CULTURE AND HERITAGE MATTER TOO! Matthew Omolesky
EXCERPTS
The notion that cultural heritage should be protected during an armed conflict ought not be terribly controversial; the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, and the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, have enshrined the principle that historical monuments, educational institutions, and institutions of religious, not-for-profit, artistic, or scientific significance should be spared by combatants for the sake of the survival of our collective patrimony. This was understood even in late antiquity, as when the Byzantine general Belisarius, during the 549-550 siege of Rome, advised his adversary, Totilo the Ostrogoth, that:
Her monuments belong to posterity, and an outrage committed upon them will rightly be regarded as a great injustice to all future generations as well as to the memory of those who created them. Therefore consider well. Should you be victorious in this war, Rome destroyed will be your own loss, preserved it will be your fairest possession. Should it be your fortune to be defeated, the conqueror will owe you gratitude if you spare Rome, whereas if you demolish it, there will be no reason for clemency, while the act itself will have brought you no profit. And remember that your reputation in the eyes of the world is at stake.
…..the property damage and cultural vandalism carried out in recent weeks — which has even been visited on monuments to figures like Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Tadeusz Kościuszko, and Robert Gould Shaw — has been perpetrated by those deemed sympathetic by the media. Thus to express even the slightest qualms about the destruction of property, livelihoods, and heritage is treated as some sort of dog-whistle denial of human or civil rights. Meanwhile “bullets are whistling through the galleries” once again, but this time it is not just Dadaists on the societal fringe who are cheering it on. I am not entirely sure how a humane culture can persist on such terms, and I have absolutely no idea how cultural institutions can carry out their traditional missions as repositories of our collective heritage in such an environment, as calls to “decolonize” the collections, stacks, and curricula of museums, libraries, and universities mount, and as even the most anodyne monuments are systematically toppled or defaced.”
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