RAPE OF MESOPOTAMIA
Dr. Jai Maharaj
Museums versus Oil Wells At the "End of History"
By Paul Street
Monday, April 14, 2003
"A country's identity, its value
and civilization resides in its history,"
says Raid Abdul Ridhar Muhammed, an Iraqi archaeologist.
"If a country's civilization is looted, as ours has been
here, its history ends. Please tell this to President
Bush," Muhammed asks New York Times reporter John Burns.
"Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi
people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a
humiliation" ("Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of Its
Treasure," New York Times, 13 April, 2003, A1).
An Interesting Comparison with the Nazis
The White House is deeply offended (officially at least)
by those who note the chilling parallel between Nazi
foreign policy and the Bush-Wolfowitz doctrine of
"preemptive" (really preventive) war currently being
enacted in Iraq. Remembering that all versions of racist
imperialism are not the same, then, let us note one key
difference between the way the Bush gang is proceeding
and how Adolf Hitler's Third Reich would have conquered
Baghdad.
The Nazis, we can be sure, would have made special
provision to safeguard, and then of course appropriate,
the monumental treasures of Mesopotamia and ancient
Sumerian civilization. No, not out of any special concern
or respect for other peoples' history: beyond the normal
looting instincts of invaders, the Nazis were eager to
identify themselves with selected aspects of past
civilizations and empires and therefore made a special
point of cataloguing and preserving the treasures of
occupied territories.
As Lynn Nichols notes in her award-winning book The Rape
of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third
Reich and the Second World War (New York, 1994), Hitler's
SS "had an art branch, the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral
Heritage), which sponsored archaeological research world
wide in the hope of finding confirmation of early and
glorious Germanic cultures." By the late 1930s,
"Ancestral Heritage" was "financing exotic projects
abroad," including elaborate, scientifically respectable
digs in South America, "determined to prove that the
Germanism of the occupied territories reached to earliest
prehistory." In the immediate aftermath of Hitler's
Polish Blitzkrieg, also sold (like "Operation Iraqi
Freedom") as a "preemptive campaign," Nazi Special Forces
prepared special lists of art works to be found and
preserved in a newly Germanized western Poland. "A
certain amount of damage and looting are inevitable in
the heat of war," notes Nichols, but in this invasion the
Germans acted on their "singularly detailed knowledge of
the location of works of art," safeguarding artifacts for
careful confiscation and preservation.
In a perverse and powerful way, history - both their own
and that of conquered nations - mattered to the masters
of European fascism. . . .
[...]
This is only an excerpt -- read the complete article at:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=3458
End of forwarded message
Jai Maharaj
http://www.mantra.com/jai
Om Shanti
Panchaang for 15 Chaitr 5103, Wednesday, April 16, 2003:
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Mesh Mase Krishna Pakshe Buddha Vasara Yuktayam
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