Undoing What Was Done

A report in Libération this morning decries the sack of the ruins of the archeological site at Nimrod, using heavy construction equipment to destroy the heritage of earlier societies that they consider blasphemous, having already addressed, apparently, a wealth of societal treasure in the museum at Mosul. My father actually worked on digs around Mosul in the mid-Thirties, and somewhere in the family treasure, there exists a small trove of 8-mm. film of locals moving dirt in their burnooses, no bulldozers being available. I recently discovered some prints of RAF photos of the dig site, part of the stuff of Hank’s personal legend.

The reflection runs thusly: is it worse to desecrate to artifacts of the past than it is to ensure that all but selective material gets buried in collective ignorance and forgetfulness? I can’t think of a single constructive or positive comment to make about the beheaders, the desecrators and those who would establish a religious or doctrinary hegemony of any sort, and that includes those in our own society whose walled-in take on life looks to take us back to some new version of feudalism. The horror of ISIS should lead us to look at our own foibles and missteps a little more closely, particularly that seemingly insurmountable impulse to bomb anything that moves, each time sowing more dragon’s teeth with each bomb that falls. I wonder when we will realize that we’re still getting the same results with our repeated actions that clearly don’t work for the majority of us (or them) and down tools for a reassessment of links between our actions and what people do in response.

I don’t know if that will help bring those Assyrians up to speed with current Islamic thought, but it might to some distance toward setting our own society free from the constraints imposed by the greedy canyon-minds.

(…one way or another, this darkness got to give.)