consequent memory lapses and the dictator's death coincided. And although my initial thought was "at last!" I think it would be better for me and probably for the rest of the world if Pinochet's name did not ring any bell anymore, if it had retreated at the back rooms of our collective memory, condemned by history to utter oblivion. The Romans used to force this oblivion as the worst punishment for men of state having failed them. The process involved taking their names out of the archives of history, bringing down their statues and destroying all road signs that carried a reference to them.

They called that Damnatio memoriae and it was considered the ultimate humiliation.

On the other hand, maybe what worked for the Romans, is not fit for our case. Probably because the Romans did not entirely lack the sense of duty as opposed to their people, as dear Augusto or his friends like Maggy Thatcher did and still do. I sincerely doubt that the fear of oblivion, the fact that he might not be remembered, would have been able to stop Pinochet from "dissapearing" thousands of his people or sending to swiss banks the millions he stole from the country he had sworn to protect and was supposed to be saving from the "communists". In that sense maybe it is better for us to vividly remember him than punishing him through forgetting his crimes, because even if history does not spontaneoulsy repeat itself it is actually us that let our errors repat themselves.
And in this case it will be probably wiser never to get any tired so that we forget the life and works of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.