I am watching a harrowing programme on BB4 about the destruction of antiquities and ancient sites across territories taken by Da'esh/Islamic State.
It is heart-breaking seeing magnificent works of art being smashed with glee - and being dismissed as idols and works that deserve to be lost. The attacks are attacks on humankind's inventiveness, on our species' creativity and on the love of beauty that defines all that is good about us.
The destruction of the past will make the future look very different. Works many centuries - and millennia old - have been lost forever.
What I suspect the programme will not discuss (we're only half way through), is how this has all come to pass. My sadness at the images we were being shown turned to anger when we saw how - for all his many flaws (and worse) - Saddam Hussein had been a champion of museums and how he had invested lavishly in preserving, restoring and maintaining sites that celebrated the majestic history of Mesopotamia from antiquity to the 20th century.
I am not one of those people who thinks that we create terrorists, or that our tolerance is responsible for radicalizing the young who are heading to join Islamic state/Da'esh.
But in this case, we must also reflect on our own role in this, for we really do need to atone for our sins. This destruction is the price to pay for our spectacular failures in the Middle East as a whole, of our embarrassing inability to understand the people and history of this region, of our idiocy in looking to support regime change (in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Tunisia).
The rage anger of those who are committing these acts of cultural barbarism - which go hand in hand with persecution and genocide of Yazidis and others - comes as a reaction to our actions in deliberately adn systematically dismantling a country to suit (what we thought were) our own ends.
I've written about this in my new book; but watching the programme this evening fills me with such despair that I could never capture in writing.
It is heart-breaking seeing magnificent works of art being smashed with glee - and being dismissed as idols and works that deserve to be lost. The attacks are attacks on humankind's inventiveness, on our species' creativity and on the love of beauty that defines all that is good about us.
The destruction of the past will make the future look very different. Works many centuries - and millennia old - have been lost forever.
What I suspect the programme will not discuss (we're only half way through), is how this has all come to pass. My sadness at the images we were being shown turned to anger when we saw how - for all his many flaws (and worse) - Saddam Hussein had been a champion of museums and how he had invested lavishly in preserving, restoring and maintaining sites that celebrated the majestic history of Mesopotamia from antiquity to the 20th century.
I am not one of those people who thinks that we create terrorists, or that our tolerance is responsible for radicalizing the young who are heading to join Islamic state/Da'esh.
But in this case, we must also reflect on our own role in this, for we really do need to atone for our sins. This destruction is the price to pay for our spectacular failures in the Middle East as a whole, of our embarrassing inability to understand the people and history of this region, of our idiocy in looking to support regime change (in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Tunisia).
The rage anger of those who are committing these acts of cultural barbarism - which go hand in hand with persecution and genocide of Yazidis and others - comes as a reaction to our actions in deliberately adn systematically dismantling a country to suit (what we thought were) our own ends.
I've written about this in my new book; but watching the programme this evening fills me with such despair that I could never capture in writing.
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