From Nina Posidelow and Athanasia Mantzouranis, Destruction of Cultural and Historic Sites in Yugoslavia, Commission of Inquiry c/o International Action Center 39 West 14th Street, Room 206, New York, NY 10011

STATE COUNSELLOR OF JUSTICE OF THE SECOND CLASS M.Y. RAGINSKY (Assistant Prosecutor for the U.S.S.R.): May it please Your Honors, among the numerous and grievous war crimes committed by the Hitlerite conspirators -- crimes enumerated in detail in Count Three of the Indictment -- crimes against culture occupy a definite place of their own. These crimes expressed all the abomination and vandalism of German fascism.
The Hitlerite conspirators considered culture of the mind and of humanity as an obstacle to the fulfillment of their monstrous designs against mankind, and they removed this obstacle with their own typical cruelty. In working out their insane plans for world domination, the Hitlerite conspirators, side by side with the initiation and prosecution of predatory wars, prepared a campaign against world culture. They dreamed of turning Europe back to the days of her domination by the Huns and Teutons. They tried to set mankind back.

Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 8: 64th Day: Thursday 21st February 1946. Morning Session.

The 1954 Hague Convention on Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, the 1972 UNESCO Recommendation Concerning Protection, at the National Level, of the Cultural and Natural Heritage, and subsequent UNESCO and EU declarations, despite the laudable purpose that inspired them, are being breached on an ongoing, indeed a committed basis, to an even greater degree than ever before, what with the increasing dissolution of distinctions between war and peace, the increasing deployment of military technology and personnel in civil roles for administrative and surveillance purposes, and the argument that progress (a concept the definition of which will never be put to a vote) trumps all other considerations.

The laying waste of Serbia to make room for the plunder of its resources by NATO interests, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban, the intentional bombing of libraries and museums in Iraq during the Anglo-American invasion, have all been perpetrated from the same logic that these military forces have employed in intentionally engaging in the indiscriminate killing of civilians: that to subdue the national spirit of an independent people, one must wipe out their identity as a people. One erases the identity of a people by removing all signs of their accomplishments through the centuries, stamping on them, obliterating them beyond hope of recall.

To ensure their continued grasp on power, or rather to ensure their privileged status as client administrations, governments are resorting to war against their own populations. In Ireland, for example, economic warfare ensured (and continues to ensure) the silencing of elements who would be potentially a source of trouble - i.e. some of the most talented and capable, unable to find outlet for their abilities, were forced to seek it elsewhere, or undergo poverty and criminalization. But another aspect of the war of the self-appointed elites against the people has been gaining momentum in recent years, and it has a moral dimension: the defeat of the confidence of a people in itself and its past attainments through cultural destruction, the better to force through economic and political fixations that are alien to its interests. Propaganda is one aspect of this destruction: the portrayal of the heroes of Ireland’s past as, on the one hand, deviants, child abusers and/or psychologically inadequate weaklings, and on the other, thugs and murderers, has gained currency with a universally compliant media; another, which also relies on the helping hand the former is so willing and eager to extend when required, and which has had no shortage of eager helpers in its own right, is the physical destruction of places and monuments to which memory adheres.

This is not just a matter of destroying things. The concept of the manufactured, replaceable commodity has, whether one likes it or not, affected the perception of everything, not just products, insinuating the perilous idea that the loss of something old is nothing to worry about, as one can just as soon, if not buy another just as good, then console oneself with the thought that it must have been photographed and written about so often that that will do, and if not, well as there are so many others safe in museums one fewer will hardly make a dent, and old things aren’t that important anyway. But historical artefacts and artworks are not just things; they bear with them a record, a survival through centuries of clues to a different life. All artwork where it is of high quality shares in a measure this sense of persistence across millennia not merely of imagination, but a suggestion of the human qualities that it aspires toward. The loss of one of these through destruction or intentional neglect is not the loss of a valuable piece brand-named with its household artist, but the death of part of what human beings are capable of as non-animals, as moral beings.

The emergence at Tara, beyond all possibility of denial, of evidence that high civilization, and on a vast scale, preceded the cultural doldrums Ireland is plumbing today is a threat to the integrity of those whose interests are in furthering the country’s descent along the path to Euro-banality, a meaningless babble of voices contending powerlessly for attention. The emergence of a strong national movement in Ireland, which in the tradition of Irish patriotism showed itself capable of engaging people of every status and denomination in its service, is a danger that is still live. The problem is that such a movement has more than adequate evidence in its favour, despite the Nero-like abandon manifested by the modern State in its eagerness to sell, flatten, carve up and hand over everything in sight.

The ideologists of ruin have committed the basic error of overconfidence, which had them exposing their agenda before the demoralization project was complete; this is understandable, given that they believed themselves insured against calamity by the backing of powerful friends. Enjoying themselves too much, they forgot discretion.

Hence, the demolition of Teltown, the proposal by ESB’s Sportsco to create a golf course beside the Hill of Tara, the plan to site an incinerator in the Boyne Valley, the building of a hotel next to Trim Castle, the insistence of Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council that the Carrickmines complex be destroyed, the National Monuments Act 2004, the National Roads Authority’s lunatic (and taxpayer-funded) spending spree: stages on the path towards a clean-slate Ireland, a history-free Ireland, an Ireland by name only. That is the endgame of cultural genocide.

The problem the handlers now have to deal with is a dilemma: whether to admit everything and brazen it out, in the style of the Progressive Democrats, a party that exerts disproportionate influence in Government without having the essential prerequisite for such influence, popular support; or try to patch things up, Fianna Fáil style, and pretend it was all an oversight, committed in over-haste to achieve a future already decided on?

Either way, it may be too late to ensure for them the survival they were counting on.

©The Tara Foundation 2004