Destruction of Iraq's historical treasures
the "Krystallnacht" of Bush's empire
Krystallnacht was a Nazi terror campaign in November 1938 against Jewish culture
in Germany. It literally means "Night of Broken Glass," and refers
to the countless broken windows of Jewish stores and synagogues all over Germany.
Krystallnacht was the transition point between mere harassment and repression
of the German Jewish minority by the Nazis, and the shift toward the early stages
of the Holocaust.
For the American "Fourth Reich," our Krystallnacht equivalent was the US allowing (helping?) the destruction
of priceless museums in Baghdad following the seizure of Iraq. This
is not only a loss to the Iraqi people - but an irreplaceable destruction of
part of the history of humanity.
www.ipsnews.net/new_nota.asp?idnews=27459
'Biggest Cultural Disaster Since 1258', Says Expert
Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Feb 15 (IPS) - One million books, 10 million documents and 14,000 archaeological
artifacts have been lost in the U.S.-led invasion and subsequent occupation
of Iraq -- the biggest cultural disaster since the descendants of Genghis Khan
destroyed Baghdad in 1258, Venezuelan writer Fernando Báez told IPS.
"U.S. and Polish soldiers are still stealing treasures today and selling
them across the borders with Jordan and Kuwait, where art merchants pay up to
57,000 dollars for a Sumerian tablet," said Báez, who was interviewed
during a brief visit to Caracas.
Destroying Babylon
By Dahr Jamail
Dahr Jamail's Iraqi Dispatches
Monday 17 January 2005
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/archives/dispatches/000171.php
The Guardian recently reported that "troops from
the US-led force in Iraq have caused widespread damage and severe contamination
to the remains of the ancient city of Babylon."
The ancient city, south of Baghdad, has been used by
U.S. and Polish forces as a military camp during the occupation, despite objections
from archaeologists.
A study conducted by archeological experts found cracks
and gaps where people had tried to gouge out the decorated bricks forming the
famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate, "2,600 year-old brick pavement crushed
by military vehicles, archaeological fragments scattered across the site, and
trenches driven into ancient deposits."
The story in The Guardian continues:
"Outrage is hardly the word, this is just dreadful,"
said Lord Redesdale, an archaeologist and head of the all-party parliamentary
archaeological group. "These are world sites. Not only is what the American
forces are doing damaging the archaeology of Iraq, it's actually damaging the
cultural heritage of the whole world."
Tim Schadla Hall, reader in public archaeology at the
Institute of Archaeology at University College London, said: "In this case
we see an international conflict in which the U.S. has failed to take into account
the requirements of the Hague convention ... to protect major archaeological
sites - just another convention it seems happy to ignore."
So Babylon is being destroyed. Along with the Iraqi
people.
www.arabnews.com:
Editorial: Bush's Mark on History
16 January 2005
Babylon was the center of one of the world's great powers. Its famous Hanging
Gardens were watered by a hydraulic system which, for its sophistication, could
be compared to our advanced space technology today. Four thousand years later,
the latest global power, the United States, has come to the land of the Babylonians
in modern Iraq, with its own awesome technology and power. Yet it seems to be
symptomatic of the profound ignorance which has informed Bush's policy in the
Middle East that the US military chose to set up a military depot in the midst
of the fragile ruins of ancient Babylon. As a result of this crass decision,
immense damage has been caused to the site.
A report yesterday from the British Museum seems at first barely credible.
Vast amounts of earth containing tens of thousands of archaeological fragments
have been bulldozed into piles to fill up sandbags. Defensive trenches have
been dug right through remains. A 2,600-year-old brick pavement has been reduced
to dust by tracked military vehicles. Someone has even tried to gouge out the
decorated bricks that form part of the dragons on the priceless Ishtar Gate.
Damage to historic monuments in time of war, though deplorable, is sometimes
inevitable. But the decision two years ago by the American top brass, during
the still relatively peaceful period of the occupation, to establish a base
for over 2000 troops in this highly sensitive and historic location is both
inexplicable and outrageous. It speaks of the extreme carelessness,
bordering upon contempt, with which President Bush embarked upon the United
States' mission to change Iraq into a country to its liking. It is
quite clear that nobody even thought to consider the ancient history, let alone
the modern history, of the country that Washington was invading.
Tragically we now see the consequences at all levels of this total lack of planning
for anything other than the overthrow of Iraq and the supply of PX stores and
air-conditioned accommodation for the victorious US forces. From the State and
Defense departments through to the Pentagon, someone should have been thinking
hard about everything that was going to happen when the last of Saddam's army
stopped fighting. But nobody was. There was just this vague idea that victorious
US forces would enjoy a ticker-tape parade through Baghdad, pack their bags
and go home.
This boorish stupidity lies at the heart of Washington's emerging humiliation
in Iraq and represents its abject failure to take into account the feeling,
fears and interests of the Iraqi people. Yesterday in another example of this
woeful neglect, the alleged ringleader of the US guards in Abu Ghraib prison
was found guilty of abusing detainees for his amusement. In truth the moral,
if not actual, guilt for these crimes goes much higher. It is said again and
again that George Bush in his second and final presidential term wants to leave
his mark on history. He already has - in the shattered remains of the precious
archaeology of Babylon the Great which has fallen to his ignorant and vandal
armies.
Copyright:Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
www.strike-the-root.com/3/herman/herman3.html
Achtung! Are We the New Nazis?
Soldiers, God and Empire
by Douglas Herman
The barbarism of conquered Baghdad mirrors the Nazi blueprint for dealing
with foreign art and culture: Loot the art and burn the culture.
Yet even The German High command never allowed or conspired in the wholesale
eradication of French culture to the degree the American Army appeared to
do in Baghdad. Reporter Robert Fisk stated in an interview, “We
claim that we want to preserve the national heritage of the Iraqi people,
and yet my own count of government buildings burning in Baghdad before I left
was 158, of which the only building protected by the United States Army and
the Marines were the Ministry of Interior . . . and the Ministry of Oil.”
Fisk also noted, “The looting was on a most detailed, precise
and coordinated scale . . . and within a few days those priceless heritage
items of Iraq’s history (those not destroyed by systematic arson) were
on sale in Europe and in America. I don’t believe that happened
by chance.”
The Nazis, great plunderers of European art, would have been envious
of the speed and cohesion of the entire operation. Understandably, they
would have been aghast at the waste, however.
David Vest: It's not the oil, it's the art!
www.counterpunch.org/vest04252003.html
The sacking of Iraq's museums: US wages war against culture
and history
The goal of the US military occupation is to impose colonial-style domination
over Iraq and seize control of its vast oil resources. It serves the interests
of American imperialism to humiliate Iraq and condition its population to submit
to the United States and the stooge regime to be established in Baghdad. Attacking
the cultural resources that connect the Iraqi people to 7,000 years of history
is part of the process of systematically destroying their national identity.
The tragic result is that treasures that survived even the Mongol sack of the
city in the 13th century could not withstand the impact of 21st century technology
and imperialist barbarism. Bush, Rumsfeld and company personify the new barbarians:
a „leader‰ who is himself only semi-literate and wallows in religious
backwardness; an administration populated by former corporate CEOs for whom
an artifact of ancient Sumer is of more interest as a tax shelter than as a
key to the historical and cultural development of mankind.
MORE:
www.wsws.org/articles/2003/apr2003/muse-a16.shtml
www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0414-07.htm
Published on Monday, April 14, 2003 by the lndependent/UK
US Blamed for Failure to Stop Sacking of Museum
by Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles and David Keys, Archaeology Correspondent
In Iraq itself, art experts and ordinary demonstrators made clear they were
far angrier at President George Bush than they were at the looters, noting that
the only building US forces seemed genuinely interested in protecting was the
Ministry of Oil.
WHY WAS BAGHDAD LOOTED?
http://electroniciraq.net/news/1065.shtml
STEPHEN SMITH, ELECTRONIC IRAQ - Heavy suspicion remains that failure of the
US to protect heritage sites, more than negligence, was a deliberate oversight
designed as a kind of cultural 'shock and awe' that would devastate
a sense of shared culture among Iraqis, leaving a blank page for the imprint
of the US occupying force and the reconstruction to follow. If proven, this
would be cultural genocide not witnessed during this civilization and
indeed rarely experienced over the 7,000-year time span of these lost collections.
Among non-embedded journalists, there were doubts raised about the seemingly
random nature of the looting. In Baghdad, Robert Fisk observed: "But for
Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum
of Archaeology and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic
library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires?
For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?". . .
Writing in Le Monde diplomatique in November 2002, French writer and critic
Jean Baudrillard gives us a theoretical model for understanding the chaos of
Baghdad. In this article, "The Despair of Having Everything," his
main argument is that: "The West's mission is to make the world's wealth
of cultures interchangeable, and to subordinate them within the global order.
Our culture, which is bereft of values, revenges itself upon the values of other
cultures."
Baudrillard goes on to develop this theme. "The rise of the globalized
system has been powered by the furious envy of an indifferent, low-definition
culture faced with the reality of high-definition cultures. Envy is what disenchanted
systems that have lost their intensity feel in the presence of high-intensity
cultures. . . This is a violent expression of repressed feeling about lives
in captivity, about sheltered existence, about, in fact, having far too much
of existence."
Priceless manuscripts, books go up in smoke
April 16 2003
As the flames engulfed Baghdad's National Library, destroying manuscripts many
centuries old, the Pentagon admitted that it had been caught unprepared by the
widespread looting of antiquities, despite months of warnings from American
archaeologists.
Almost nothing remains of the library's archive of tens of thousands of manuscripts,
books, and Iraqi newspapers, according to reports from the scene on Monday.
It joins a list of looting and destruction that already includes the capital's
National Museum, one of the world's most important troves of artefacts from
the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations.
Calling the looting of historical artifacts "a catastrophe for the cultural
heritage of Iraq", Mounir Bouchenaki, a deputy director-general of the
UN cultural body UNESCO, announced an emergency summit of archaeologists in
Paris tomorrow.
The heads of archaeological missions in Iraq from Britain, Denmark, France,
Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States have been invited to attend the
summit, which will provide an initial assessment of the damage.
Mr Bouchenaki said UNESCO planned to send a fact-finding mission to Iraq within
two to three weeks, "otherwise everything will be destroyed".
Last weekend, looters ransacked the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, running
off with treasures thousands of years old.
Christopher Walker, the deputy keeper at the British Museum in London, likened
the looting to "a bit like what the Taliban did to the Bamiyan statues",
which were blown up by Afghanistan's fundamentalist Islamic rulers in 2001.
The Guardian, Agencies
|
