[MAI-NOT] The Rape of Mesopotamia--Museums versus Oil Wells At the "End of History"
Jonathan Larson
by Paul Street
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=3458
"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. It
would have unthinkable for them to let the historical artifacts and
cultural riches of Iraq slip away into the hands of anonymous looters.
"History is Bunk"
Things are different with the new bosses of Baghdad, employed by a
onetime C student history major who couldn't tell the difference
between a Mesopotamian fossil and a Mexican burrito. They represent
an insufferably narcissistic nation (still primarily obsessed with
what a military campaign that killed millions of Vietnamese did to
its own national psyche) whose "leaders" have long painted our their
country as the specially chosen, "exceptional," and practically
timeless answer to the grating past. America, we have all been asked
to believe, is the permanently modern City on a Hill (John Winthrop).
It "stands taller and sees farther" (Madeline Albright) than the rest
of the hopelessly "old" world. A more recent twist on America's
ever-evasive, a-historical sense of itself and the world sees the
"single sustainable model" of societal evolution represented by the
US - supposedly "liberal" mass consumer capitalism and
"representative democracy"
- as the "End of History." It is the glorious terminal point of
serious political contestation over the nature and meaning of
collective human existence. "History," according to the iconic
American mass-production automobile capitalist and virulent
anti-Semite Henry Ford, "is bunk."
For these and other reasons, it is not surprising that world
history's most powerful military force couldn't spare so much as a
single tank or two soldiers to guard the National Museum of Iraq
during the "war" for Baghdad.
Such a relatively tiny presence might have prevented the
disappearance of more than fifty thousand artifacts from what the
Chicago Tribune calls "the storehouse of civilization's cradle." And
it's not like the White House and Pentagon didn't know what was in
that storehouse: leading experts gave them elaborate lists of key
artifact sites, placing special emphasis on the National Museum.
"Mesopotamia," says Gil Stein, director of the University of
Chicago's prestigious Oriental Institute, "is the world's first
civilization. It's the first place to develop cities, the first place
where writing was invented.
And the artifacts from the excavations from there are the patrimony
for our entire civilization and entirely irreplaceable" (Chicago
Tribune,13 April, 2003, p.1).
"Whatever," say Bush and Rumsfeld. Their imperial arsenal includes
helicopters ("Apache," "Blackhawk" and "Comanche") named after tribes
from North America's own obliterated ancient civilizations and its
genocidal past. Who really gives a damn, they ask, when you get down
to it, about a bunch of "artey-facts" and fossils and such? That
stuff only matters, they think, to historians, archaeologists,
anthropologists and other assorted "liberal" "eggheads" who wouldn't
even know how to shoot a sword-wielding Arab like Harrison Ford did
in "Indiana Jones." For heaven's sake, as Rumsfeld loves to say, its
just too darn bad if a bunch of "old timey stuff"
(to quote Homer Simpson) gets lost on the road to paving over Mesopotamia.
After all, we've got a modern American and Ford-like job to do:
benevolently granting those poor Iraqis the mass-consumer items,
pseudo-representative semi-democracy (plutocracy), and soul-deadening
mass culture ("Baywatch Baghdad" is surely in its planning stages) we
know they crave.
A Disturbing Charge
According to one story appearing in publications around the world, US
armed forces actually encouraged the ransacking. According to Khaled
Bayomi, a Middle Eastern political researcher who witnessed the
looting of the National Museum, American troops inspired the plunder
for a very interesting reason. "The lack of jubilant scenes" of
grateful Iraqis greeting American conquerors, claims Bayomi, meant
that US forces "needed pictures of Iraqis who in different ways
demonstrated hatred for Saddam's regime." It's hard to believe that
such encouragement (if that's what took place) did not occur without
high-level approval (See "US Encouraged Ransacking" at www.
informationclearinghouse.info/article2842.ht).
The Oil Wells are Safe
Today, the American Empire's nice cop Colin Powell felt compelled
during a press conference to acknowledge the tragedy of the National
Museum. He pledged American assistance in the effort to recover the
lost items (no small job). Global outrage over the rape of
Mesopotamia has reached the front page of his nation's leading
newspapers, making it into Powell's own daily internal briefings.
But whatever the truth (or falsity) of the charge that Americans
cynically encouraged the looting of the museum and the sincerity (or
cynicism) of Powell's statement, it should be noted that the oil
wells of Iraq have been consistently, well and massively guarded by
British and American forces. But of course: it's important, after
all, that the people of the world retain their greatest imaginable
freedom of all at the End of History - the right to drive around
cheaply in ecocidal automobiles to and from glorious citadels of mass
consumption. Henry Ford would certainly approve.
Paul Street ( < mailto:pst...@cul-chicago.org >
pst...@cul-chicago.org) is a writer and former historian in Chicago,
Illinois.
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warmest regards
Jonathan
web site at:
http://villa.lakes.com/eltechno
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