The student campaign to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College at Oxford University failed. One may speculate about the true reasons behind the staunch resistance by this institution against the students’ protest. In the official defence of this choice, something no one can object to was called upon: freedom of speech. Both Chris Patten and Mary Beard argued in favour of keeping the statue because removing statues of individuals with whose views one disagrees is contrary to freedom of speech and historical accuracy.

However, there is nothing free and open about the contribution of these statues to our discourse on British History. In fact, monuments make us forget more than they help us remember. By prompting some thoughts, statues suppress others, thus promoting an ideological view of the past. Seeing figurative public art every day subtly manipulates our minds.

Surely, I hear you say, this is preposterous! Statues are not a means of mind control.

Perhaps not, but consider the following. Psychologists have established the existence of a phenomenon known as socially-shared retrieval-induced forgetting (hereafter, SS-RIF). Let me explain first how retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) works in the lab before describing how it can be socially shared in the wild, so to speak.