The Guardian view on Islamic State: fear in a handful of dust

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/09/guardian-view-islamic-state-fear-handful-dust

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Watch the Islamic State thugs smashing up 3,000-year-old statutes in Mosul, and the emotions are not hard to describe: disgust, rage, even grief. What’s harder, however, is to explain precisely why the hammer blows against ancient stones hit so hard.

Beautiful as those Assyrian winged bulls undoubtedly were, before they were set about with power tools, it might be said that they were “only things”, caught up in a conflict where countless humans have died. Are the Mosul sculpture smashers, who’ve since moved on to bulldoze the awesome remains of Nimrud, really uniquely barbarous? The Isis pretext is that monuments from the pre-Islamic era are inherently idolatrous, hardly novel as a basis for vandalism. Iconoclasm has, after all, been a feature of all the Abrahamic faiths: it is Christians and Jews, not Muslims, who recount how Moses ground up the Golden Calf. After Wolf Hall, it’s as well to remember not only the place of beheadings in English history but also the destruction of age-old abbeys.

Recall the disdain for antiquity the Americans showed when, during the war that unleashed so much of the region’s current chaos, they scarred ancient Babylon with a helicopter base, and you can begin to see the outlines of an argument for trying to keep cool about clouds of venerable dust. But such que sera, sera relativism must not be indulged: it is an intellectual pose that deserves to be knocked off its plinth.

There is indeed, as the heart feels, something especially frightening about this war on history, something that starts with the motive. Isis can claim that false idols are being smashed, but it’s a sham: nobody has worshipped most of these antiquities for aeons. In truth, just as when the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas, what’s involved here is less a religious statement than a declaration of war on the outside world. In the utopian frenzy of Mao’s cultural revolution, Pol Pot’s Year Zero, or indeed its 18th-century French inspiration, the stated aim was disowning the unwanted inheritance of tradition. The cost of seeking to sever ties with the past was, however, soon enough paid not in stones but in blood. And, of course, as the wrecking ball looms over the wonders of Nineveh, thousands of men and women have also been in line for destruction, sometimes through butchery recorded and uploaded by Isis itself.

To achieve real historical oblivion in this corner of the world would amount to smashing the cradle of civilisation: the roots of the old world, and through it the new, trace back to the fertile crescent. Mercifully, such total erasing of humanity’s past is beyond Isis, thanks to scholarly records, reproductions and prudent transfers of exhibits to safer sites.

The deepest hurt will not afflict westerners but all those Middle Easterners who yearn to be worthy custodians of their special inheritance, and – more mundanely – hope that its draw to travellers could contribute to a more prosperous future, in more peaceful times. The whole world needs to stand in solidarity with them. Vandalism is a lesser crime than murder, but what it reveals is occasionally just as terrifying.