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| Where is Anand? this should interest him.
| Foucault: War is Production, the Production of Destruction.
| Orwell: He who owns the past owns the future.
| Destruction of architecture, the two together...
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The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War.
By Robert Bevan.
Reaktion Books.
240 pp. $29.95
Reviewed by Tom Lewis
Bevan argues that the destruction of buildings, be they historic,
symbolic, or merely utilitarian, “is often the result of political
imperatives rather than simply military necessity.” Architecture, he
contends, “is not just maimed in the crossfire; it is targeted for
assassination or mass murder.” Significant buildings may be destroyed as
an adjunct to genocide, as propaganda for a cause, as a way of
demoralizing an enemy, or out of simple personal vindictiveness on the
part of the attackers or the victors. Bevan offers a veritable taxonomy
of heritage destruction. He considers genocide and its attendant
“cultural cleansing” in cases from Armenia to Bosnia; symbolic attacks
upon buildings by terror groups, including, of course, the attacks of
9/11; the carpet-bombing of densely packed cities such as Hamburg and
Dresden in World War II; wholesale cultural annihilation, as in the
attempted Germanification of Warsaw by its Nazi occupiers in 1944;
religiously motivated destruction, such as the Taliban’s obliteration of
the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001; and the brutally dividing
walls erected in Berlin, Belfast, and Israel’s occupied territories,
where architecture serves as an instrument of suppression or exclusion.
Bevan’s grim statistics force readers to confront yet another dimension
of the savagery of our age. In the fighting that accompanied the
dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, “more than 1,386 historic
buildings in Sarajevo were destroyed or severely damaged. . . . Gazi
Husrev Beg, the central mosque dating from 1530, received 85 direct hits
from the Serbian big guns.”...
cont'd....
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=178977