[Peace-discuss] corp. looting and book burning in Iraq

[paul michael king]

This is preposterous! Everything that has transpired so far in this war
pales in comparison to this. Not because human life is less valuable than
these objects, but because we are willfully destroying the history of this
people and ourselves. We are invoking a permanent cultural amnesia over a
them so that their minds and hearts can be coopted by the unholy and
profane culture of western consumerism. We are performing a cultural
lobotomy not only on the middle east, but on the world. This is our
culture, this is where we came from. This is truly the beginning of a very
dark age. Darkness filled with the sounds of machines and bombs and death.
I am profoundly upset and mad as hell.


On Wed, 16 Apr 2003, Ricky Baldwin wrote:

> and one (depressingly serious) by Robert Fisk on book
> burning.  Together, they seem to fill out the picture
> of US "liberation". - Ricky]
>
> > ********************************************
> >
> > April 15, 2003
> >
> > The Sacking of Baghdad
> > Burning the History of Iraq
> > by ROBERT FISK
> >
> > Baghdad.
> >
> > So yesterday was the burning of books. First came
> > the looters, then the
> > arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking
> > of Baghdad. The National
> > Library and Archives ? a priceless treasure of
> > Ottoman historical documents,
> >
> > including the old royal archives of Iraq, were
> > turned to ashes in 3,000
> > degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the
> > Ministry of Religious
> > Endowment was set ablaze.
> >
> > I saw the looters. One of them cursed me when I
> > tried to reclaim a book of
> > Islamic law from a boy of no more than 10. Amid the
> > ashes of Iraqi history,
> > I found a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of
> > handwritten letters
> > between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who
> > started the Arab revolt
> > against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia, and the
> > Ottoman rulers of Baghdad.
> >
> > And the Americans did nothing. All over the filthy
> > yard they blew, letters
> > of recommendation to the courts of Arabia, demands
> > for ammunition for
> > troops, reports on the theft of camels and attacks
> > on pilgrims, all in
> > delicate hand-written Arabic script. I was holding
> > in my hands the last
> > Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history. But for
> > Iraq, this is Year Zero;
> >
> > with the destruction of the antiquities in the
> > Museum of Archaeology on
> > Saturday and the burning of the National Archives
> > and then the Koranic
> > library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being
> > erased. Why? Who set these
> > fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage
> > being destroyed?
> >
> > When I caught sight of the Koranic library
> > burning--flames 100 feet high
> > were bursting from the windows--I raced to the
> > offices of the occupying
> > power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. An
> > officer shouted to a
> > colleague that "this guy says some biblical [sic]
> > library is on fire". I
> > gave the map location, the precise name--in Arabic
> > and English. I said the
> > smoke could be seen from three miles away and it
> > would take only five
> > minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there
> > wasn't an American at the
> > scene--and the flames were shooting 200 feet into
> > the air.
> >
> > There was a time when the Arabs said that their
> > books were written in Cairo,
> >
> > printed in Beirut and read in Baghdad. Now they burn
> > libraries in Baghdad.
> > In the National Archives were not just the Ottoman
> > records of the Caliphate,
> >
> > but even the dark years of the country's modern
> > history, handwritten
> > accounts of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, with personal
> > photographs and
> > military diaries,and microfiche copies of Arabic
> > newspapers going back to
> > the early 1900s. But the older files and archives
> > were on the upper floors
> > of the library where petrol must have been used to
> > set fire so expertly to
> > the building. The heat was such that the marble
> > flooring had buckled upwards
> >
> > and the concrete stairs that I climbedhad been
> > cracked.
> >
> > The papers on the floor were almost too hot to
> > touch, bore no print or
> > writing, and crumbled into ash the moment I picked
> > them up. Again, standing
> > in this shroud of blue smoke and embers, I asked the
> > same question: why? So,
> >
> > as an all-too-painful reflection on what this means,
> > let me quote from the
> > shreds of paper that I found on the road outside,
> > blowing in the wind,
> > written by long-dead men who wrote to the Sublime
> > Porte in Istanbul or to
> > the Court of Sharif of Mecca with expressions of
> > loyalty and who signed
> > themselves "your slave". There was a request to
> > protect a camel convoy of
> > tea, rice and sugar, signed by Husni Attiya
> > al-Hijazi (recommending Abdul
> > Ghani-Naim and Ahmed Kindi as honest merchants), a
> > request for perfume and
> > advice from Jaber al-Ayashi of the royal court of
> > Sharif Hussein to Baghdad
> > to warn of robbers in the desert. "This is just to
> > give you our advice for
> > which you will be highly rewarded," Ayashi says. "If
> > you don't take our
> > advice, then we have warned you." A touch of Saddam
> > there, I thought. The
> > date was 1912.
> >
> > Some of the documents list the cost of bullets,
> > military horses and
> > artillery for Ottoman armies in Baghdad and Arabia,
> > others record the
> > opening of the first telephone exchange in the
> > Hejaz--soon to be Saudi
> > Arabia--while one recounts, from the village of
> > Azrak in modern-day Jordan,
> > the theft of clothes from a camel train by Ali bin
> > Kassem, who attacked his
> > interrogators "with a knife and tried to stab them
> > but was restrained and
> > later bought off". There is a 19th-century letter of
> > recommendation for a
> > merchant, Yahyia Messoudi, "a man of the highest
> > morals, of good conduct and
> >
> > who works with the [Ottoman] government." This, in
> > other words, was the
> > tapestry of Arab history--all that is left of it,
> > which fell into The
> > Independent's hands as the mass of documents
> > crackled in the immense heat of
> >
> > the ruins.
> >
> > King Faisal of the Hejaz, the ruler of Mecca, whose
> > staff are the authors of
> >
> > many of the letters I saved, was later deposed by
> > the Saudis. His son Faisel
> >
> > became king of Iraq--Winston Churchill gave him
> > Baghdad after the French
> > threw him out of Damascus--and his brother Abdullah
> > became the first king of
> >
> > Jordan, the father of King Hussein and the
> > grandfather of the present-day
> > Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah II.
> >
> > For almost a thousand years, Baghdad was the
> > cultural capital of the Arab
> > world, the most literate population in the Middle
> > East. Genghis Khan's
> > grandson burnt the city in the 13th century and, so
> > it was said, the Tigris
> > river ran black with the ink of books. Yesterday,
> > the black ashes of
> > thousands of ancient documents filled the skies of
> > Iraq.
> >
> > Why?
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
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Graduate Student
Library & Information Science
Champaign-Urbana, IL


"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the
homeless, whether the mad destruction is brought under the name
of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?"
(Gandhi)