Lance Armstrong

Description

Interview Rob van der Laarse with radio presenter Jurgen van den Berg on the decision of UCI president Pat McQuaid to disremember Lance Armstrong from sport history. Did such a policiy of forgetting ever succeed in history? Van der Laarse speaks of a classic case of damnatio memoriae going back to Roman antiquity, and mentions other cases from Hugo de Groot in the Netherlands to the German WWII policy of spatial and ethnic cleansing in West Poland (Warthegau) where complete populations and landscapes are faded out of history, and post 1989 renamings of heroes and street signs. Yet, with few exceptions, such policies of silencing are never succesfull, except some cases of complete totalitarian control of mass media.