The human urge to destroy

Last week, there was a big outcry from western cultural experts and those in the West more attuned to international events as the extremists of ISIS proceeded to smash the museum artefacts of the Mosul, some of which were at least 2,700 years old, dating back to the glory days of the Assyrian and Mitanni empires.  There was a hope that these were replicas and the originals were squirrelled away safely but no-one seems sure.  The ostensible motive given was that they were un-Islamic but that they had survived so long under ISIS' aegis suggested that they were selected in assymetric revenge for the reverses suffered by their forces after months of pounding from the air by the USA and certain allies. 
In this, they recall the Baedeker Raids of April-May 1942 by Nazi Germany on English targets of immense cultural and historical significance outside of London.  By the middle of World War II, Bomber Command's operations against the Third Reich were beginning to have a serious effect, hammering Lübeck and razing seven-tenths of Rostock.  In revenge, the Nazis sought to demoralise the British by attacking treasured cities such as Canterbury, Bath, York, Norwich and notably Exeter, the latter "a gem," in the words of one gloating Luftwaffe officer, "before we came."  Though cultural targets were bombed further in the following 18 months too, they never reached the intensity of those fateful Spring months and were discontinued after heavy losses for no material gain, another quixotic foray by the Nazis that reaped no rewards for their war machine.
Bomber Command had long memories.  In addition to the nutjobs in Mosul on their demolition job, in recent days it has been the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Dresden.  The east German city was of arguably even greater cultural worth than Exeter and crucially was only a transit point in the sense that it had roads, possessing no industry or war-making capacity of note.  It was though a prisoner of war destination and as the Germans knew the Allies knew it, left it little defended thinking that Allies would not imperial their own.  For two days, Bomber Command and the USAF rained down firebombs.  Quite aside from the human cost - the people in their air raid shelters melted alive to form a hideous gloop, the children evaporated - it was a fantastic own goal as Allied prisoners shared the same fate as the townsfolk.  The cultural heart of Dresden was ripped out.  Coventry (from 1940), Exeter and the others had been 'avenged' but it was a quite unnecessary.  In my educated opinion, it did not shorten the war by one day - it was, in fact, a war crime and it overshadowed all of the other important,if ugly, work of Bomber Command to the extent that it took until the 21st century before their contribution was recognised and even then it took public subscription rather than government funding to raise a memorial.  In the weeks following, Churchill is recorded as disavowing the Dresden raid once the magnitude of destruction became clear. 
The historian Andrew Roberts has vehemently affirmed the need to attack Dresden, Roberts' credibility is largely shot on matters of World War Two after he compared before the invasion of Iraq by George W Bush's USA, Saddam Hussein in 2003 with Adolf Hitler in 1939 in terms of likelihood of invading his neighbours, when in fact Saddam - monster as he was - had a toothless aspect after years of sanctions and no-fly zones and was victim of a gratuitous war of choice.  The leader with the closest comparison to 1939 Hitler in 2003 was Dubaya himself, but Roberts' right-wing ideologue blinkers would not permit him to be rational.  Roberts' was possibly being obsequious about Dresden to obviate the air crew as being war criminals, something that could not be swerved by saying "we were just carrying out orders." More truthfully than Roberts, my grandfather, a teenager at the time, when I saw him ten days ago still expressed his satisfaction at 'hitting Germany' - the human and cultural cost was irrelevant, it was about revenge, no matter how blunt it was.  Prague, tellingly, was left untouched by Bomber Command.
The East German communists rebuilt Dresden (bar the Cathedral, which had to wait until the fall of the Berlin Wall) as their fellow socialists in Poland resurrected Warsaw, but it impossible to say how much was lost.  On a lighter note, a German teacher of mine, when she visited Dresden on a personal visit, asked if the blackened walls were a result of the bombing and was told by her guide that it was actually caused by the notorious belching pollution of East German cars.
Over the past years, it seems sites of incredible historical import have been wantonly trashed by extremist Islamists - Bamiyan by the Afghan Taliban, Cairo by Salafists following the fall of Mubarak, Timbuktu by Malian al-Qaeda, Krak de Chevaliers by ISIS, with the further loss of the great Bazaar in Aleppo in fighting and the looting of the Baghdad Museum of Antiquities following the lawlessness in the wake of the 2003 invasion.  But we in this country have historical acts of destruction to suit our own ends.  There was Henry VIII's Year Zero with the Dissolution of the Monasteries - architectural marvels reduced to ruins.  Sir Francis Bacon, the late Elizabethan and early Stuart polymath, lamented the decline of English castles through neglect - this was before the English Republic 'slighted' many castles that had been held by Royalist forces with stacks of gunpowder, the spiteful attention given to Corfe Castle particularly distressing to modern sensibilities.  As the British Empire expanded, we burned the Grand Bazaar in Kabul after the massacre of 16,000 British and Indian settlers/occupiers in the ill-fated First Afghan War, we connived with the French in the destruction of the sumptuous Summer Palace of the Chinese Manchu Emperor in 1860 and we looted Abyssinia in 1867 to punish the eccentric emperor for his taking hostages after his letter to Queen Victoria was snubbed.  Even in peacetime, the British demolished Euston Station's Doric Arch with St Pancras Station narrowly avoiding the same fate and countless handsome town houses were pulled down (the survivors now sell for millions) to build hideous, shoddily built, crime-ridden blocks of flats which killed communities in the name of architectural ideology.
Such an ideology is little different in terms of a mindset to ISIS.  Mongolia lost more than 90% of its centuries old monasteries because they were 'feudal'.  The Russians accidentally destroyed the Amber Room of Catherine the Great looted from Tsarkoe Selo by the Germans as the former pounded an ancient East Prussian castle.  The totalitarians in the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan and (not as extensively) Italy destroyed countless monuments and works of art that didn't fit with their views.  The Franks justified their sacking of Constantinople ex post facto because the Byzantines were 'heretics' (though this excuse didn't convince many in the West, not least because the Crusaders were excommunicate themselves after attacking the port of Zara).  The first (Chin) Emperor of China implemented a burning of books that wasn't rescinded until the second Han Emperor acceded the throne. Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist ruling family have obliterated 80% of historical Mecca since they took over in the 1920s.
There are so many more examples of the dark side of humanity in destroying things that would otherwise have benefitted future generations.  Vandals have existed for millennia (and not just briefly in the 5th-6th centuries AD) and continue to do so.  Buildings, art, literature and other artefacts are lost, never to be seen again.  We create, we wipe out some of it, we create more and later some of this is intentionally wrecked.  Of course, creation can take years, destruction can take seconds.  I have become phlegmatic when some new outrage is perpetrated on cultural icons because that is the history of human nature.  It's desperately sad but if not now, it would have happened at some point in the future.  We may think we hold ourselves to higher standards but it so easy to slip. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.  We lose; however, we also replace. This is precisely why human life is worth preserving above all else - savagery is part of us but it is just a part, the essence to better things (in a non-destructive fashion) is so much more powerful an urge.  One human life is more precious than all the art in existence and has ever existed and the most important to preserve.  It is that to which we must hold.