It’s hard not to get disgusted with human beings sometimes. We seem to have such a talent for destroying everything, and then doing it all over again a few years later. It’s not enough that we’ve trashed the climate we depend on for survival, or that we’ve laid waste to countless species and their habitats along with them, or that we can’t even figure out how to stop destroying the planet; we have to enhance our resumé further by flirting with starting yet another World War. Granted, that’s Vladimir Putin’s doing as opposed to humanity’s in general, but we are destructive as a species. We move fast and break things.
We also make things, to be sure, but then the others come along and kick them into dust. It could be our epitaph: “Made a lot of excellent stuff but broke it all.” The world is littered with crumbs of temples and statues and paintings, gardens and cottages and wheelbarrows, because we can’t learn to get along with each other and take care of our treasures.
Treasures such as the Bamiyan Buddhas, for instance, that were carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamyan valley of central Afghanistan in the sixth century and blown up by the Taliban in the twenty-first. In Palmyra, Syria, ISIS destroyed the Tetrapylon and the facade of the city’s Roman theater in 2017. Multiply those examples—by some huge number—all over the planet. We’re good at making, but we’re good at destroying too; we can have nice things for a little while, if we’re lucky, but sooner or later the smash will happen.
Early in Putin’s war on Ukraine, Russian forces burned the Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum to the ground, along with twenty-five works by the Ukrainian folk artist Maria Prymachenko. I haven’t been able to find any sources that say the museum was being used for military purposes; it was apparently what it said it was: a local history museum. Maria Prymachenko is now known to millions of people around the world, and copies of her gorgeous paintings will probably be adorning walls and greeting cards and reusable shopping bags for years to come, but those twenty-five paintings the Russians torched are gone forever.
Destroying such treasures is evil. It’s also a war crime. In January 2020, the European Cultural Foundation noted, in the context of a threat by then-President Donald Trump to destroy cultural heritage sites in Iran, that the deliberate targeting of cultural property in the event of armed conflict is against international law and recognized as a war crime by the International Criminal Court.
Beyond the fact that such an attack would be illegal, an assault to our universal cultural heritage is also condemnable as culture and cultural heritage stand for the connection and communication of people beyond borders and politics, the engagement with other cultures can offer room for global solidarity and dialogue across communities.
They do. In times of peace, when they’re allowed to, the arts can bring people together, especially the nonlinguistic arts that don’t require translation—music, dance, paintings, sculpture, architecture. But times of peace are so rare, and so fleeting. On March 16, Russian forces bombed a theater in the port city of Mariupol, destroying it. Ukrainian officials reported that more than a thousand civilians were sheltering in the theater, and satellite images taken before the bombing show the word CHILDREN in Russian written on the ground at the front and back of the building.
Putin claims that Ukraine is not a real country but just a part of Russia, and he wants to drag it back into the loving embrace of the Russian bear. If this is love, one wonders what hatred looks like.
It boils down to the duality of human beings, I suppose. We’re the worst and the best. The other animals don’t paint or compose music or write poetry, but they also don’t come up with genocide or torture or nuclear weapons. It’s a great pity that our technological talents have developed at a much steeper rate than our moral or our artistic ones.
When Hitler walloped France in June 1940, thus avenging Germany’s defeat in 1918 and the scorchingly humiliating Armistice signed at Compiègne, he seized the opportunity to visit Paris, art capital of Europe. He had been an aspiring artist in Vienna, before he turned his hand to Nazi activism, so you’d think he would have gone straight to the Louvre to drink in room after room of painting. But sadly, he hadn’t allowed himself enough time. He spent just three hours there, his one and only time in Paris, being driven around the top tourist hot spots—the Opéra, the Champs-Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower—where he posed for snapshots just like Ethel and Joe from Nebraska. Napoleon’s tomb and the Sacré-Cœur finished the speed-visit, and away he went, never to return.
But if Hitler couldn’t visit the Louvre, he could bring the Louvre to him, and figuratively speaking he did, in the sense that he and other Nazi bigwigs stole every artwork they could get their hands on. The U.S. Holocaust Museum introduces its Looted Art section by explaining that “Hitler wanted to enrich the Third Reich and its leaders with exquisite and culturally significant treasures, sell looted art that did not reflect the Reich’s ideals for foreign currency, and create the Führermuseum, envisioned as the cultural center of the world, in his hometown of Linz, Austria.” The dream of the Führermuseum never became reality, fortunately. It probably would have looked like the bar at Mar-a-Lago where customers can gaze on a portrait of Donald Trump in a tennis sweater.