The image sting: From Stalin's head to Mao's fantasy.

Damnatio memory, the punishment for memory, was called the ancient Romans. The statues were crushed and damaged, the busts broke, the epigraphs scratched, the images were wiped out on the fresco. It didn't work. Sometimes it caused different effects. It was the opposite of atheosis that struck emperors who had been taken to power. But one of them returned when his power was restored.

A wave of iconic fury against the monuments of the southern confederacy is dividing America, even more than it is currently. The statue of a broken and broken Sudist soldier is a strong image. It doesn't matter that he's been there before the municipality of Durham since 1927.

It brings to mind other images, age-old developments, revolutions, statues thrown down by the people's fury: The giant Stalin, beheaded in Budapest in 1956, Lenin, who was removed from the pedestals with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the scene of Saddam Hussein's statue that collapsed with the help of the American tank, which was broadcast live on CNN.

Comparisons speak a lot. But it should not be exaggerated. In fact, they are not yet coming down with popular anger, statues of generals, and personalities who fought on the wrong side in the civil war that ended in 1865. When removed, they do so above all to avoid exacerbating tensions. Checked monuments have already been removed in dozens. In many cases the proposal comes from local authorities, and envisions, not destruction, but departure or displacement. They do it at night, with police escorting workers, to avoid incidents.

For example, the transfer costs of the <x0ld Joe”, the statue of the confederate soldier in front of Gainesville municipality in Florida, took over the “Biia branch of the confederacy”. Last Saturday, the manifestations that ended up in tragedy in Charlotteville, with the killing neonastian car that got in front of the crowd, were pros and against the removal of a statue of General Lee from a park dedicated to black Emmacipation. The statue is still there.

I remember the time when it seemed like the statues of Mao in China would disappear. My friend Frane Barbier, a great journalist, came to see me when I was a correspondent in Beijing. Then he went to Sichuan and wrote that he had seen Mao's statue disappear in the night. When I arrived a short time later in Chongdu, I found that the statue of the Great Tymonier was still there. It's brilliant in sunlight. I asked, did you take him off and bring him back? They answered: No, we had sent him back.

There are those who say that the spread of the monuments and symbols of the confederacy occurred early in nine hundred, when civil war had already been forgotten, and finally, in a <x0 we breath of reconciliation” to enjoy a little bit of everyone, perhaps adding a street or a statue that puts together civil rights movement, with the figure of a South hero, racist and pro-slave. But it doesn't work, it's like setting fire to gunpowder, if you get a president who sets up on the same level, those who wave flags with swastika and those who conflict with racism.

Perhaps Trump will not fall by a rebellion against the statues. But he did. And his verbal acrobatics, the fact that one day says one thing, and the other day over the same argument, shows the difficulties he has to get out of trouble. Can't be thrown in battas, like what demonstrators should counter the statues of Washington and Jefferson, who had been slave owners.

I don't like it when we run on statues, symbols, different ways of interpreting history. It happens often all over the world. People continue to be killed for old stones, conflicting stories, even in Jerusalem or India. The memory you create and perpetuate conflict is a curse. Just as memory curse can result in inefficient, counterproductive, or worse, ridiculous. But when you have to, you have to. / La Repubblica-bota.al/