Article :Peter Stone is the elected honorary Vice President of Blue Shield International, an advisory body to UNESCO on the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict.
There was a horrified reaction around the world when US president Donald Trump tweeted, at the height of America’s ongoing dispute with Iran, threatening Iran’s cultural heritage.
He wrote that the US had identified 52 sites, including important historical buildings and artifacts, that would be targeted if Iran retaliated against the killing of its top military commander Qassem Soleimani on January 3.
After Trump’s advisors – including the Pentagon – told him this would be illegal he pulled back from that position.
We now see in our own country, rioters tearing down statues and backing movements to destroy our cultural heritage.
How is it against the law to destroy Iran’s historic sites, but ok to do so here?
Throughout history, historic buildings and places are damaged and destroyed during conflict through collateral (or accidental) impact, and historic artifacts get looted. That’s war.
For hundreds, if not thousands, of years, armies were paid by being allowed to loot and run riot after winning a battle. The military mind cared little about anything other than winning the war and going home richer.
There are many cultural and academic reasons for trying to protect heritage during armed conflict, most of them irrelevant to those doing the fighting.
We need to realize that cultural property protection will only be effective if militaries and politicians take it seriously.
Perhaps surprisingly, cultural property protection has a long history in military law.
The earliest surviving code of discipline for an English army, the 1385 Durham Ordinances, was drawn up for Richard II’s invasion of Scotland.
It included an article not to damage religious or other cultural buildings.
Interestingly, the USA is accepted as the first country to make cultural property protection part of its military policy through the 1863 “Lieber Code” written for Federal forces during the American Civil War.
Today, the intentional targeting of cultural and religious sites that are not military objectives, have no military function, and make no contribution to military action, is prohibited specifically in international humanitarian law, most notably in the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict .
Cultural property protection is also an integral part of the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions, the 1998 Rome Statute and UN Security Council Resolution 2347.
Bottom line, cultural property protection is increasingly regarded as “customary international law” and applies to all sides in any conflict.
And it works. Military commanders were found guilty and imprisoned for deliberately attacking cultural heritage under the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
Since Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War in China in the sixth century BC, military writers have argued that to destroy the cultural heritage of your enemy is bad military practice.
It gives the first reason for the next war and often makes a defeated population harder to govern.
On the other hand, protecting the cultural heritage of a population you have conquered shows them respect and they are easier to govern. This is what modern soldiers often refer to as a “force multiplier”, something that makes their main job of winning a conflict that much easier.
Think about that. With the tearing down of statues of everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant, the cancel culture folks are creating enemies of people who previously were will to sit on the sidelines during all of this current chaos.
Folks, cultural heritage is what makes us human. It gives us a sense of place, and identity.
It can and should be used to explain and explore a common human past – what makes us the same, both good and bad.
We can’t do that if cultural heritage is destroyed by war, or worse deliberately targeted by our own people as we are seeing today.
What happens if we allow our culture to be cancelled?
I found a great article in the American Thinker by Dr. Brian C Joondeph.
As he clearly points out cancel culture has morphed to cancelling America because of who it might offend.
What happens when everything gets cancelled and we become a society described by letters and numbers, eliminating our rich history and traditions?
The cancel culture is leading us to an Orwellian society, from America the Beautiful to The Hunger Games.
The self-appointed censors have found their voices after George Floyd’s death and COVID-19 threats, with protests and riots not only now condoned but actually encouraged.
What are some of the casualties?
Gone with the Wind, a multi-Academy Award winning classic movie was cancelled from HBO due to “racial insensitivity.”
Several Netflix shows were cancelled due to an Australian comedian’s use of blackface.
Police shows have also been cancelled, at least the ones not portraying a multigendered police force concerned more about their carbon footprints than catching the bad guys.
Newspaper editors have been cancelled for the high crime of publishing op-ed pieces, written by a conservative senator, as was the case for NY Times editor James Bennet. So much for the Times motto, “All the news that’s fit to print.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to cancel statues in the U.S. Capitol. It seems statues depicting Confederate leaders are suddenly offensive to her.
Yet these same statues didn’t bother her or any other House Democrats a week ago, a year ago, or a decade ago.
Democrat officials walked past these offensive statues gathering dust and never said a word, but now all of a sudden they must go because as Pelosi said, “Monuments to men who advocated cruelty and barbarism to achieve such a plainly racist end are a grotesque affront to these ideals.”
Will statues or buildings dedicated to former Senator, and KKK Exalted Leader, Robert Byrd also be canceled?
Will those who eulogized the former KKK bigwig at his funeral also be cancelled? These include Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Pelosi may want to cancel U.S. Capitol statues but is she willing to cancel her own father?
While mayor of Baltimore, Nancy’s father dedicated monuments to Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E Lee.
Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro had it right at the time, saying the memorials, “Stand like a stone wall against aggression in any form that would seek to destroy the liberty of the world.”
In other words, a reminder to remember history, lest it repeat itself.
There is also a push to rename military bases named after Confederate commanders, including Forts Bragg, Hood, and Benning.
Will they be renamed or will they just be given numbers? How proud will the West Point grad’s parents be to say their son or daughter is being deployed to Fort 267. Or was that 257?
Colleges and universities are next. Most of the Ivy League schools have ties to American slavery, even if centuries ago.
Now the only slaves are those students taking out six-figure loans for worthless degrees in gender studies or intersectionality, leaving college as slaves to loan companies.
Elihu Yale, founder of Yale University, was a slave trader. Will Yale change its name?
Sports teams need a bit of cancellation too. There is a long list of offensive team names and mascots, from the Washington Redskins to the Cleveland Indians. Should they be cancelled or renamed?
Good luck with renaming. They tried that with hurricanes and the progressives still weren’t happy since it turned out that female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes, according to CNN. What about the other 70 or so genders who aren’t properly represented in hurricane naming?
And of course, support for law enforcement is also being cancelled as cities want to defund or eliminate their police departments.
Ironically, we are told all cops are bad because of the actions of a few. And all gun owners are bad because of the evil intentions of a handful.
Yet it’s considered racist and Islamophobic to even hint at generalizing the actions of a few jihadis to the entire religion.
Cancel the police and it will be the Hunger Games in American cities.
Truckers have already promised to not deliver to cities that defund police. Minneapolis can grow its own food in winter when the temperatures are below zero. Good luck with that.
When the left wants to cancel everything that is part of the American culture and way of life, there will be nothing left. Perhaps that’s the goal.
They can remake history as they choose, like writing a novel. But history is important, even the bad parts. As philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
So, what are the effects of cultural destruction?
It is a difficult thing to describe, so here are a couple of very different examples to try and provide a short answer.
Hollywood movies that seek to terrify their audiences with apocalyptic scenarios tend to use the destruction of iconic buildings and structures as their climactic image.
In one example, the audience knows that New York has turned into a wasteland, not because it sees a wasteland, but because only the torch held aloft by the statue of liberty is visibly poking through the sands that now submerge the city.
The Golden Gate Bridge is torn apart by a tidal wave; the statue of Admiral Nelson lies in pieces at the foot of a crumbling column, and so on.
Why can those images be so much more effective and horrifying than images of human beings dying? It is because they speak of the destruction of an entire city, a society, a nation, a civilisation, and a way of life.
The destruction represents not just the destruction of those immediately living alongside these monuments, but of entire generations.
There is a form of extremism that sees the very existence of sites that are celebrating other people’s faiths or cultures as a challenge.
In 1942, Nazi Germany had ordered the Baedeker Blitz, air raids on cultural sites in the UK in response to the destruction of the German town of Lübeck in the same year.
In spring 1942, the air war over Europe became a tit-for-tat game of retaliation, aimed more at destroying civilian morale than wartime industry.
On 28 March 1942, the Royal Air Force bombed the German city of Lübeck in what was the first large-scale RAF raid to do considerable damage to a German city.
The town was hardly defended due to its lack of industrial infrastructure, so why use valuable resources on a militarily unimportant city?
British Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris was a staunch believer in the war-winning power of breaking the enemy’s morale. (Is that what we are seeing today?)
With his actions justified by the Area Bombing Directive of February 14th,1942 which allowed for the targeting of civilian targets, Harris and his bombers sought to wreak havoc on the German population, starting with Lübeck.
The majority of the city’s buildings and homes were affected by the bombing to some degree. Hundreds were killed and wounded, with thousands more left without roofs over their heads.
Though considered a success for the RAF, the Lübeck raid would bring about the wrath of the Luftwaffe at the expense of the British population and the fabric of its cultural history.
On April 14th, Hitler instituted the Baedeker Directive, calling for a shift in focus from military to non-military targets.
The German Luftwaffe hit the British town of Exeter on April 23rd, 1942 in the first of what would become known as the Baedeker Raids or Blitz.
The series takes it name from the well known Baedeker travel guides, as the targets became less militarily significant and more culturally relevant.
One German statesman was quoted as saying, “We shall go out and bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide.”
Over the next few days, subsequent attacks struck Bath, Norwich, and York.
Canterbury would be hit a month later, likely a direct retaliation for a massive RAF raid on Cologne the night before that killed hundreds, wounded thousands, and destroyed more than 10,000 homes.
There is probably a number of similarities between the attitudes of the Third Reich and what we see today when it comes to cultural diversity and the cancel culture.
The biggest similarity I see is that they inspire horror and fear, and I guess that is part of the point.
Followers of the current movement want to destroy anything valued by those who care about our cultural history.
This becomes quite obvious when you see them tearing down statues of General Grant, and Abraham Lincoln.
They don’t care who they were, or what they stood for. They only know that their destruction will strike a blow against those who cherish our history and culture.
Is it effective, you bet. Can anything be done to stop it?
Probably not until we can get our politicians to step forward, call out clearly what is really happening, and take action.
Callers?