Stupid people tricks, art division

In 1687, the Venetians besieged Athens, which was controlled by the Ottoman Turks. They shelled the city, including the Parthenon, which took a direct hit, blowing out the center of the building in the process.

Odd that a single shell should inflict such damage on a structure sturdy enough to stand pretty much intact for eighteen hundred years. It might have not had such damage had the Turks not decided to use the building as a gunpowder magazine. Funny how that works.

One of the great works of classical architecture, lost to the shortsightedness of war. Not that recent wars have done all that much better: during World War II the world saw the destruction of Coventry Cathedral, not to mention numerous artworks that simply vanished or were destroyed. The Vietnam War and the subsequent rise of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia resulted in the vandalism and neglect of the temple complexes at Ankgor Wat and Akgor Thom. (Fortunately, there is some hope there: preservation efforts are underway, as the sites at Ankgor have been listed as World Heritage Sites.) Early on in the war in Iraq, museums in Baghdad were looted, with priceless artifacts stolen and destroyed. Part of the reason may have been the failure of American forces to secure the National Museum.

War always carries with it a terrible cost in human lives. As a society, in America, we have done a bad job at estimating what those costs will be; so do most nations embarking on a course of war. And the human costs always eclipse the cultural costs: whatever the damage to the temple complexes at Ankgor, as heartbreaking as that may be, it pales in comparison to the horrors inflicted upon the Cambodian people. The looting of the antiquities in Baghdad cannot trump the massacre at Haditha.

But maybe they are of a piece. Art says who we are as a people, gives us our identity. There is a reason beyond simple prestige that the Greek government has been fighting for years to recover the statues from marble friezes of the Parthenon, which currently reside in the British Museum in London. If you see people of a country as not worth protecting, why would you care about protecting their cultural treasures?

Except that that legacy, in some sense belongs to the world as well as to each country. When cultural treasures are destroyed, we are all the poorer: witness the international outcry at the destruction of the colossal Buddhas by the Taliban.

I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this, other than I keep thinking that when all is said and done, there needs to be a reckoning of the cultural destruction wreaked upon Iraq -- or any other war-torn country -- and that needs to be mourned by others than those who suffered the immediate loss, and even by their enemies.