27 February 2015

Video of the day -- smashing history


ISIS released this video of its men destroying ancient statues and other art in a museum in the Iraqi city of Mosul, on the grounds that it represents "idolatrous" ancient Mesopotamian paganism.  Some of these works date back as far as the ninth century BC.  They are destroying the achievements of their own ancestors who had a different religion.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Zosimus the Heathen said...

Good fucking God, that was depressing and hard to watch - just seeing all those irreplacable archeological treasures destroyed in the name of a worthless ideology that'll soon be forgotten (we can only hope anyway). What better illustration, though, of the intellectual bankruptcy of fundamentalism? (It puts me in mind a little of all the artists I've heard about who once produced great work, but disavowed it all once they'd "found" Jesus or Allah or whoever.) Gah, this shit makes me so angry!

27 February, 2015 04:32  
Blogger Ahab said...

War, slavery, countless atrocities, and now destruction of antiquities. Just when I think ISIS can't get any more revolting, new horrors emerge. Zosimus is right -- extremists are intellectually and morally bankrupt.

27 February, 2015 07:03  
Blogger Shaw Kenawe said...

There're only a few things I can think of do to counter this repulsive news:

Read more poetry; go to a museum and look at antiquities, listen to Mozart.

Really. It's all too much to comprehend.

28 February, 2015 09:29  
Blogger Infidel753 said...

Yes, it was disturbing and depressing. Not as much as the video of the burning of Mu'âdh al-Kassâsbah, which I couldn't even bring myself to watch. But like that video, it's a reminder of how religious fanatics have long behaved, from the Library of Alexandria to the Bâmiyân Buddha statues. It's just that in earlier times there were no cameras to show us what they did.

28 February, 2015 16:37  

Post a Comment

<< Home