Global War On Terror Ends
Topic: Iraq War

Democrats put end to global war on terror
By Toby Harnden in Washington Last Updated: 12:47am BST 10/04/2007


Does this mean we can now have a VGWOT Day like we had a VE and VJ Day? Not really

Democrats have banned the phrase "global war on terror" from the draft Pentagon budget, arguing that it is a propagandist term designed to boost President George W Bush's contention that the Iraq conflict was a war of necessity.

The term, coined by the Bush administration shortly after the September 11 attacks, soon entered the American political lexicon. In Pentagon documents, it has its own acronym - GWOT.

But Democrats on the House of Representatives' armed services committee, in an unconscious echo of Basil Fawlty's refrain of "Don't Mention the War!" in a Fawlty Towers episode "The Germans", has said that GWOT should be avoided.

What a concept! Just think how many lives we could have saved at the Normandy Invasion or the Storming of Iwo Jima if the Democratic Party of some 60 odd years ago had come up with this concept!

It beats "Cut and Run" or "Declare Victory and Leave" hollow. Just pretend there is no War and stop using the phrase that has been used to describe it thus far. Just erase the words from History

The Republic can now rest secure in the knowledge that the Global War On Terror has Ended and that the Security of the Nation is in the good hands of the more innovative thinking of the Democratic Party.

One question?

Has anyone Informed Al Qaeda and the other associated Jihadist Islamic factions?

I mean what a complication if they failed to hear that the Global War On Terror was over.

Doing some reasearch I have discovered this method of dealing with unpleasant situations has a long History, from antiquity upto today it is called:


Damnatio Memoriae

Damnatio memoriae is the Latin phrase literally meaning "damnation of memory", in the sense of removed from the remembrance. It was a form of dishonor that could be passed by the Roman Senate upon traitors or others who brought discredit to the Roman State.


Explanation
The sense of the expression Damnatio memoriae and of the sanction is to cancel every trace of the person from the life of Rome, as if he had never existed, in order to preserve the honour of the Urbs; in a city that stressed the social appearance, respectability and the pride of being a civis romanus as a fundamental requirement of the citizen, it was perhaps the severest punishment.


Practice
Its most visible practice was in the condemnation of unpopular Emperors upon their deaths. The Senate wanted to condemn the memory of Caligula, but Claudius prevented this. Nero was declared an enemy of the state, but then given an enormous funeral honoring him, thus his status is unclear. Similarly, the Roman senate condemned Domitian and Commodus. Shortly after Commodus' death, they restored the original name of the city of Rome and its institutions which had been renamed in Commodus' honour during his lifetime. Other notable examples are the damnatio memoriae of Geta by his brother Caracalla, and of Elagabalus.

Upon passage of the damnatio memoriae, the person's name was stricken from any rolls of honor on which he may have appeared - some of them were called memoriae. In the case of the Roman Emperors so condemned, their statues were destroyed, or recycled with the heads of their successors, and their name removed from public buildings.


Similar practices in other societies
It has been suggested that Person#Implications of the person, non-person debate be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

A modern example: A Soviet "unperson" vanishes: commissar Nikolai Yezhov retouched after falling from favor and executed in 1940.



The cartouches of the heretical 18th dynasty pharaoh Akhenaten were mutilated by his successors. Earlier in that same dynasty, Thutmose III carried out a similar attack on his step-mother Hatshepsut late in his sole reign. However, only engravings and statuary of her as a crowned king of Egypt were attacked. Anything depicting her as a queen was left unharmed (and the campaign ended after his son by a secondary queen was crowned co-regent), so this was not strictly speaking damnatio memoriae.[1] There is also some debate whether this defacement was Thutmose's doing at all, since most of the damage is estimated to have happened some 47 years into this reign.
Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus to become famous. The Ephesus leaders decided that his name should never be repeated again, under pain of death.
Marino Faliero, fifty-fifth Doge of Venice, was condemned to damnatio memoriae after a failed coup d'etat.
More modern examples of damnatio memoriae in actual practice was the removal of portraits, books, doctoring people out of pictures, and any other traces of Josef Stalin's opponents during the Great Purge. In a twist of fate, Stalin himself was edited out of some propaganda films when Khruschev became the leader of The Soviet Union.
A famous example of the concept of damnatio memoriae in modern usage is the "vaporization" of "unpersons" in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in the quote "He did not exist; he never existed".

Technorati Tag: Global War On Terror ***GWOT. ***Al Qaeda

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