Headline August 18, 2017/ ''' !CULTURECIDE CUM COMEUPPANCE? '''

''' !CULTURECIDE CUM 

COMEUPPANCE? '''

!HOW DOES ONE ROLLBACK FANATICISM?:  You ; *The World Students?*,   And You,  the great students of this great nation : America?.

And then Yee  the great. brave students  :  Merium, Rabo, Ambassador Malala,  Haleema,  Saima,  Dee,   Eman/LUMS,   Seher/Kings College, Sarah, Zilli, Armeen/LUMS, Zaib/GIK,    Lakshmi/India, Hadiqa, Sameen, Dantini/Malaysia?...........

David Brook in his genius fires up   : ''We're  living  in an age of  terrible anxiety. The country is being transformed by complex forces like changing demographics and technological disruption.

Many people live within a bewildering freedom, without institutions to trust, unattached to compelling religions and sources of meaning, uncertain about their own lives. 

Anxiety is not so much a fear of a specific thing but a fear of everything, an unnameable dread about the future.......     People will do anything to escape it. Very true!.....  The World Students Society, thanks you.  

AND then what of the Second World War, the destruction of the ancient centre of Rotterdam, Conventry Cathedral, the Wren Churches of the City of London-

The wrecking of renaissance Italy, the levelling of Warsaw, courtesy of the Luftwaffe,  the Wehrmacht and the SS. 

And the  RAF's  1945  destruction of  Dresden and the bombing of the Middle Ages basilicas  of Germany's cities. And the mass theft of renaissance art and the sacking of museums across Europe, courtesy of the Nazi party's ''cultural'' elite.

And then we have the Germans of the First World War to thank for the burning of the 15th century   university and libraries of Louvain and the total demolition of the  medieval  Cloth Hall  at Ypres.

And  -yes, this can go on and on -we can still see the ruins of  the churches  and abbeys which incurred the  incendiary fury  of  Henry VIII  and then digress still further and ask why the-

Romans of the Middle Ages used the Coliseum as a quarry  -just as the Ottoman authorities used the Crusader castle of Beirut as a quarry for their port extensions in the early 20th century.    

And then came the Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths, not to mention the early Muslim invaders who themselves tried to destroy a stone Buddha, I've seen its reassembled body in Dushanbe museum.

And when I think of  pre-history's  and Sumer, I can only remember walking through the ancient cities of  southern Iraq, dug up and pulverised by tomb robbers after the  2003  Anglo-American invasion, and the statues whose broken limbs I crunched over in the..... darkness of the looted....... Baghdad Museum.

We can sometimes reconstruct. The Ypres Cloth Hall was reconstituted exactly as it was. The Old City of Warsaw was rebuilt from old maps and photographs. 

The UN organised the rebuilding of the bridge at Mostar. The Saudis have paid for the reconstruction of Bosnia's mosques. 

Basil Spence designed the new  Coventry Cathedral. Warsaw is almost picture perfect but the new Mostar bridge will take years to look like the weathered old masonry which a 16th century visitor described as  ''like a rainbow arch soaring up to the skies''.

The Cloth Hall  at Ypres looks magnificent. So is the post-war  ''medieval'' city in Warsaw. I'm not sure if  Basil Spence's new Coventry cathedral works today, either in faith or in art.

But now the problem, If a single life is more precious than all the planets, why do we weep for the wreckage of Buddhas and Roman cities and churches and mosques and libraries?

Of all the  ''cides'', surely  ''culturalcide''  should be way down our list of priorities. 

Yet it's clearly near the top   -the UN waffles on about our children's heritage. But I've never it better explained than in the words of a Croat woman, Slavenka Drakulic who wrote about this very question only a month after the destruction of the  Stari Most Bridge by her own Croat army.     

She recalled seeing a photograph of  a middleaged Bosnian woman' 'with a long knife cut along her throat'' and she asked herself why she felt more pain looking at the image of the destroyed bridge than that of the woman.

And this is what she concluded : ''We expect people to die. We count on our own lives to end. The destruction of a monument to civilisation is something else. The bridge, in all its beauty and grace, was built to outlive us.

It was an attempt to grasp eternity. Because it was the product of both individual creativity and collective experience, it transcended our individual destiny.......

You would think that nothing new could happen, that, after the........ the concentration camps and the mass rapes, the ethnic cleansing....there would be no room left for imagination.........''

And for Muslims, destiny and eternity subjects of the Quran, which was first revealed to the  Prophet [PBUH]  on the 27th day Ramazan,   the ''Laylat-al-Qadar'',......... the Night of Power.

It is the holiest night in Muslim calendar. And it was on this night  -this year- that the 12th century leaning minaret of Mosul was blasted to the ground.  

With respectful dedication to the Leaders, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!   -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW!   -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Assertive Modesty '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless