War on Civilization
Islamic State seeks to obliterate
humanity’s legacies.
From the Wall Street Journal
Islamic State has turned from
beheading hostages to waging war on the world’s cultural heritage. Last week
the jihadist would-be caliphate posted a five-minute video of its members
destroying statues in the Mosul museum with sledgehammers and power tools. This
week its fanatics bulldozed the remains of the 3,000-year-old city of Nimrud.
In response the Iraqi government
called for an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council, and
Irina Bokova, Unesco’s secretary-general, said the “deliberate destruction of
cultural heritage constitutes a war crime.”
Nimrud was capital of the Neo-Assyrian
empire in late 9th century B.C. and site of some of the earliest and most
accomplished monumental architecture and sculpture. From an archaeological
standpoint, Nimrud and the region generally have been a gold mine for
understanding the ancient Near East and thus the birth of civilization. The
Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest epic poem and ancestor of “The Iliad,” “The
Odyssey,” “Paradise Lost” and much else, was discovered at nearby Nineveh in
the 19th century.
In its religiously motivated nihilism,
Islamic State’s destruction echoes the Taliban’s desecration of the Bamiyan
Buddha statues in Afghanistan in 2001. Though nominally about purging
“idolatry,” the destruction of non-Islamic cultural heritage aims to eradicate
all traces of civilization before Muhammad by pulverizing its artifacts. With
the region and its peoples severed from all contact with their history,
identity and inherited traditions, Islamic State will have a tabula rasa on
which to inscribe its medieval sectarianism.
It
may seem idle to bewail the destruction of cultural heritage in the face of
Islamic State’s ritualized, public murder of innocents—journalists, aid
workers, adherents to different faiths. Human life needs protecting from
Islamist killers above all. But mankind’s cultural heritage connects us to the
past and thus enriches the present and future. Islamic State’s eagerness to
broadcast its war on art and history is further proof that it must be urgently
confronted and destroyed.
From the Survival Blog
In an amazing display of
ignorant stupidity, Islamic State fighters are looting and bulldozing the
Assyrian city of Nimrud. Thousands of years of precious archaeological
treasures are being pillaged and destroyed. Everyone recognizes that the
history of humans seldom aligns itself with our current thinking, whether
religious or philosophical, but we also recognize that it is “our” history. To
deny and destroy it is the pinnacle of ignorance.
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