- BURNING LIBRARIES (AD) - 

VERSION FRANCAISE

 

SUMMARY OF LEARNERS      INTRO & VOCAB      BURNING LIBRARIES (BCE)

 

Dates listed hereafter are Christian Era (CE) unless noted otherwise.  Please consult “Burning Libraries (BC)” for a list of prior atrocities and a preamble to this nauseating topic. 

The Book of Mormon proclaims that Christ carried His teachings around the world.  It is written therein that He went to what would become Latin America (?) where mighty Judeo-Christian empires originated from a boatload of Israelite refugees.  These Christian civilizations are said to have flourished for centuries and then degenerated into prehistoric obscurity.  A book of encoded golden pages, since lost, revealed this chronicle to the founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints.  Could its contents have been forecasts of our (the European New World’s) eventual colonization, fundamentalist betrayal of Christianity and self-destruction?

Others conclude that Jesus received Buddhist instruction during a youthful pilgrimage to Kashmir in India.  Recall the twenty-plus year gap in His biblical biography.  It has also been said that he went to Britain as a boy with his uncle to visit Cornish tin mines and in Egypt to study ancient scriptures.  He is also said to have lived to a ripe old age in Kashmir after his disciples spirited His comatose body away from itchy-fingered Roman executioners.

The giant library at Antioch burned down in 37 along with its city.  Before her defeat, native Queen Boadicea burned down Roman Londinium (London) in 50.  Three quarters of Rome burned down in 64.  Rome conquered Jerusalem in 63 and flattened it in 70.  In 68, the Romans annihilated Qumran, the Jewish Essene community that guarded the Dead Sea Scrolls.  It massacred the inhabitants of Caesurae Palestinae (a beautiful and very rich artificial harbor), Jotapata and Massada (the Jews’ last stand fortress) by 73.  Subsequent revolts targeted Jewish colonies in the great imperial cities (a lot of ‘decadent, cosmopolitan sophisticates’ as usual).  This massacre cost the Roman Empire hundreds of thousands more lives and equivalent treasure.  Rome conquered the island of Anglesey in 78, the last known refuge of the Druids.

Eighty CE saw the first destruction of one of the greatest Buddhist centers, Anuradhapura in Ceylon.  Founded in 437 BCE, it would be annihilated by Tamil invaders during the 8th century CE, this time for good.

During the first four hundred years of the Christian era, the city of Rome (and, by inference, every other metropolis worldwide) suffered about eleven major fires every decade.  A major fire was one that involved public buildings and entire residential districts.  This, from Johan Goudsblom’s Fire & Civilization, Allen Lane, London, 1992.  Doubtless, crowded wooden cities were naked to fire—at least until the 19th century when Europeans introduced masonry construction and mechanized fire brigades.  The City of Rome had organized firemen; but like a lot of unemployed rural residents nowadays, they tended to start fires so they could get paid to put them out.

In the first two centuries CE, the Cushan invaded, settled and administered a Golden Age of Buddhism in Northern India under the title Guptas.  The Gupta civilization burned out while stopping White (Caucasian) Hun invaders during the 5th century.  Several dynastic orders contended for imperial control of Southern and Central Asia, until devastating Muslim invasions rolled through from 1000 to 1400.

China’s capital, Ch’ang-an (population: one million), burned down in 24.  Pan Ku and his sister, Pan Chao, compiled the Han Shu (History of the Han) circa 70.  They began a long tradition of including a bibliography in every dynastic history.  Unfortunately, three library catastrophes nullified further Han progress.  Lo-yang, the Han capital, burned down circa 200.  More books were lost when government functionaries fled back to Ch’ang-an.  It burned down in turn in 208.  Lao-tse, the founder of Taoism, was Court Archivist under the Chou c. 220.  Nearly four hundred years of the Warring States Period (220-581) destroyed most Chinese collections.  In his Lang Huan Chi, Chang Hua (232-300) laments a vast imaginary library filled with precious ancient manuscripts lost to history.  By 279, the Western Tsin Dynasty’s catalog totaled 30,000 volumes.

The Huns had been held out of China beyond the Great Wall’s fortifications for six centuries.  They finally broke through and pillaged the Chin capitals, Loyang and Ch’ang-an, in 312.  Their destructive dominion lasted until 581.  The Liang Dynasty built up a 140,000-volume collection.  Unfortunately but predictably, that library burned down in 554.  A giant Buddhist grotto library was built in Hopei during the Six Dynasties Period from 221 to 589.  Over the next thousand years, this collection accumulated many Confucian classics by incising them in raw stone on the cave’s walls.  A similar facility was established next to the National Academy.

Circa 600, Niu Hung wrote a memorandum to the Sui Emperor about the destruction of previous libraries.  He suggested that imperial collections should be augmented by copying private books.  The Chia-tse palace accumulated 370,000 volumes by following this new policy.  In 605, the Chinese emperor, Liu Fang, sacked Indrapura, the Cham capital.  From 754, when the population of China was about fifty-three million; it fell to seventeen million by 764. 

Two key texts on Japanese history disappeared, the Kokki (National Record), during the Isshi (Itsushi) Incident in 645, and the Tennoki at some later date. 

In 758, Arabs and Persians sacked Canton.  The Tibetans invaded Chang-an in 763.  A British collector bought a copy of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra dating from 868, at Tun-huang in 1907.  It is the oldest known printed book.  Many Buddhist sects acknowledge that title as their supreme text. 

In 907, building materials from the ruins of Ch'ang-an were rafted to build the new capital, Kaifeng.  The Chinese invented printing presses around the same year.  Guttenberg’s imitation press wouldn’t startle Europe awake until 1454.  In 978, the Chinese imperial library held 80,000 volumes.  Universal civil service examinations petrified Mandarin dominion over China from 960 until the Communist overthrow of Manchurian Mandarins in the late 1940’s and perhaps even today.

Actually, the loss of Chinese technological superiority can be laid at the hooves of the Mongol Horde and its ninety-year suppression of Chinese culture, followed by centuries of mixed rule that slavishly imitated the Mongols in military tyranny and technological backwardness, if nothing else.  Sorta like African tyrants imitating the brutality of their White colonial predecessors. 

The Song Renaissance (circa 1200) produced a fountainhead of peaceful creativity and a shortage of weapon capability.  For the next seven centuries, various dynasties, both Chinese and foreign-born, would make sure that no such vulnerability reoccurred by suppressing Chinese creativity.  Paradoxically, as usual, the suppression of peace technology brought an equivalent standstill in new weapon development.  In attempting to strengthen China militarily, those dynasties only succeeded in weakening it to the verge of total helplessness.  Having recently recovered from that cultural disaster, the re-emergent Han are about to show off their stunning intellectual potential once again within the next few decades.

Internal chaos destroyed half the books in various imperial libraries by the end of Hsuan Tsung’s reign c. 1000.  Under T’ang leadership, both private and monastic libraries flourished for a while.  During the Northern Sung period, which lasted until 1126, the Chung-wen Hall was established in modern K’ai-feng.  This library contained 6,705 works in 73,877 volumes.  The Chin destroyed it when they took over.

For millennia, military expeditions dispatched from the Middle Kingdom raked foreign tribes, cities, libraries and monasteries along its expanding frontier.  The Tibetans fought back; they occupied the Chinese capital Ch’ang-an in 763.  They had been Chinese vassals before, would see their Drigung Temple burned down by a Mongol-Chinese army in 1290, and would be re-annexed in 1720.  Chinese occupiers torment the Tibetans and wreck their civilization as we speak.

Kublai Khan abandoned his Mongol capital, Karakorum, in favor of Peking.  In the mid-1300’s, vengeful Chinese destroyed Karakorum.  The Mongols sacked and burned Pagan, capital of Burma (founded in 849) in 1287.  The Shans would do so in 1299, permanently this time.  In the 13th century, Mongol chieftains consolidated every library their Chinese slaves implored them to spare and shipped the lot to Peking.  This collection expanded over the next seven centuries, as did others in China.  Serious damage resulted from the mid-1640 Manchu takeover, when Nanking, Peking, Fukien and Canton changed hands several times.

There followed the horrific Taiping rebellion with its twenty million dead (the concurrent American Civil War killed 600,000 in the worst war Americans have ever known).  Then two Opium Wars against the London/Boston Drug Cartel.  Believe it or not, this gang of thieves was led by Queen Victoria and backed by the Drug Lord financiers of Stanford University and America’s trans-continental railroads.  In pursuing its brain-dead War on Drugs, the DEA should confiscate those structures and auction them off to support its habit.

During the Boxer rebellion, European, American and Japanese armies sacked the Imperial Residence in Peking’s Forbidden City.  Thereafter, a couple of Sino-Japanese Wars would reduce Chinese libraries by three quarters.  Finally, Americans bankrolled the Nationalists during the Chinese Civil War.  This inept policy culminated in their evacuation to Taiwan.  Mao Tse Tung was a library assistant at one time.

 

Back to ‘Europe’ around the year zero.  Another Roman Emperor, Vespatian, celebrated his son’s destruction of Jerusalem by inserting a public library in the Forum he had built circa 70.  The Octavian library was destroyed in 80.  Emperor Domitian (81-96) had many wrecked libraries rebuilt—one of his several desperate and ruinous reconstruction decrees.  Seeking disappeared works, he dispatched emissaries to copy unique originals in Alexandria.  The fortunes he spent rebuilding civilization went wanting for mercenary armies, who proceeded to tear out, cut down and burn to ashes all his efforts at reconstruction.

In 105, Rome destroyed the four-century-old Dacian Empire’s capital, Sarmizegetusa, in what is now Romania.  Roman deserters manned the last bastions of resistance.  In the same way, Irish deserters from the American Army fought to the last when the U.S. invaded Mexico.  Meanwhile, the Texas Rangers served the U.S. Army in Mexico as Gestapo agents.  

In the 2nd century, the most famous western libraries were Como and Tivoli in Italy, Tripoli in Lebanon and Timgad in Algeria.  The Berbers destroyed this last city during the 7th century.  Each of these cities was fought over, sacked and eventually reduced to a dusty backwater.  In 130, the Romans erected Aelia Capitolina on the sixty-year-old ruins of Jerusalem.  Rome sacked the Persian capital city, Seleucia, in 165.  The Palatine library was destroyed circa 190.  In 196, Septimus Severus captured rebellious Byzantium; he burned it down, rebuilt it, (a common Roman practice) and renamed it Antoninia after his wife.  In 197, the Gaelic commercial center of Lugdunum (Lyons) was sacked during another Roman civil war.  Only recently has it recovered its famous prosperity.  Rome sacked Ctesiphon, capital of rival Persia, in 198.  It re-looted Syracuse in 216.

An earthquake toppled the Colossus of Rhodes – another Wonder of the World – in 224 BCE.  Erected fifty years earlier, it had stood 100 feet tall.  It was so superbly crafted, ships were said to make harbor between its outstretched feet.  This is assumed to be an impossible feat of engineering—what, another impossible feat of ancient engineering?  The city of Rhodes was damaged by the earthquake, both physically and spiritually.  Surviving inhabitants refused Egyptian king Ptolemy III’s offer to finance the reconstruction of that famous statue of Helios, their patron sun god.

Bishop Alexander established the Latin Library in Jerusalem.  Around that time, Origen & Pamphilus created a large library in Caesarea, now a ruin.  Heruli Goths sacked Philipolis in 250.  Shapur I of Persia sacked Antioch twice in 256.  Meanwhile, busy Goths burned down Ephesus in 262.  Ephesus was the New York City of Asia at that time.  Its temple of Diana (Artemis) was another Wonder of the World.  It held the third greatest library in the Western World, after those of Alexandria and Pergamum.  As noted earlier, it had already been burned down at least once.  They went on to sack Chalcedon, Nice, Pruse, Apanda, Cius, Athens Corinth, Sparta, Argos, Nicomedia and many other cities from 265 to 277.

Alexandria endured fifteen years of civil war, famine and plague from 250 to 265.  Another Roman Emperor suppressed a revolt in Alexandria in 272 (with untold damage to the Library).  He defeated the Goths and Alemanni and then sacked Palmyra in 273.  Franks destroyed Syracuse around 280.  Another Roman Emperor suppressed another Alexandrine revolt and sacked the town in 295.  Bursis and Coptos were sacked under his orders.  In 298, he ordered all Christian texts burnt, churches destroyed and worship outlawed. 

This massive purge probably cancelled the last opportunity to chronicle Christ’s life accurately.  

The library at Antioch burned down once again in 363 along with the rest of the city.  Sometime between 300 and 500, the city of Ubar, the primary desert way station for the incense caravans of Arabia, collapsed into a sinkhole.  Mohammed offers its destruction as a lesson to the unfaithful.

In 365 Egypt, Sicily, Dalmatia and Greece were inundated by a tsunami that an oceanic earthquake drove two miles inland.  Fifty thousand people died in Alexandria alone.  In 367, the Bishop there ordered Egyptians to burn all non-canonical religious writings.  The Nag Hammadi heretical texts (rediscovered in 1945) were survivors of this holocaust.  A Roman Emperor commanded the mass incineration of all non-Christian books in 373, the year the Castillians burned down Lisbon.  A Christian mob led by the archbishop of Alexandria destroyed its Serapeum (Temple of Serapis) in 391.  That was the same year a Byzantine Emperor ordered that every pagan temple be razed.  In 401, the final version of Ephesus’ Temple of Artemis was destroyed by order of St. John Chrysostom. 

Some historians attribute the next thousand years’ Dark Age to these alternating acts of Christian and Pagan fanaticism.  You can’t stage a respectable Dark Age without burning all the books beforehand.

The Vandals sacked Rheims, Amiens, Arras and Tournai around 406.  They sacked and nearly destroyed Marsala, a prosperous Sicilian city that was nearly 800 years old in 440.  Visigoths stormed and sacked Rome in 410, a feat the Vandals reprised in 455. 

A Chinese Army chased the Huns from their steppe homeland in 91, all the way across Asia to Europe.  The Huns dealt similar destruction to everyone they encountered from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean around 450.  Except for Paris and Rome, the western and southern limits of Attila’s raids. 

St. Cyril of Alexandria led his monks to mob, torture and kill Hypatia, a Neo-platonist philosopher renowned for her wisdom and beauty.  The Persians sacked Miletus in 494 and Amida in 502.  Another Christian zealot, the Emperor Justinian, closed the thousand-year-old University of Athens in 529, thus ending Neo-Platonism and its research in reincarnation.  The Byzantines attempted and failed to conquer Persia, then failed to retake the Western Roman Empire from the barbarians.  All they really managed to accomplish was to gut almost every city in North Africa, Italy, Armenia and Anatolia.  

Nanjing was destroyed by fire in 589.  That same year, the Benedictines founded the Monastery of Monte Casino.  St. Benedict, their patron, loathed scholarship.  Despite his bias, it became another great library after his death.  Destroyed by the Lombards in 585, by Saracens in 884, by Normans in 1046 and by an earthquake in 1349, it would be leveled by American bombers during World War II.  The Franks sacked Tarragona, the Roman capital of Spain, during the 5th century CE.

Antioch was another great library city on Turkey’s southern shore.  Catastrophic earthquakes (the one in 526 killed 250,000 inhabitants) alternated with a succession of military sacks (by Persians in 538 and 611, Arabs in 637, Seljuk Turks in 1085, Crusaders in 1098, Mamelukes of Egypt in 1268 and Ottoman Turks in 1516) to reduce this magnificent center of commerce and learning into a provincial backwater.  The Library of Rome burned in 535; it was a total loss in 546.

Massive earthquakes and plagues wracked the world around 543; they halved Europe’s population within fifty years.  By 550, the crucifix had become a fashionable Christian ornament.  It’s strange how nature-tormented Christians learned to decorate their bodies with this idolatrous and shadistic jewelry.  Circa 600, Pope Gregory I (The Great, as usual) burned down the library of Palatine Apollo.  The Persians sacked Damascus in 614 and Jerusalem in 615, then again in 619.  Vyadhapura, Hindu Funan capital of the first Khmer kingdom, was taken over by the Chenla in the 7th century.

The list of towns Muslims captured with varying degrees of destruction includes but is not limited to Pella, Damascus, Homs and Emesa in 635; Palmyra, Petra and the six sophisticated desert cities of the Nabateans wiped out in 636.  The Muslims took Ctesiphon in 637.  They finally destroyed Persia’s official state religion, Zoroastrianism.  Imagine the book-burning parties they must have held!  Ibn Khaldun wrote:

 

“Umar wrote [to the local Muslim commander who had requested permission to distribute these books to his troops as booty]: ‘Throw them into the water.  If what they contain is right guidance, God has given us better guidance.  If it is error, God has protected us against it.’”  The Muqadimmah: An Introduction to History, Franz Rosenthal, translator, Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press, 1967, p. 373.

  

Jerusalem fell in the wake of this destruction, then Tripoli and Antioch in 638, Aleppo in 639, Caesarea and Gaza in 640, Babylon in 641, Ascalon in 644, and Tripoli again in 645.  Nanking in China was destroyed in the 690’s. 

In Alexandria in 642, Arab conquerors found 700,000 volumes.  “Enough kindling to heat Alexandria’s baths for six months.”  Umar again – Mohammed’s first Successor and Caliph of the Faith – declared that all necessary knowledge could be found in the Koran and any knowledge outside the Koran must be pernicious. 

Sound familiar?  Fundamentalists cannot be told apart, regardless of their religion, date of birth or mother race.  Their mothers must have loved them, nonetheless…

The list goes on.  Cyrene and Tripoli, which the Muslims took in 643; rebellious Alexandria again in 645 (ending its manuscript exchange once-and-for-all); Cyprus in 649; Rhodes in 654; Kabul in 664, 708 and 1504; Bokhara in 674 and 710; Samarkhand (where Chinese craftsmen taught Muslims the art of paper-making) in 676 and 711; Carthage in 698; Gibraltar, Lisbon (burned) and Toledo in 711; Samarkhand again in 712; Khwarizm, Ferghana, Tashkent and Kashgar in 713; Multan in 715; Lisbon in 717; Narbonne in 719; Seville in 721 (where the Western Gothic King Isidor’s library was destroyed); Carcassonne and Nimes in 726; Bordeaux (burned down) in 732; Derbent in 733; Samarkhand, once and for all, in 737 or 738.  The Franks took Narbonne back from the Muslims in 759.  Palermo, Sicily fell to them in 831, independent Capua in 840, Bari in 841.  It would prosper as a Muslim stronghold until 1062 when the Pisans sacked it, then 1072 when the Normans took it and rebuilt it as their Sicilian capital.

The monastery at Lindisfarne was the missionary center of the Celtic Church.  Vikings sacked it at the end of the 8th century – a forewarning of escalating Viking raids into Britain.  Ravenna fell to the Lombards in 751.  In 756, the Briton capital Alcluith was captured by the Picts. 

The Haeinsa temple, established in 802 near the Korean city of Taegu, contains 80,000 printing blocks engraved with Buddhist scriptures dating from the 13th century.

The Javanese invaded Anam and Champa in 774.  In 832, the Pyu capital, Sri Kshetra, was destroyed during a Thai raid led by Nanchao.  Escaping northwards, its urban population was eventually taken captive by the Mon.  Beneficiaries of trade between India and the rest of Southeast Asia, the Pyus were the most peaceful people in the region.  They punished rare crimes with great leniency and held democratic elections for their leaders.  Boys and girls went to Buddhist schools until they were twenty, establishing a custom of near-universal literacy in Burma ever since.  They were so non-violent, they would not make silk because that involved killing silk worms. 

In 807, Muslim raiders plundered Rhodes; in 840, they sacked Rome.  Savage Kyrgyz Turks destroyed the Uighur capital city of Karablagasun during the same year.  In later centuries, surviving Uighur exiles would serve the Mongols as mercenary scholars (a well-paid, perilous and seldom mentioned honor). 

In 871, ex-slaves destroyed Basra.  Arab Muslims fought each other and the Turks to the death.  At first, they did so as Northern and Southern Arabs, later as Shia and Sunni sectarians.  Together, they sacked many Muslim towns including Basra in 923, Kufa in 925 and Mecca in 929.  I doubt that Mohammed would have approved.

The Patriarch of Constantinople, Photius (c. 820-891) compiled his Bibliotheca, an account of two hundred eighty earlier texts.  It is a valuable reference source for many lost works. 

In 846, a Muslim army from Cordoba sacked Leon; another sacked Rome and burnt St. Peters.  In 878, Muslims conquered Syracuse.  In 985, Muslims burned Barcelona and then Leon in 988.  In 976 al-Mansur, the new regent for the child Caliph of Cordoba,

 

“… proceeded to the library of al-Hakam [his father, the ex-Caliph], caused all the writings therein contained to be brought forth in the presence of a number of theologians and ordered these latter to put on one side, with the exception of medical texts and treatises on arithmetic, all those books dealing with the sciences of the ancients: logic, astronomy and other sciences cultivated by the Greeks.  When these had been separated from all the books relating to lexicography, grammar, poetry, history, medicine, jurisprudence, traditions, in short those sciences recognized by the Andalusians, Ibn Abi ‘Amir commanded that the works treating of the ancient sciences should be burned.  Some were in fact committed to the flames; others were flung into the palace moats, or buried, or destroyed in some other manner.  Ibn Abi ‘Amir acted in this fashion in order to ingratiate himself with the people of al-Andalus and to discredit in their eyes the principles followed by al-Hakam.  Indeed, these sciences were ill regarded by the older generation and criticized by the leading men.  The majority of those then engaged in the study of philosophy lost their ardor and kept secret what they knew of these sciences, only cultivating openly the branches permitted them, such as arithmetic, the rules governing the partition of inheritances, medicine and the like.”  Toynbee, Arnold, ed., Cities in History, McCraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1973, p. 177.

 

Around the year 999, the same year he murdered his brother, Mahmud of Ghazni destroyed the Hindu temple dedicated to Shiva at Somnath in Gujarat.  Then he burned the famous library of the Fatimids in Bokhara.  He may have advertised himself as a patron of the arts, but in reality he was just another two-bit religious fanatic.  He built the Celestial Bride Mosque in Ghazni.  Christian Barcelona sacked Cordoba in 1010.  Muslims raided Pisa in 1011: their last big raid into Italy.  In 1013, Berber rebels seized and sacked Cordoba wracked by internal unrest.  Al-Mansur’s palace and carefully censored library were utterly destroyed.  In 1071 Seljuk Turks took Jerusalem from the Fatimid Muslims, then they fought each other among its ruins.

Between 1014 and 1018, Byzantine Basil II attacked Bulgaria.  Victorious in battle, he had 15,000 prisoners blinded and then ordered this grim procession sent home: one man out of every hundred got to keep one eye intact to guide the others.  The Bulgarian King threw himself from his own battlements when he beheld this sorry remnant of his army stumble home.  That same year, the Poles took Kiev. 

In 1019, a Liao army was driven out of Koryo (Korea).  King Anawratha (1044-1077) was the founder of the Myanmar (Burmese) empire.  He ‘rescued’ the Pegu half of the Mon kingdom from a Khmer raid and then took over the Thaton half, taking home to Pagan 30 sets of the Buddhist canon (Tripitaka), about 30,000 Mon monks and artisans and the captive king of Pegu.  Though the Mons dominated Burmese culture for two centuries thereafter, it was a love-hate relationship based on military dominance on the one hand and cultural superiority on the other.  Koryo built a wall from sea to sea in 1044.

Seljuk Turks captured Ceasarea in 1067; in 1076 they sacked Jerusalem (thus inciting the Crusades).  In the same year, Almoravid fanatics took the salt and gold trading center of Kumbi.  They massacred its pagan majority and imposed Islam on the Kingdom of Ghana.  Kumbi endured a succession of invaders and reformers until it collapsed in 1240; a Soso chief sacked it in 1203.  Norman allies of Pope Gregory VII sacked Rome in 1084.  By 1102 the Muslims had taken every town in Portugal, and in Spain up to Valencia.  The Christians besieged and retook Toledo in 1085.  Portugal would not be entirely regained for Christianity until 1147; Spain, until 1340.  After which the Christians would fight among themselves for another century.  Or longer?  The Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s ate up another million victims.  In 1162, Frederick I Barbarossa (Redbeard) destroyed Milan.

The library of Banu Ammar, the greatest library in Syria, was scattered and destroyed during the sack of Tripoli by Genoese marines in 1109.  This destruction was mirrored in that of many rich cities throughout the eastern Mediterranean -- including Jerusalem, Caesarea and on the very rich island of Cyprus (thanks to Richard the Lionheart) -- during the Crusades (1096 to 1291: eight major expeditions and many minor ones during which a million Europeans and uncounted Muslims, Jews and native Christians died as a result of combat). 

In 1170, Seljuk Turks destroyed the Armenian library in Syunik with its 10,000 manuscripts.  In 1171, the Kurdish Sunni Saladin (Salah-al-din Yousouf) annihilated the Shia Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo along with many of its libraries; he retook Jerusalem for Islam by 1187, as well as many other Crusader towns.  Conquering Sicily and Italy in a series of complicated and bloody wars, the Normans took Bari, Tripoli, Mahadia, Malta and Corfu.  They sacked Athens, Corinth and Thebes from 1146 to 1152.

The Muslim invasion of Hindu India induced massive mortality and destruction.  Battles and subsequent massacres occurred at Peshawar in 1008, Thaneswar in 1014, Kanauj in 1018, (the University of Nalanda was destroyed in 1183), Lahore in 1186, Kathiawar in 1023, and Tarawari in 1191.  In 1192, 120,000 Muslims demolished the Hindu temples at Ajmer.  Delhi fell in 1193, Benares in 1194, Badaun and Kannauj in 1195, Kalinja in 1202, Magadha and Bengal from 1201 to 1203.  In 1234, Chahadadeva captured Narwar from the Muslims.  The Yadava capital Devagiri fell in 1294, Ramthanbor in 1301, Chitor in 1303, most of the Deccan by 1311, Kabul in 1504, Agra and Delhi in 1525 and Talikot in 1564.  From the 13th to the 19th century, cruel Moslem rulers destroyed a hundred Hindu temples dedicated to Shiva in the pilgrimage city of Benares alone. 

Usually, they erected mosques over the ruins—the way Christian evangelicals built churches over pagan ruins, and Communists built community centers over Christian ruins, at gunpoint.  This has been an endless source of friction since, from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to most cities in Northern India.  After all, what the Muslims got away with at sword-point a thousand years ago, they’re not about to permit anyone to do to them today.  And it has never occurred to any of these fanatics – Muslim, atheist or otherwise – that inviting Allah into a building and ejecting Shiva from the same building, or inviting the Christian God and evicting the Gods of old, is the same as rejecting every version of God including one’s own.

God has more patience than I do with silly humans nit picking each other to death over their contradictory, restrictive, and yammering definitions of God’s infinite, immeasurable and limitless love.

The Kingdom of East Java was destroyed in 1017.  Tangut, Khmer, Mon, Chola (who invaded Malayu in 1025) Viet, Burmese, Srivijaya, Annamese and Champa civilizations fought one another across every portion of the Asian mainland that Turks, Mongols and Muslims had spared.  Equivalent massacres blossomed in the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos.  Many islands contained one or more warring tribes and city-states.  Like most societies, they destroyed each other’s citadels and libraries at every opportunity.

Great Novgorod, the seat of the Russian state under the Viking Rurik, was established in 862.  It repulsed attacks from Teutonic and Livonian Knights, from the Swedes and the Mongols.  It was taken by Ivan III of Moscow and laid waste by Ivan IV.  The Uzbeks took Meshed, holy Shiite city, in 1582.  Moscow burnt down in 1570; there were 200,000 dead.  Khiva was destroyed in 1603, Karakorum in 1688.

The Lombards, Marcomanni, Gepidae, Heruli, Vandals, Avars, Burgundi, Helvetii, Teutons, Alans, Franks, Saxons, Goths, Huns, Vikings, Magyars and Pechnegs formed a host of killer swarms.  Thanks to them, no city, monastery or library in Eurasia and North Africa survived the decline of Roman power and the onset of Christianity.  Just like nowadays, civilization was on the verge of total annihilation at the hands of born-again Huns who retained just enough familiarity with true civilization to destroy it.

Charlemagne could barely read and he couldn’t write.  He took hostage almost every educated nobleman in Europe, and then had most of them killed to secure his hold over the Empire.  He destroyed the independent commercial center of Fiume on the Adriatic.  Circa 800, he and his mentor, Alcuin, had to recruit clerical volunteers from the four corners of the cramped Catholic world: (North Africa, Rome, Ireland and Byzantium) to reteach noble orphans their forgotten ABC’s.  His grandson, Charles the Bald, was a bibliophile.  He created his own library and added to the Palace’s.  Both libraries disappeared after his death.  Abbey libraries were established at Tours, Cluny, Corvey and Fulda (the military chokepoint of Germany).  Like most ‘great’ libraries of this period, they boasted a few hundred volumes at most—and all of them perished.  Nearly all of London burned down in 798.

Meanwhile, mead-soaked Vikings toasted each other from hollowed human skulls (from which the term Sköll!).  They burned down Aachen and Cologne (Köln) around 800, sacked London, Cadiz and Pisa.  They sacked the famous Monastery of Iona in 806, Clonmore in 836.  The Danes took Dublin in 851.  York, Canterbury with its Cathedral, London, Paris, Aix, Worms, Algerica and Toulouse, all these and lesser satellites succumbed by 861.  Looting their way from the White Sea southwards along Russian rivers, Varengian Norsemen sacked Constantinople in 865.  After this display of military prowess, they signed on as its mercenaries.

After an abrupt Roman evacuation, the backwater that was England absorbed centuries of raids, massacres and invasions by Celts, renegade Gallo-Romans, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Irish, Jutes, Picts, Scots, Vikings and assorted barbarians.  Alfred the Great of England staged a revival of Old English literature around 890. 

In 978, the Holy Roman Emperor and Charlemagne’s heir apparent sacked Aix-la-Chapelle, Charlemagne’s coronation city.  London burned down again in 982.  Another Caliph destroyed Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher in 1009.  Oghuz Turks sacked Tabriz in 1029.  Benares, India, was plundered by a Punjabi (Muslim) army in 1034.  In 1084 the Normans sacked Rome.  Am I repeating myself?  Resurgent Christian crusaders massacred the populations of Antioch in 1098 and Jerusalem in 1099. 

Venice burned in 1106.  Crusaders destroyed Tripoli’s thousand-year-old library during a siege in 1109.  They sacked Christian Byzantium and destroyed its libraries in 1204.  Pisa sacked Amalfi, Italy in 1135 and 1137.  In 1151, the Persians burned down Chazni.  In 1177, the Chams sacked Angkor Wat.  Zimbabwe, capital of a mining empire intermittently rich since the 3rd century CE, was abandoned for unknown reasons during the 11th century.  In 1184, the great Abbey at Glastonbury, site of one of the oldest Christian churches in Europe, (do you recall my mention of Jesus visiting Britain?) burned down along with all its sacred scriptures.

Constantinople and its libraries started up in 330.  Its first Hagia Sophia (Church of Divine Wisdom) burned down in 360; the second, in 532.  Around 475 a fire destroyed 120,000 volumes.  This collection grew back to 600,000 volumes.  In 551 the last Latin library in Constantinople was destroyed.  Thereafter, collected works were written solely in Greek.  A tidal wave crushed Beirut during the same year; it would it take another ten centuries to recover its prior glory. 

Constantinople boasted a half million inhabitants, free bread, circuses and rudimentary medical care for the poor.  Savage rioting between Blue (reactionary) and Green (radical) parties, however, accelerated the Empire’s decline.  Actually, these mutual benefit societies opposed each other on every social issue including religion and politics, largely because they championed different sides during Hippodrome chariot races—another instance of sports enthusiasm run amok.  This zero-sum patronage system – doling out minimal benefits after enormous military taxes had been paid – set its members tooth and nail against each other.  Finally, the Imperial Guard waded into one of their worst riots and massacred all the Greens—the Blues were the Empress’ favorites.  These ridiculous squabbles (reminiscent of the factional squabbling between interchangeable American Democrats and Republicans) caused a military disaster during the battle of Manzikert in 1071, during which the Seljuk Turks massacred the entire Byzantine army.  This disaster befell the army even though it was at the height of its military power and was costing its civilian population a fortune to support.  It happened largely because the top commanders were Green/Blue political fanatics and wouldn’t support each other during the battle.

In 1204 Frankish and Venetian Crusaders sacked Christian Constantinople and its libraries.  In 1212 London burned down.  In 1236 the Holy Roman Emperor burned down Vicenza.  French Louis IX had the Talmud burned in Paris.  In 1453 the Turks finally took Constantinople with grievous loss to life and property.  Shiploads of books were evacuated to Venice and elsewhere, and from thence into oblivion.  Later, the Turks destroyed Trebizond on the Black Sea: the last refuge of the ‘Roman’ emperors.

1453 was the year the Vatican established its own Library.  The Catholic Pope hadn’t lifted a finger to save Greek Orthodox Constantinople from the Muslims.  The Vatican Library is famous for having blacklisted unique manuscripts of Europe’s greatest works, on a Papal Index Librorum Prohibitorium (index of forbidden books, commonly called The Index).  Papal suppression of rare knowledge stifled intellectual discourse for centuries—almost as effectively as our media-glut of commercial-based white noise does so today.

During the European Dark Ages, brilliant Muslim scholars guarded Koranic commentaries as well as some Greek and Roman thought.  Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham (Arabic: أبو علي الحسن بن الحسن بن الهيثم, Latinized: Alhacen or (deprecated) Alhazen) (965 – 1039),  wrote two hundred books, at least ninety-six scientific texts, of which more than fifty have survived in whole or in part.  He is one of the originators of modern science.

Yet around 1100, a pious Muslim scholar concluded that ancient Greek texts led to “loss of belief in the origin of the world and in the creator.”  In 1150, the latest Caliph set alight the enormous philosophical library of Baghdad (a relatively recent city, established in 762), saving onrushing Mongols the trouble.  Actually, when the Mongols took Baghdad with near-total massacre of its inhabitants, its river Tigris was said to have run red with blood from bodies thrown into it, then black with ink from books treated likewise. 

Some of these tidbits were taken from L. Sprague de Camp’s The Ancient Engineers, Dorset Press, 1963.  A handful of enlightened Christians and Jews preserved the Old and New Testaments, as well as a few Talmudic and monastic commentaries.  Anyone else’s thoughts – Persia’s Zoroastrian religion/bureaucracy and the Hellenized Buddhism of the Cushan – were extirpated without mercy. 

Fundamentalist Taliban gangsters are putting the finishing touches to this task today.  They’ve wrecked the last of countless Buddhist statues that once lined the Silk Road.  Across the Mediterranean and South Asia, thousands of beautiful statues were destroyed or had their noses and facial features gouged out―half by Christian iconoclasts and half by Muslim fanatics.  I don’t think this vandalism had anything to do with Jesus’ or Mohammed’s teachings, and I doubt if either of them would have approved.  Such vandalism makes religion look bad to civilized outsiders: just a bunch of snot-nosed, ignorant vandals.  One should expect fewer conversions that way; and both Jesus and Mohammed were great believers in gathering as many converts as possible through peacemaking and noble generosity.

Constantinople was nearly spared from Turkish sack by the Mongols who conquered the largest contiguous empire in history.  Calling themselves the Chin dynasty, Juchen Mongols destroyed the Sung capital, Kaifeng twice in 1126 and 1127.  Nanking, the Southern Sung capital, fell to them in 1127.  Nomad Mongols despised cities; they tended to level them on the run.  Major cities sacrificed to the Mongols include but are not limited to: Peking and the Chinese cities north of the Yellow River, in 1215; Susa in 1218 (dating back to 5000 BCE; leveled prior by the Assyrian King Assurbanipal in 647 BCE and in 638 CE when Muslim armies conquered Persia),  Khojend, Otrar, Bokhara (which surrendered without a fight, but was destroyed anyway), and Samarkand in 1220; Zenjan, Ghazni, Gurganj, Nishapur, Merv, Balkh, Thalequan, Bamian, Ghulghuleh in 1221; Herat, Astrakhan and Sudak in 1222; Ninghsia in 1227; Tbilisi, Erivan and Baku between 1231 and 1236; many south central Chinese cities including Pien Liang (Kaifeng) in 1234; Moscow and Kaluga in 1237; Kiev in 1240; Cracow, Pest and Lahore in 1241; Nanchao, China in 1253; the major cities of Koryo, 1253-57; Hanoi in 1257; Baghdad in 1258 (see above). 

A Khwarezmian army fled the Mongols in good order; it managed to sack Jerusalem in 1244.  Mongols took Hanoi in 1257; they destroyed Maiyafarign; Alamut (where the great Persian historian and Mongol bureaucrat, ‘Ala ad-Din Juviani,  persuaded the Mongol tyrant Hulägu to spare the precious Library of the Assassins (Isma’ilis); Baghdad in 1258; Cracow, Sandomir, Bythom  and Sidon in 1259; Aleppo and Nablus in 1260; Mosul in 1262 (at the time, Mosul was world-famous for its beautiful paintings – typical patterns for mosque decoration,  since – for its brilliant enamel and metalwork, and for the fabric muslin); Urgench, Khiva and Bukhara in 1273; Hangchow in 1276; Chaochow and Canton in 1278 and 1279 (exterminating heroic Sung resistance in China); Bhamo in 1283; Hanoi in 1285; Pagan and Hanoi, for the last time in 1287.

Shortly thereafter, the indomitable Annamese ejected the Mongols.  Any amateur historian could have forewarned French, Japanese and American invaders of their eventual defeat by Vietnamese Nationalists.  If only they’d bothered to listen.  The Soviet invaders of Afghanistan, likewise.  The only people who beat Alexander the Gross in a fair fight were Afghan Gypsies.  The only people who stopped the Mongols on a battlefield were Egyptian Mamelukes and the Vietnamese, plus Indonesian and Japanese islanders.  Of course, this victory wasn’t always good news.  In 1291, the Mamelukes destroyed Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Haifa.

It was said that a comely virgin balancing a pitcher of gold on her head could walk the length of the Silk Road without fear of molestation – except, probably, by Mongol watchmen.  For the first time in history, Marco Polo and his party could cross the length of Asia under one passport.  Humans purchased this hyper-security with untold suffering and waste.  How badly do we want to feel secure?  This Highway to Hell became the transmission route of the Black Death.

The National Geographic Society published a beautiful, oversized book called Peoples and Places of the Past: The National Geographic Illustrated Cultural Atlas of the Ancient World, 1983.  One of that society’s countless informative, inexpensive and highly entertaining historical texts; not to mention the cheapest super-high qualify magazine in circulation, many issues of which contain beautifully drawn maps and posters.  Bless them.  This book’s three-foot by two-foot, full-folio title page contained a giant picture and the following caption on the next page: 

 

“Afghan [camel] riders pick their way past the ruined citadel now known as Shar-e-Gholgola, the ‘city of screams.’  Once the seat of empire and a lush, prosperous metropolis, the city fell before Mongol invaders in the 13th century.”  

 

Why do my daydreams torment me with equivalent images of a ‘planet of screams’: this desolate Earth?  Can’t we do better than that?

 

In 1081, Hiei monks burned down the monastery at Miidera.  In 1113, 20,000 armed monks attacked Enryajuji.  In 1165, Hiei monks burned the Hosso fortress in Kyoto.  In 1193, Zen was prohibited in Japan.  The Japanese stopped two Mongol invasions on their beaches, with a lot of help from kamikaze (Divine Wind) typhoons.  Thereafter, the Japanese fought civil wars among themselves for centuries.  Internally pacified by force, they launched the first of a series of viciously futile invasions of Korea.  The Japanese drew inspiration for their Neo-Confucian religion, from books they stole from Korea’s ransacked libraries.  In 1275, a major library was founded in Kanazawa (part of Yokohama), intending to collect every book written in Chinese and Japanese.  Though diminished, it still exists. 

The Mongols invaded Java by sea and burned its capital, Kediri or Daha, in 1293.  Shortly thereafter, the Javanese expelled the Mongols.  The Mamelukes destroyed Sis, Adana, Tarsus and Lajazzo in 1275.  In 1303 Alexandria was flooded once again by a monstrous tidal ware.

The Egyptians destroyed Tripoli in 1289; the Muslims, Arbela in 1310.  There followed the Mongol destruction of the Genoese Crimean colony of Kafa in 1308 (where and when the Black Plague was released into Europe through primitive germ warfare and commercial shipping); Kalinin in 1335; Herat in 1341; Kashgar in 1380; Herat again in 1381; Moscow in 1382; Fars in 1386; Karakorum in 1388; Smyrna and Baghdad again in 1393; Astrakhan and Serai in 1395; Delhi and Meerut in 1399; Aleppo and Damascus in 1400; Baghdad once again in 1401; Angora and Smyrna in 1402.  Once the Mongols got going, nothing but a death in their own leadership and subsequent feuds could slow down their whirlwind of destruction.

Around 1405, the Turk/Mongol butcher Tamerlane unleashed more chaos across Central Asia than can be imagined.  Also known as Timur the Lame, he was a devout Muslim and brilliant psychopath.  He killed adherents of every creed with ecumenical gusto.  His annihilation of Delhi cost over 80,000 lives; the city would take a century to recover.  Hundreds of thousands of victims were butchered under Timur’s personal supervision.  Meanwhile, he ordered the best artisans he could find to guild his magnificent capital, Samarkand.  He spared Mosul from siege and rebuilt its pontoon bridge across the Tigris. 

His city-kill credits include Balkh in 1370, Urgench in 1379, Abdizhan in 1375, Isfarian in 1381, Zaranj in 1383, Asterabad in 1384, Kars and Tiflis in 1386, Van and Ispahan (70,000 dead) in 1387, Tiflis in 1400, Baghdad (with 90,000 dead) in 1401.  His rivals destroyed Moscow, Vladimir, Yriiel, Mozhaisk in 1382; and Tabriz in 1386.  Tamerlane destroyed Azov in 1395; Astrakhan and Sarai in 1396; Multan and Talamba in 1398; Delhi and Miraj in 1399; Aleppo, Moma, Homs and Baalbek in 1400; Damascus in 1401; the Ottoman capital of Bursa, Smyrna (Izmir) and Sardis in 1402.  Tamerlane died in Otrar on January 19, 1405; his tomb was protected by executing all its diggers.  His death cut short his plan to annihilate Chinese civilization, once and for all, and turn its rotting corpse into the pivot point for his conquest of the entire world.

Fourth Crusaders sacked Zara in 1202 and Thessalonica in 1204.  These so-called crusaders destroyed every city and massacred everyone they encountered: Christian and otherwise, armed and otherwise, resisting and otherwise.  Then they were massacred like a pack of wild dogs by the first real army of Muslims they met. 

In the 1200’s, the Almohad Berbers – raging Muslim fundamentalists from Morocco – re-re-invaded Spain.  Their Almoravid predecessors had already wrested Spain from Visigoth hegemons in 711.  Resurgent Spanish Christians took advantage of this inter-Muslim strife to snuff out the most advanced society of the Middle Ages: the Islamic colonies of al-Andalus (Andalusia).  The Pope authorized the Spanish Inquisition in 1238.  Cardinal Jimenez, the Grand Inquisitor who succeeded bloody-handed Torquemada, burned 24,000 books in Grenada.  From then on, Spanish conquerors would do their worst to snuff out each new civilization they encountered.

In Central America, Diego de Landa, the Bishop of Yucatan, patiently studied the literature of the Maya.  Their records dated back to August 12, 3113 BCE.  They had predicted that the world would end on the winter solstice of December 21, 2012.  On that date, animals would find their voices, artifacts would come alive in men’s hands and they would unite to destroy mankind.  This may be a likely outcome, when you think of it, of future bionanotechnology. 

De Landa patiently taught himself High Mayan.  Eventually, he earned the grudging respect of native elders, shamans and priests.  They reverently brought him their last surviving copies for safekeeping.  Once he believed he had captured the entire collection, he had everything burned.  He substituted his own Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán.  Of thousands of hypothetical Maya texts, only a few survive today.  Those survivors include the Dresden Codex, the Paris Codex (including the Popol Vuh and the Rabinal Achi), the Madrid Codex and a handful more.  The Aztecs, their vassals and enemies (including the inhabitants of the 2000-year-old Zapotek city of Monte Alban) suffered a similar fate.  So did the feuding Incas and their vassals in the Andes.  So did every Indian nation in South and Central America.  None survived except as miserable remnants.  Many were completely exterminated.

Northern Europeans dealt equivalent Christian mercy to North American Indians. 

Let’s set aside, for a moment, the grim British project to distribute smallpox-infected blankets to Indians they didn’t care for.  The Canadian Government managed to dispossess its fewer but proportionately more menacing Native Indians almost peacefully—unlike genocidal bully/victim relationships perfected in the U.S. 

They adopted two expedients: 1) they guaranteed native title in perpetuity to small tracts of land centered on each tribe’s most sacred ground, instead of shuffling crushed survivors onto reservations sited on more and more remote badlands; and 2) the Royal Canadian Mounted Police administered justice more or less equitably between the natives and settlers.  In contrast, the U.S. hired glory-hound militarists, larcenous political appointees and bigot Christian fanatics to abuse Native Americans at gunpoint.

Only a few Amerindian nations were peaceable by nature.  Oral traditions, archeological remnants and pictorial records tell their own story of intertribal warfare and even complete tribal and urban extermination in Meso-America.  Population pressures largely drove it.  The great urban civilizations of South and Central America succeeded each other in ascending order of blatant militarism and brutal sacrifice.  Only the Six Nations of the Iroquois (the fiercest warriors in America) are on the record as having established an internally peaceful Confederacy.  They tended to kick non-confederate butt until the Whites arrived with their diseases, firepower and overwhelming numbers.  A few Native-American nations on the California coast were inherently peaceful.  Perhaps predictably, their red and white neighbors mistreated them with equal enthusiasm.  Apparently, Guarani Indians greeted the Spanish colonizers of Paraguay peacefully.  What other native peoples were pacifists at heart and suffered annihilation or forced assimilation into more warlike tribes, no surviving records document.

By 400 CE, some unknown combination of catastrophes had destroyed the nearly two-thousand-year-old Olmec civilization.  Meso-American urban society is traceable from 1500 BCE to about 600 BCE, at Chavin de Huantar in Northern Highlands of Peru.  A city-site existed at San Loranzo, Tenochtitlan (ca. 1150-900 BCE); as well as its probable political successor, La Venta (c. 800-400 BCE).  Both urban civilizations seem to have destroyed themselves, inexplicably.

Monte Alban was a mountaintop city that housed some 24,000 people.  It declined in the 7th century.  The city of Teotihuacán was the largest city in the New World: population 200,000, founded c. 300 CE.  It destroyed itself with fires deliberately set between 700 and 750.  More and more warriors appear in its final century’s art.  Copan was the proud capital of the Maya race.  Its ceremonial centers went back to c. 2000 BCE.  It snuffed out, along with its satellite cities, between 830 and 930.  An inspiration to the Maya was the Toltec capital of Tula or Tollan (35,000 inhabitants).  It lost its ceremonial center to fire between 1150 and 1200.  By 1300, the starving inhabitants of Tiahauanaco abandoned their Andean plateau.  They’d inscribed it with giant mounded-pebble glyphs visible only from the air.  The neighboring Huari Empire collapsed around the same time, c. 1000 CE. 

Giant metropolises were abandoned, which once housed 100,000 people or more.  Speculation about these disasters includes abrupt climate change (super-El Niños), irrigation-disrupting earthquakes, crop depletion, civil war, invasion, disease—even rabid vampire bat infestations and mass evacuation by extraterrestrials.

In North America, one could find advanced urban centers like Casas Grandes; the Hohokam, Chaco, Mogollon and Anasazi (Pueblo Bonito) cultures of the American Southwest; Mound People towns like the Hopewell complexes near the Great Lakes; and equivalent Mississippian towns like Cahokia near St. Louis.  All of them may have traded with more southerly nations listed above.  They also disintegrated, for a variety of mysterious reasons, by 1300.

Ani was the capital of the ancient Armenian state.  An earthquake destroyed it during the 14th century.  The same fate befell the Pharos of Alexandria.  It was a lighthouse one hundred feet square at its base and two hundred feet tall, completed in 280 BCE.  Apart from the Pyramids, it was the last survivor of the Seven Wonders of the World.  Wrecked by earthquakes in 956 and 1303, and finished off in 1323, its remnants were camelled off as scrap bronze.

Berlin burned in 1405.  Palembang, Sumatra was destroyed in 1407.  Harfleur fell to the English in 1415.  Its surrender initiated the 116-year “Hundred Years War” between France and England (1337-1453).  In 1419, the Lesser Town of Prague was destroyed during interminable Hussite rebellions.  Amsterdam burned in 1421 and again in 1453.  Altenburg, Germany was burned by the Hussites in 1430.  These heavily armed, wagon-borne heretics formed one of the first modern armies; nearly half of its combatants carried firearms, and many of its private soldiers were literate.  Utraquist and Taborite (Hussite) sectarians ravaged Central Europe until 1452, when Prague fell once again and local nobles exterminated them.

The three main halls of Peking’s Forbidden City were destroyed by fire in 1421.  Successive conflicts between Turkic and Mongol descendants (who were fanatical Muslim and Buddhist converts, respectively) destroyed Nishni Novgorod and Gorodites in 1408; Urgench in 1431; the Uzbeck capital Olugh-beg and Samarkand (whose famous porcelain tower was smashed) c. 1450; Sairam and Tashkent in 1451; Sarai, the capital of the Golden Horde in 1502; Aksu, Jusha and Bai in 1514.

The Chams (Champa) raided the region of Angkor in 1177.  It was the urbanized and intensively cultivated seat of Khmer power.  The Cambodians counter-invaded in 1190.  The Thais defeated the Khmers at Sukothai in 1238.  They captured Ankhor Wat in 1353 and Angkor Thom in 1431.  Those cities were finally abandoned just before 1450.  In 1431, Tuaregs took and sacked Timbuktu, the 200 year-old capital of the Mali Empire.  In 1439, the Ottoman Turks took Semendia, the Serbian capital; in 1448 they took Herat.  Spain took Naples in 1442.  Circa 1450, the Annamese (Vietnamese) took, lost and retook the Champa, capital of Vijaya.  The Tatars took Moscow in 1451.  Thai Ayuthians took the Chiengmai capital (founded by the Thai King Mangrai after 1239) in 1452. 

In 1453, the French retook Bordeaux.  This ended the Hundred Years War and set loose thousands of routiers (rootiay, “roadies,” demobilized soldiers) to ravage the French countryside and torment its peasantry for decades to come.  Immediately thereafter, the English fought the civil War of the Roses until 1485.  Thereafter, the French fought out their Fronde (Sling) civil war.

Affluent Trebizond surrendered to Ottoman Turks in 1461; it never recovered from their abuse.  Timbuktu was sacked by the Songhai in 1468.  After decades of civil war, the Japanese Monastery at Honganji was destroyed in 1465.  Civil war ravaged Kyoto from 1467 until 1477.  Otranto, Italy, fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1481.  In 1482, the English took Edinburgh.  Dresden burned in 1491.

During the 15th century, the Aztecs pulsed ever outward.  Before 1325 CE, they had been a handful of sociopathic ‘chosen people.’  They were outcast by their victorious neighbors to two snake-infested swamp islets.  By around 1430, they had destroyed their own chronicles to erase the bitter memory of their snake-eating past.  By the time the Spaniards brought about their doom in 1518, they had become the most vicious imperialists in Mexico.  They lashed out against their neighbors, more or less at random, from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast of Mexico.  Aztec women were said to have been the most beautiful…

The Moscovites took Tver in 1485.  In 1492, Granada fell to the Christians, ending Muslim occupation of Spanish territory.  The Swedes sacked Ivangorod in 1496.  Milan, Naples and other Italian cities fell repeatedly to French-led Renaissance invaders hired from all over Europe and then sent packing riddled with syphilis.

Uzbeks took Herat, Khorasan and Transoxiana c. 1500.  In 1505, the Portuguese sacked Kilwa and Mombassa: the two greatest trade emporia of East Africa.  They took Hormuz in 1508.  These events marked the beginning of Europe’s conquest of the world.  During this period, every center of world commerce would be sacked, burned and raked over (most several times), and almost every tribe and nation on Earth would be enslaved. 

Anglo-Saxons love to condemn the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, when about 40,000 French elites were executed by vengeful French proletarians in three years.  Tisk, tisk.  How much more civilized we smug Anglo-Saxons are, compared to those rabid Frogs!  Well, amphibians can’t catch rabies, but you get my point.  They fail to mention the fact that it was a sorry year, since the 16th century, when less than 10,000 native elites weren’t massacred by European imperialists (including those hypocrite Brits and Americans, and, yes, the French too), somewhere around the globe. 

I am of Irish descent; no English person has anything honest to tell me about the political massacre of subjected peoples. 

Americans keep harping on how much more ‘civilized’ their Revolution was, compared to the French.  Tell me, you flaming hypocrites, weren’t thousands of Loyalist American Tories killed in combat during the American Revolution, and many more forced overseas at gunpoint after the war?  People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Mombassa, capital of a vast African empire, burned down in 1508.  In 1510, the Persians took Baku and Tabriz back from Tatars, and the Russians took Pskov.  Don Affonce de Albuquerque sacked Goa for four days that same year; he boasted he filled the mosques with Muslim citizens and then set them afire.  A year later, this Portuguese entrepreneur sacked Malacca, the greatest seaport in South East Asia with its 100,000 inhabitants.

Ottoman Turks defeated the Mamelukes during days of bloody fighting in the streets of Cairo, and then sacked it in 1517.  Rhodes fell to the Turks in 1522.  Rebellious peasants pillaged Mainz in 1525.  In 1527, the Shans sacked Ava, the Northern Burmese capital.  That same year, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V sacked Rome, thus ending the Renaissance with a military flourish.

Spain sacked Tunis in 1535.  In 1536, British King Henry VIII and his Prime Minister, Sir Thomas Cromwell, ransacked and dissolved 800 abbeys, friaries and nunneries.  The Abbey at Glastonbury – said to have once housed the Sacred Chalice – suffered a commercial sack from which it never recovered.

 

“The destruction of books was almost incredibly enormous.  Bale describes the use of them by bookbinders and by grocers and merchants for the packing of their goods.  Maskell calculates the loss of liturgical books alone to have approached the total of a quarter of a million.  An eyewitness describes the leaves of Duns Scotus as blown about by the wind even in the courts of Oxford, and their use for sporting and other purposes.  Libraries that had been collected through centuries, such as those of Christ Church and St. Albans, both classical and theological, vanished in a moment.  It was not only the studious orders that gathered books; the friars, also, had libraries, though, as Leland relates of the Oxford Franciscans, they did not always know how to look after them.  So late as 1535, a bequest was made by the bishop of St. Asaph of five marks to buy books for the Grey Friars of Oxford.  Nor can it be doubted that vast numbers of books less directly theological must have perished.”  Taken from “The Dissolution of the Religious Houses,” at http://www.bartleby.com/213/0301.html

 

The French army and Berber pirate allies sacked Nice in 1543.  In 1544, the English re-sacked Edinburgh.  Russians took Kazan in 1554 and Astrakhan in 1556.  The Portuguese destroyed Rio de Janeiro in 1557.  From 1562 to 1628, France indulged its worst bigots during the Huguenot Wars.  The Protestant half of the brightest French luminaries was forced to seek refuge, honor and livelihood in foreign lands.  France would compete with them for centuries to come.  In this manner, France doomed itself to second-rate – if good Catholic – status.  In 1569, Northern English Earls sacked Durham Cathedral.

The Russians sacked Novgorod in 1570.  The Tatars sacked and burned Moscow in 1571 (200,000 dead).  Antwerp fell to Spain in 1576 and again in 1585.  Venice burned in 1577.  After liberating themselves from Spain and enjoying a brief Golden Age, most Flemish cities were sacked by foreign armies.  An English fleet sacked Cadiz and Lisbon in 1587.  Another Portuguese army sacked Mombassa in 1589.  Moroccans destroyed Gao, the Songhai capital.  They sacked Timbuktu in the early 1590’s, destroyed Ahmed Baba’s library and the famous University of Sankore.  The English sacked Cadiz again in 1596.

At Oxford, the Bodleian library replaced the original that had burned down in 1602.  Khiva was destroyed in 1603.  Cardinal Federigo Borromeo founded the Ambrosian Library in Milan in 1609, possibly from remnants of the great library of its defeated rival, Como.  The Achenese sacked Johore in 1613.  The Japanese government took Osaka Castle in 1615.  During the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) at least ten million victims died—nearly every other German.  Imagine what happened to the region’s libraries.  Dutch adventurers burned down Jakarta in 1619 and enslaved the Banda islanders to extract more spice.  Prague was looted repeatedly; the Austrians sacked it in 1620.  Heidelberg was sacked in 1621.  In 1630, Ottomans destroyed Hamadan, the ancient capital of Media.  The next year, Protestant Swedes took Frankfurt and Catholic Germans took Magdeburg, both by storm.  Japanese government troops stormed Hara castle in 1637.  In 1645, the Manchus sacked Yang-chou with ‘very heavy casualties.’  They would take another forty years to subdue the Ming dynasty.  Kandahar fell to the Persians in 1649.  In 1654, the Russians took Smolensk.  A year later, the Swedes took Warsaw, lost it to the Poles and then retook it.  That same year, the Russians retook Kiev.

The magnificent city of Edo (Tokyo) numbered 107,000 inhabitants in 1657, the year it burned down.  The Siamese took Chiengmai in 1662.  The next year, the Moguls took Assam.  In 1664 and again in 1670, King Sivaji took Surat.  Its twice-wrought destruction became the pivot point of his life—how sad.  By 1665, 100,000 Londoners had died of plague.  The city burned down the next year.  The Moguls took Chitagong in 1666.  Tsaritsyn and Astrakhan fell to Cossacks in 1670.  The Russians retook Astrakhan in 1671. 

The Library of the Escorial of Madrid burned down in 1671, taking with it most of the official documentation of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, since the Spanish Crown forbade dissemination of this information beyond its domain.  In 1673, the French took Maastricht.  In 1688, Karakorum was destroyed and Athens was gutted.  The Turks used the Parthenon as a powder magazine, which Venetian artillery promptly blew up.  Five months later, the Venetians ‘won’ the battle of Athens.  By then, plague had emptied the city.  It would remain empty for three years.  Then the Turks retook it.

During the endgame of World War II, despite Churchill’s promise to the contrary, the British Army used the Parthenon as a gun battery site.  From this dominant height, they shelled the working class districts of Athens.  Thus did Churchill and a succession of Anglo-Saxon hypocrites re-employ Greek fascists to rule Greece at gunpoint for the next forty years.  Much the same way rearmed Japanese troops continued to garrison most of South East Asia after Japan’s surrender, against native Nationalists and on behalf of undermanned Allied victors. 

Many ‘retired’ Nazis became government functionaries throughout post-war Europe.  Bushido-boys rapidly regained corporate dominion over Japan.  Before and during the war, the BundesBank bankrolled the Nazis—you can guess how.  Now, it is the financial powerhouse of Europe.  The American OSS absorbed 1500 ex-Gestapo operatives when it became the CIA—above and beyond the ex-Nazi rocket scientists we brought home with us.  Japanese masters at genocide, who’d infected countless Chinese and Allied prisoners with plague, anthrax and other epidemics, were pardoned in exchange for their laboratory notes.  Who knows how many more demons incarnate became prized NATO functionaries?  Needless to say, Russian Stalinists were just as accommodating to evil.

In 1693, a French army sacked Heidelberg.  The French ravaged Germany with destruction equivalent to the Thirty Years War (no wonder the Germans came back later and demanded payback).  Three years later, the Russians took Azov.  The Omani took Mombassa in 1698, the same year Whitehall Palace burned down.  In 1703, the Swedes took Warsaw again.  Algerians took Oran in 1709.  French troops sacked Rio de Janeiro in 1711.  In 1716, fanatical Lamaist Dzugar Mongols took and sacked the Lamaist holy center at Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.  In 1720, the Chinese took Turfan and Urumchi.  Copenhagen burned down in 1728.  Constantinople suffered great fires in 1729, 1756 and 1782.  The Persians sacked Delhi in 1736.  They took Balkh, Ghazni and Kabul in 1738.  They destroyed Delhi and the entire Mogul Empire in 1739.  They took Bukhara and Khiva in 1740.  In 1751, the Mons took Ara, the capital of Burma.  Six years later, the Burmese took Pegu, the Mon capital.  Moscow burned down in 1752.  The Bambaras took Timbuktu, Djenne and Bamako in 1755.  Russians took Azov in 1783.  As part of the British conquest of India, Lord Cornwallis burned down the city of Bangalore.  This is how he ‘redeemed’ his military reputation ‘soiled’ by his defeat at Yorktown.

Has this tale of wanton destruction made you cross-eyed yet?

Almost every European, Turkish and Persian town was besieged, plundered and/or burned during this period—ostensibly over the best way to worship God.  Lisbon – the capital of a prosperous maritime empire two hundred years old – was annihilated, one crisp Sunday morning in 1755, by a massive earthquake, tidal wave and firestorm.  Voltaire noted this sample of God’s affection in his novel, Candide.

The founder of the Afghan/Durani dynasty sacked Delhi in 1756 and again in 1760.  That same year, the Russians burned Berlin.  In 1765, Harvard College burned down along with its library, destroying over 90% of its books; Princeton’s Nassau Hall Library burned in 1802.  The Burmese sacked Ayutha in 1767.  In 1775, the Tuaregs took Timbuktu.  In 1799, the French took Naples, once again by storm.  In the late 1700’s, fanatical Wahhabi tribesmen invaded Tarim.  It was an Arab city with 365 mosques and a great many libraries.  Between their assault and an infestation of white worms, every book housed there was lost.

Almost every European and Mediterranean city suffered significant damage during the Napoleonic Wars.  Wellington’s army, for example, sacked Bajadoz in 1811—imitating Napoleon and his marshals whose troops sacked every city they took.  In 1812, the Russians burned Moscow out from under Bonaparte.  In 1811, the Montserrat Monastery Library burned down.  In 1814, the British took Washington D.C.  Seeking reprisal for an equivalent atrocity the Americans had perpetrated against the Canadian capital at Toronto, they burned down the White House and the Capitol Building.  These structures housed the first Library of Congress.  It was later replaced by Thomas Jefferson’s library.  A tornado descended on the city.  It killed and maimed more British soldiers than ineffectual American resistance had, on that day.

In 1820, the Siamese were alarmed at vague rumors that the British were about to attack them, presumably with Laotian help.  They invaded Laos and burned down every public structure in Vientiane, the Lao capital.  They burned alive, in giant bamboo cages, every Lao prisoner they did not enslave.

Canton burned in 1822.  Macau’s Archives were destroyed by fire in 1825 and 1885.  In 1827, the Dahomey took Whydah.  In 1828, the Russians carried off the fine library from Ardebil, capital of Azerbaijan.  New York City burned in 1845.  Montreal’s Parliament buildings were destroyed by fire in 1849.  So was Rangoon, Burma, in 1850.  In 1851, the remaining two thirds of Jefferson’s book collection burned up along with most of the second Library of Congress; so did San Francisco.  Tokyo burned in 1857.  Along with many other cities, Nanking was destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion.  In 1864, its magnificent Porcelain Pagoda, Hong Xiquan’s palace and the Ming Palace nearby were smashed.  Vicksburg, Tennessee; Jackson, Mississippi; Atlanta, Georgia; Laurence, Kansas; Columbia, South Carolina; Richmond, Virginia and other American towns suffered the same fate during the American Civil War (1860-65).  Quebec City burned in 1866.  During the South American War of the Triple Alliance (1865-70) the Brazilian Imperial Army sacked Asuncion, Paraguay, and took the National Library to Rio de Janeiro where its remnants were kept in secret.  Beginning August 23, 1870, the Prussians decided to burn down Strasbourg with incendiary shells from their siege artillery, along with its picture gallery, its city library full of ancient treasures, its Huguenot Temple Neuf and most of the roof of its Cathedral.  A German rehearsal for future outrages of this kind, intended to force surrender, which only cohered local resistance.  A French Communard mob burned down the Tuilleries library in Paris in 1871, with its 250,000 books.  The Great Chicago fire occurred the same years; Boston burned down a year later.  In 1882, Chile confiscated the National Library of Peru and transferred its contents from Lima to Santiago.

From the mid-1800s on, some excuse or other was found to flatten almost every city on Earth.  For example, British troops burned down Benin, the capital of an empire at least 600 years old.  Its magnificent sculpted wood and cast bronze artwork never recovered. 

Messina was swallowed by a gruesome tidal wave in 1908.  The entire 1890 U.S. Census burned up in 1920.  In 1922, Young Turks burned down the city of Smyrna and sent the Greek minority and the Greek Army dispatched to protect them, scrambling back to Greece.  This atrocity was a continuation of their super-efficient, futuristic, German-supervised campaign to exterminate every Turkish Armenian (at least a million of them from 1894 to 1915).  Who knows how many Orthodox churches, seminaries and libraries went up in flames? 

Whenever human avarice and cruelty were not up to the task, natural catastrophe did the trick.  For example, 140,000 people and uncounted documents perished when an earthquake and firestorm leveled Tokyo in 1923. 

The University of Virginia Library burned down at the beginning of the 20th century.  So did the Italian National Library at Turin, from an electrical fire in 1904.  At least 100,000 items of the 320,000-book collection went up in flames, including many priceless manuscripts and its entire Oriental collection.  On February 19, 1938, a fire at West Point destroyed its library and a lot of American history prior to that date.

Major libraries and collections destroyed by warfare during the last century include but are not limited to: Peking, Port Arthur, Louvain, Noyon, Amiens, Ypres, Arras, Soissons, Salonika, Rheims, Cambrai, Belgrade, Smyrna, Kiev, Vilna, Minsk, Shanghai, Suchow, Nanking, Guernica, Madrid, Nanking, Warsaw, Cracow, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Coventry, London (where 60% of World War I military records were destroyed during the Blitz), Valetta, Benghazi, Tripoli, Belgrade, Minsk, Vitebsk, Kiev, Viasma, Smolensk, Bryansk, Odessa, Uman, Kharkov, Sevastopol, Rostov, Stalingrad, Belgorod, Budapest, Ancona, Naples (where retreating Nazis burned 80,000 volumes of the Royal Society), Pisa, Milan, Caen, St. Nazaire, Brest, Metz, Arnhem, Hamburg, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Köln, Essen, Dresden, Heidelburg, (virtually every German, Japanese, Eastern European and Eastern Chinese city was leveled as were many more across Europe), Mandalay, Rovaniemi, Tartu, Manila, Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, Yokohama, Shuri, Rangoon, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Seoul, Pyongyang (founded in 1122 BCE; ravaged by the Japanese in 1592, 1894 and 1904; and by the Americans in 1951), Jerusalem, Port Said, Hanoi, Hue, Phnom Penh, Jolo, Belfast, Beirut, Amritsar, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, Vukovar, Grozny, Kabul and Baghdad.

During the Greater Paroxysm, European fascists made a point of burning every Hebrew and Yiddish scripture, every Cyrillic text and icon they found in Russia, as well as every progressive book they could find anywhere in any language.  Their destruction totaled hundreds of millions of books.

 

“The most extensive Soviet deportations, however, were carried out as Soviet troops liberated territory in 1943-44.  The people affected were the minorities living on the north slope of the Caucasus and the west bank of the Volga, who maintained their own languages and religions, primarily Islam but also Buddhism, and who had been largely unaffected by the strongly Slav and Orthodox elements of Russian culture ... In total, about 1,200,000 were affected.  During 1943-44, the Soviets deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to forcibly remove these people, and they were moved with few possessions, in cattle trucks with little or no food and water.  Probably about 500,000 died in transit or subsequently in the Gulag.  The Soviet authorities removed all references to these people, and all materials in their written languages were destroyed.”  Clive Ponting, Armageddon, Random House, 1995, p. 223.  Italics mine.

 

These predatory tactics are not unique to Soviet Russia.  On the contrary, they are consistent with weapon managers in general.  Euro-Americans treated American Indians with equivalent tenderness.  For example, they forbade Indian children to speak their mother tongue while they forced them to attend residential schools.  Other empires treated their ethnic minorities just as shamelessly or worse.

Chunking, China burned down in 1949; Tottori, Japan in 1952.  Priceless text collections in Florence were ravaged by flooding in the 1960’s.  On 7 June, 1962, the library of Algiers, along with its 60,000 volumes, was dynamited and burned down by French colonial bitter-enders of the OAS.  Mandalay, Burma burned in 1981 and Lashio in 1988.

In this so-called 21st century of ‘modern’ civilization, library collections are systematically neglected; they go up in flames by accident or malevolent intent.  Librarians at the Czech National Library in Prague confessed to enormous damage from neglect and appealed for international aid.  The entire ex-Soviet Union’s collection is in dire straits.  The same confession applies to most Second and Third World collections.  America’s Library of Congress is a sieve.  The American University Library in Beirut was bombed.  Bosnia’s National Library was especially targeted for Aggressor destruction.  In 1966, Indonesia’s greatest living writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Pram), saw his library burnt to the ground by sneering militarists before they dragged him off to ten years in exile.  How many more private libraries had to suffer the same fate at the hands of armed infants?  80% of U.S. Army service records from 1912 to 1960 were lost in a 1973 fire at the St. Louis National Personnel Center.  The library in Hama, Syria was destroyed in 1982.  In 1983, a fire destroyed the St. Michael’s House collection in Australia.  The Los Angeles Public Library burned down in 1986.  In the spring of 1988, a Shiite library in Teheran was wiped out by one of Saddam Hussein’s randomly aimed Scud missiles.  Many irreplaceable, thousand-year-old texts were destroyed.  A 1989 fire leveled the Russian Library of the Academy of Sciences on Vasilievski Island.  The Chinese destroyed the major monastery of Gandem, outside Lhasa, in the 1960’s.  Inexcusably, they’ve wrecked every Tibetan monastery since.  A hundred year flood and ensuing fire in 1995 gutted the archives of the Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota.  On September 21, 1996, the library at Linkoeping, Sweden, was destroyed by fire.  Takastan Monastery, the largest Buddhist monastery in Bhutan, suffered the same fate on 19 April, 1998.  On June 10, 1999 the Kashmir State Cultural Center burned down.  California State University’s (CSU) Hayward Library was arsoned in May of 2000.  In Ambon, Mollucas Island in Indonesia, the Christian University Campus was set ablaze in June of 2000.  The Iraqi library at Basra burned down during the American invasion in 2003; though its chief librarian, Alia Muhammad Baker, managed to save 70% of her collection with the help of heroic local townspeople. 

If I’ve left out some act of cultural vandalism or urban disaster of noteworthy viciousness, please write to me about it for inclusion in future versions of this page.  If anyone ever bothered to write up humanity’s global self-lobotomy, that work was destroyed in its turn.

Meanwhile, almost every book printed since the 1800’s is quietly self-destructing.  Their cheap, high-acid paper reacts to light, heat and moisture by crumbling to dust.  Fahrenheit 451 has reached room temperature, these days.  The wonderful world of chemistry has relieved Ray Bradbury’s fascistic, science fiction dystopians from the thankless chore of burning every book.  Ephemeral electronic media are even more vulnerable.  Any massive breakdown of civilization will see most of them perish, including this work.  In addition, our recording media’s engineered obsolescence affords our literature repeated opportunities to disappear.  Herculean efforts to transfer print media onto digital databases (mostly meaningless megatons of accounting documents) will only mitigate this devastation.  In library after library, reluctant staffers have dumped truckloads of perfectly fine books and bibliographic materials into the nearest landfill.  Meanwhile, their MBA-certified weapon managers crow that they’ve achieved cost-cutting ‘goals’. 

In the future, preserving old ideas – especially idiosyncratic and culturally specific ones deviating from the mass media norm – shall become private, oral and website responsibilities much more often than public, paper-published ones.  Since the technocrats refuse to do their obvious duty, we will need many more bards, witches, griots and shamans to assume these adult responsibilities.

 

Addenda:  On Black Tuesday, April 15, 2003, Iraq’s National Library, its National Museum and Islamic Library were looted, ruined and burned by unchecked rioters and expert grave robbers.  Once again for the ten thousandth time, the world suffered a terrible lobotomy. 

Tell me, is this really the 21st century in which I have to serve my time, or is the Monster Hulagu still in charge?  In fact, we Americans have confirmed that we are worse news than the Taliban.  They found nothing better to do that blow up two giant statues of Buddha in the valley of Bamian.  The official in charge of that demolition just got elected into the new Afghan Parliament.  I hope he chokes on the power he amassed at gunpoint.

A hundred years from now, once everyone will have forgotten Saddam Hussein, Bush the Lesser will be remembered as the American yokel who oversaw the annihilation of Baghdad’s priceless collections.  A thousand years from now, that may be the only thing this flash-in-a-pan American Empire is remembered for.  How mightily those mental midgets will have fallen! 

Only Texans and their greed-driven associates could secure the Oil Ministry yet leave the National Library, Islamic Library and Museum of Iraq unguarded.  Their school-marms didn't ‘learn’ them Mesopotamian archeology the way mine did, with deep reverence.  The U.S. Central Command was repeatedly warned beforehand.  It took no precautions.  Clueless barbarians…

As for the U.S. Marines, some butter-bar Platoon Leader should have grasped what his superiors – from the President on down – were too stupid, ignorant and lazy to realize.  That kind of man-on-the-ground, take-the-initiative response is what good officers are paid for: to post guards over unforeseen yet vital installations.  He should have arrested anyone who reached for those sacred collections, and his superiors should have backed him instinctively. 

He may have tried; who knows?  History is the first love of a real soldier.  No history buff would have permitted that outrage without protest.  But he would have had to buck his request up the Chain of Command.  During its ascent, it would have had to run past the stupidest link in the chain (perhaps the top one in the White House?).  Did some overworked staff officer – perhaps tallying available squads of warm bodies versus square blocks left to guard – simplify his worthless career by bucking back a sharply worded reply: “Negative.  Do nothing.”?  Or maybe he was just an insider hireling of rich collectors intent on stealing those artifacts, and made sure his patron’s lusts were satisfied? 

In either case, if there is any difference between overwhelming firepower and victorious acumen, Americans have yet to learn it. 

This must be a new low for the United States Marine Corps.  Allowing the Baghdad collections to vanish on your watch, that rates right down there with routing from the gun line at First Bull Run and thus earning the Union Army another four years of massacre.  Or allowing the Marine Barracks in Beirut to be truck-bombed flat without a serious fight, days after similar targets were struck the same way. 

America must learn – slowly and painfully – what every idiot empire in history had to learn during its roller-coaster ride of growth, conquest, stagnation and annihilation—just before its allied victims strip it of everything it once cherished.  Like accidental homicide during the commission of another crime; stupidity, shortsightedness and cultural ignorance never excuse the unintended consequences of our worst impulses.  History doesn’t care how Texan, Republican, corporate and otherwise inept and self-serving our leaders may be, or how clueless we must have been to empower them, except to hasten our defeat. 

America and Australia have the luxury of dominating their continent without a military rival worthy of the name (unlike other, sub-continental nations).  They may cower on their own continent and remain as small-town, closed-minded and bigoted as they please.  Americans may undereducate their youth until our college students don’t know what a twelve year-old would know overseas.  Our most mephitic fat cats may send mercenaries out to comb the world and rip off its treasury, bolted down or otherwise, with relative impunity. 

Once we venture forth into the Big Bad World, however, permissive incompetence becomes lethal.  It will bring us consequences much more serious than mere public embarrassment of our collective bumpkinhood.

Americans, be warned!  Like a spoiled child during a temper tantrum, we’ve broken a priceless vase in a china shop.  We’ve already been badly scraped, once (on 9/11).  Next time, we’re likely to get sliced up good.  Everyone has, who’s preceded us down this Shining Path to attempted dominion of WeaponWorld. 

Organizing PeaceWorld on our watch would be a much better deal for everyone concerned—America’s interests, strengths and limitations foremost.

 

On Monday, January 5, 2004 of this so-called civilized age, thousands of rare Sanskrit manuscripts, ancient books and palm leaf inscriptions were destroyed in half an hour, as two hundred and fifty protesters ransacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.  One of the worst losses is a clay tablet dating back to the Assyrian civilization of 600 BCE.  The protesters, members of a group called the Sambhaji Brigade, pelted stones and broke glass at the Institute.  Some cut telephone lines so the police could not be alerted.  Police protection had been given to three historians, G. B. Mahendale, Shrikant Bahulkar and V. L. Manjul, in the light of the controversy over a book containing allegedly objectionable observations by author and teacher James Laine, on the parentage of the Maratha warrior King Shivaji.  In the process, he paints a new and more complex picture of Hindu-Muslim relations from the 17th century to the present.  The controversy seemed to have been resolved when Mr. Laine apologized last month for his statements on Shivaji.  The book's publisher, Oxford University Press, withdrew the book from the market.  Police arrested seventy-two people for the vandalism, reports Newkerala.com. 

 

Thus do fundamentalists disgrace their own creed.

 

“4/29/2005 -- The Central Library in Imphal, the capital of the northeastern Indian state of Manipur, has suffered what historian Gangumei Kamei called “an incalculable loss.”  A group pushing for Mayek script to replace the state’s official Bengali script, set the facility ablaze, destroying as many as 145,000 books, including some of the oldest and rarest texts.  Officials say the protestors were a combination of members of the regional United Forum for Safeguarding Manipuri Script and Language, and a separatist rebel group, the Kangleipak Communist Party.  The BBC News quoted an attorney as describing the arson as a “Taliban-style” act.  Officials say that for several months the groups have been demanding the government adopt the Mayek script and drop the Bengali used for the last three hundred years to write the Meitei language.  Some local newspapers have begun publishing editions in both languages.”  http://www.libraryjournal.com./article/CA527242?display=breakingNews

 

I wish I never had to add another disgraceful incident to this long and sorry list.  I suspect that I shall have to.  At times, this human race can truly sicken one.  Oh well; as my favorite tee shirt would say:

 

Learner:

Not of this species,

Not from this planet.

 

An electrical fire on September 2004 gutted the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, the hometown of Goethe.  Over 50,000 irreplaceable books were lost, even though a daisy chain of good people saved 6,000 tomes from the flames, and another 22,000 were spared.  The library has since been rebuilt and 60,000 titles, including thousands painstakingly restored, were returned to it.  The December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami flooded out who knows how many archives within that region and drowned their guardians. 

March 5, 2007: the Al-Mutanabi book market in Baghdad was car bombed and destroyed.  It had been a world-famous center of reading and scholarship for centuries, even under the heavy hand of Saddam Hussein.  Like the dynamiters of the Shia’s most holy Karbala and Najaf shrines, may the perpetrators repent their deeds before they die!

On March 3, 2009, the municipal archives of Köln (Cologne) collapsed, killing two people, ruining many medieval manuscripts and four hundred boxes of the author Heinrich Böll’s (1917-1985) private papers and unpublished manuscripts.

The World Trade towers contained several archives and museums that were destroyed on 9/11/2001.

On or just before the first weekend of 2012, during rioting between political protestors and the military, the Institute of Egypt was gutted by twelve hours of fire and then flooded by Cairo’s Fire Department.  The next week, the remains of 192,000 books, journals and writings were being picked over by volunteers trying to salvage something from the wet ashes of the collapsed building.  One of the five copies in existence of the 24-volume Description de l’Égypte, hand-written by Napoleon’s scientific expedition, was destroyed, along with many irreplaceable texts on Egyptian culture and history. 

At a minimum, the Egyptian military failed to protect the building from arsonists and failed to put the fire out quickly, when nearby buildings were either protected or their fires were extinguished instantly.  At worst, they set the fire themselves.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/19/cairo-institute-burned-during-clashes

 

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