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ISIS kills hundreds of people, the deadly coven in Syria and Iraq continues. Why is it so painful for us to hear about the destruction of cultural property? Why do they make headlines? British journalist Deborah Orr offers her own – bitter – explanation.
The ruins of ancient Palmyra do not know fear and despair, they do not feel pain and torment. They can neither defend themselves nor flee. They don’t feel anything. But people feel for them, just as people felt for the ancient ruins of Nineveh, Nimrud and Hatra, which also fell into the path of ISIS. The best in man meets the worst in man, and the worst wins.
Again and again, people explain apologetically: yes, we understand that the destruction of artifacts is not as terrible as the extermination of people. And yet it’s the artifacts that make the headlines. This is understandable, we continue to justify ourselves: cultural values are important for the peoples of Syria and Iraq too. This loss hurts everyone. Everyone except ISIS. The more disgust and contempt arouse ISIS people, the more they enjoy it.
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Lamentation for the lost ruins is a lamentation for the highest manifestations of the human, for what humanity can create and achieve. Crying for dead people is the opposite. It involves acknowledging what happened to them. Namely, they had to face that side of a person that is a little more difficult to idealize, with that part of him that sees some kind of perverted dignity in cruelty, destruction and chaos: they are sought after, they are seen as a terrible achievement with a negative sign.
The UK is tired of watching ISIS atrocities, and the rest of the world is probably too. We no longer expect or want reporters to risk themselves on these deadly journeys to bring us news we’d rather not know. We are tired of pictures of hostages on their knees, in orange jumpsuits, who are about to be executed. Nobody else wants to see anything.
From time to time some particularly monstrous or inventive nightmare breaks through the wall of our disgust. and enters the collective consciousness, which already craves oblivion. What ISIS people are doing to other people has become literally unspeakable. Talking about the items they destroy, even the most precious items, the most truly irreplaceable, is still possible – this is our way of expressing understanding of the magnitude of this horror and not switching to thinking about what it is like to be there, in the middle of hundreds of kilometers of violence, enslavement and fear; what courage is needed to rise up against it, and what punishment awaits those whose courage was not enough.
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It is not surprising that people who, without flinching, thrust an ax into a person’s neck, smash the Greco-Roman colonnade without the slightest remorse. But in fact, it is not surprising that it is easier for many people to mourn the death of a column than the death of a person. The column can stand as the embodiment of the abstract idea of civilization – or fall for this idea. A person, a person like you or me – no, it’s too scary, too painful to even think about it. Today we have one task: to keep this horror at a distance so that it has nothing to do with our lives here in the UK.
Mourning for Palmyra is also mourning for a global project that unites all of humanity, in which we all strive for the same thing, we want to achieve the same goals and share success with each other. Crying over ancient pillars hurts, but it’s not as bad as mourning a world that people seem determined to destroy.despite all the creative energy that exists in us. ISIS no doubt sees this as decadent, because it fails to see that there is nothing more decadent than a hypocritical death cult that values only its own nihilism.
Source: theguardian.com