Every thug, every invader, every dictator knows smashing culture goes hand in hand with butchering people.
And this is exactly what ISIS is now doing. Along with their mass killings, their abductions and rapes, their beheadings, their torching people alive, their unspeakably cruel rampage now extends to history and culture.
Their latest stomach-churning video depicts a wrecking crew of ISIS maniacs in an antiquities museum in Mosul, Iraq. Wielding sledgehammers, the video shows these culture-killers toppling ancient statues from museum pedestals, then smashing them with repeated blows of their sledgehammers. The statues they could not pound to rubble and dust with their hammers they destroyed by using power drills. At an archaeological site near the museum, the destroyers worked as energetically as demons to drill and smash into chunks a massive, magnificent Assyrian winged-bull deity that is 3,000 years old.
Their ferocity against the stone artifacts is sickening to watch not just because it is such a senseless attack against a cultural heritage but because it is all too easy to imagine the same ferocity used against flesh-and-blood human beings.
An ISIS narrator on the video explains that the artifacts are false idols that must be smashed. Orders from God. Before their assault at the museum, the militants attacked the Mosul Public Library, where they removed books to be burned, then set off bombs, destroying thousands of books and rare manuscripts. They have also let loose their violent attacks against other libraries, mosques of the “heretics” and other “ungodly” works of ancient art.
Ironically, these vicious plunderers, these haters of all things civilized, are doing their dirty work in the “Cradle of Civilization,” the ancient area near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Throughout history, there has always been a thin line between civilization and barbarity, between lightness and dark, between enlightened tolerance and blind intolerance. It’s astonishing how many worldwide artifacts have lasted, considering how many waves of barbarians have smashed their way through their plundering invasions. Hitler’s regime hosted book-burnings and confiscated or destroyed what was considered decadent, degenerate works of modern art. In Cambodia, Pol Pot’s sadistic Khmer Rouge members smashed every trace they could find of “corrupt” Western culture and even tortured and murdered anybody who wore eyeglasses (a sign to them of Western weakness). During their self-proclaimed Cultural Revolution, Maoist communists indulged in scavenger hunts, rooting out and destroying cultural artifacts they deemed politically unacceptable. The Taliban gleefully used ancient carved cliff Buddhas as target practice for their mortar rounds.
Those are just a few recent examples of tyrants trying to erase history and culture. Like all fools, they thought – they think – that by destroying artifacts they can simultaneously kill the ideas or beliefs that go along with the artifacts. Invaders have long known that to undermine their victims, it’s necessary to damage or destroy their culture, which is the foundation of identity. Once identify is undermined, the cultural-social bonds come undone.
Thus, to the victor the spoils. But not for long. Not forever. Those who think they can kill ideas they don’t like might as well try to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. All this hideous killing and culture-wrecking indicates just how insecure these destroyers are about their own belief systems. The more their doubts surface, the more insecure they become and the more they plunder, smash and kill. Their murderous self-righteousness stems from inner fears and quaking uncertainties. Do they really believe they will be welcomed with open arms into heaven for their heinous rampages in the here and now? It’s more likely dancing devils and flickering flames will greet them. People who are confident in themselves and their belief systems do not indulge in destructive rampages or violence against people or artifacts.
It’s only baseless egotistical monsters who actually think they can remake the entire world in their own image. To do so, they would have to kill everybody and destroy everything that is not “them,” which means, of course, they will end up with nothing at all except for the flimsy shadows of their own baseless egos, the empty outcome of their own ruthless behavior.
You’d think after thousands of years of history, fools would learn those lessons. But terrorists, daring to invoke “religion,” keep trying to conquer the world when they haven’t even mastered themselves. Thus, they try to underline their “causes” by plundering, smashing and killing, and that is why they always end up – fortunately – causing their own destruction.
