World's cultural loss during times of war
Posted 23 Feb, 2006 at 08:26 by blue in /World | Permanent link
Regardless of your beliefs, this is a terrible thing.
If the image doesn't mean anything to you, you can read one of the many news articles on the bombing of the Golden Mosque at CNN or Wikipedia.
I remember when I visited Germany in 1992 and saw scaffolding around many buildings. When asked about it, our guides indicated that in many cases it was to do restoration on old buildings... removing soot and other effects from things such as acid raid (notice how you don't hear about that in the news anymore? Do you think acid rain really stopped, or we just have new catch phrases for the media?).
However, many of the buildings were also having a different sort of restoration done. Repair from damage from World War II and allied bombings. One church I visited had photos of their stained glass windows... pre-1944... done by various masters of the craft. They currently had about 6 of the 30 windows restored and were working on collecting funds to do the rest.
Now consider that... a wealthy, prosporous nation like West Germany was still repairing things.
Irag, and a city like Baghdad, probably one of the oldest cities on the planet, just had the American war machine roll over it. I know that the US military actively tries to avoid directly bombing targets of cultural or religious significance... but war is war. Terrorist attacks, and, those who are in fact specifically targeting locations of cultural significance are even less discriminating - need I remind anyone of the Buddha's destroyed in Afghanistan?
Regardless of your cultural background, I think it is a profound loss when one of these achivements is detroyed or lost. I was pleased to see, and hope that it is followed up on, that the US Ambassador to Iraq has offered US help in rebuilding the mosque. That said, things rebuilt can never be quite the same. Don't you agree?