Thanks to Evan Simpson (a former Zope Corporation colleague) for pointing me to these postings from Teresa Nielsen Hayden:
Loss, a thoughtful and saddening reflection on the looting of history in Baghdad. A poignant quote from the New York Times article cited:
Mr. Muhammad, the archaeologist, directed much of his anger at President Bush. “A country’s identity, its value and civilization resides in its history,” he said. “If a country’s civilization is looted, as ours has been here, its history ends. Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation. If we had stayed under the rule of Saddam Hussein, it would have been much better.”
And this is evidence of...?, citing an article in The Independent about the libraries of Baghdad being burned. From the Independent article cited:
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?To which Teresa responds with chilling speculation:
And why shouldn’t he [Donald Rumsfeld, suggesting the weapons all moved to Syria]? With so many records destroyed, in the library and elsewhere, we can claim anything about Saddam’s regime; and who can prove us wrong? If we really wanted to know about weapons of mass destruction, we wouldn’t have blown Chemical Ali’s house to smithereenies. That’s where those records were kept. Or if we did happen to blow it to smithereenies, we would have gone in and secured the site and whatever remained. It wouldn’t have been difficult; a reporter for the Daily Telegraph walked into the house while it was still being looted by local peasants and little kids. But we didn’t do that either. Nor did we secure the government offices and the homes of other high officials to see whether their paperwork held any clues. Darned if the looters didn’t destroy all that data too.
It's so much easier to rewrite history and reshape the world in our image if we destroy the past so people won't have to know the potentially terrifying future that awaits them.