Protest, intervene, remove! Media representations and public reception of the international statue wars in Czechia

This article provides a case study examining the media coverage and public reception of the phenomenon of reparative statue wars, which re-emerged after the death of George Floyd through the Black Lives Matter movement. It investigates the mainstream Czech online daily iDnes.cz, and the articles mainly focused on de-commemorative actions in the United Kingdom and the Americas. First, it reads the texts to trace the framing of reparative histories, decolonization, and social injustice. Second, it scrutinizes photographs, revealing five basic visual frames that establish different dynamics between a viewer, depicted event, and monument. Finally, it analyzes discussions taking place in the comment section. It detects prominent historical analogies that readers draw between the current de-commemorative movement and the Czech(oslovak) modern past of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These comments are conceptualized as lay theories of history through which the national discourse of the so-called “repetitive history” meets and opposes the new transnational mnemonic regime of decoloniality.