Culture Under Attack (Imperial War Museum)



                    

 Yesterday I went to the excellent, if rather jading, Culture Under Attack exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. I learnt about instances of the wilful destruction of cultural heritage as an act of war or oppression, from the iconic such as the detonation of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan to the astoundingly unfamiliar such as the Nazi 'Baedeker Raids' aimed at bombing "every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide" - a disturbing example of how one man's love of culture can be turned into a weapon against culture a few generations later (Baedeker's Great Britain was published 1897)


Among the most poignant things was viewing the historic acts of wreckage as ever-more details emerge of the ongoing 'culture-cide' in the Xinjiang Uygur 'Autonomous Region'. CNN had broadcast footage that very morning concerning the mass destruction of Uighur Muslim cemeteries, including an interview with Aziz, a London-based Uighur exile whose father's grave has disappeared and is under no illusions about what Beijing's policy constitutes: "We cannot live anymore with them together. Because they are committing genocide against the Uyghur people".

To its immense credit, the exhibition doesn't shy away from the term 'genocide' either. It may seem hyperbolic but the attempt to delete a people's history is the first step to pretending they never existed in the first place. There are also some well-chosen quotes from victim and perpetrator alike telling very much the same story. Here are just two:

"We shall make this place a desert. We shall wipe it out so that it will be hard to find where Louvain used to stand. For generations, people will come here to see what we have done and it will teach them to respect Germany and to think twice before they resist her." - a German officer, Louvain, August 1914 where over a thousand buildings were destroyed, including the National and University Library along with more than 500 people in the opening month of WWI.

"[ISIS are] trying to destroy our collective memory...They want people to know that nothing was important before them." - a resident of Mosul on the orgy of destruction wrought in Mosul Museum by Daesh thugs in 2015.

The bitterness at the damage wreaked in their attempts is soothed only by with the joy that, ultimately, they failed! 

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