At the Ramparts of the Human

Here my words and bear witness to my vow. Night gathers and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the shield that guards the realm of men.

— “The Oath of the Night Watch,” Game of Thrones.

At this very moment, large, well-organized caravans of migrants are marching towards our southern border. Some people call it an “invasion.” It’s like an invasion. They have violently overrun the Mexican border. You saw that two days ago. These are tough people, in many cases. A lot of young men, strong men. And a lot of men that maybe we don’t want in our country.

— Donald Trump. November 1, 2018.

Turns out I wasn’t wrong to suggest back in the summer that there were deep affinities between Israeli and American border rhetoric and the apocalyptic imaginary of contemporary Hollywood. When I wrote, I was grappling with the border-wall imaginary around Gaza and how it worked to transform (in image and story) one of the most destitute and desperate societies of human history (contemporary, besieged Gaza) into vicious enemies who were not quite human. The more I thought about it, the more I saw how it resonated with genre narratives (from sci-fi and fantasy to Westerns) about the frontiers of humanity. Game of Thrones meets World War Z meets Lord of the Rings meets The Searchers.

In both news reporting and fiction entertainment, we now regularly encounter images of walls erected to protect beleaguered groups of heroes from invasion by masses of humanoid monsters in the form of zombies, orcs, White Walkers, and unruly natives.

migrants-gty-0200-jpo-181020_hpEmbed_3x2_992.jpg
attack-on-eastwatch.jpg

At the time, I had not yet discovered The Green Line, the fash podcast from Border Patrol brass Brandon Judd, Chris Cabrera, and Art Del Cueto. Thanks to an especially brilliant episode of Intercepted, I learned about this podcast, which is sponsored by Breitbart, as well as a knife manufacturer, a boot company, and a Texas physical therapy provider corporation that specializes in workman comp cases. The hosts play up the fact that they are leaders in the National Border Patrol Council, a right-wing frontier militia that poses as a labor union for federal employees.

Day after day, the hosts bring the voice of nativist ressentiment and weapons-positive chauvinism to a discussion of American politics. They call for wider gun proliferation and criminalization of non-citizen residents. They also, unsurprisingly, advocate a cruel if familiar military strategy against refugees fleeing the ravages of US-backed dictators and death squads in Central American. If you ever wanted reasons to abolish the Department of Homeland Security, you’ll find them here.

What’s fascinating and disturbing is that this podcast very consciously broadcasts from the ramparts. Yes—the hosts see themselves as the Night’s Watch, as cosmic guardians not just of a particular civilization, but of humanity itself. Westeros is real to them, and so is the Wall. Take a listen to this 2016 episode of the Green Line or any other and judge for yourself.

Do Border Patrol leadership imagine they work for Jon Snow? How many patrolmen really believe that Honduran refugees are White Walkers? Shockingly, some do.

Sadly, Herzl and Sobchak were correct to point out that if you will it, it is no dream. For those with enough will and weaponry, the wall between the imagined and the actual is never too thick or too high.

Obviously, science fiction doesn’t cause zombie apocalypses. But apocalyptic-minded armed thugs, with the full force of the state behind them, might just act on their fantasies in this actual world.

The City and the Gate

It is not often we glimpse the cosmic struggle between civilization and barbarism, humanity and inhumanity, freedom and tyranny. But last week’s ghastly diptych was one such moment: on one side, Trump officials—led by stumbling, corrupt Israeli politicians and anti-Semitic millennialist preachers—celebrated the relocation of the US Embassy to Occupied Jerusalem; on the other, Israeli snipers murdered more than sixty Palestinians in broad daylight. 

splitscreen.jpg

American media commentators might have viewed the event as this century’s Sharpeville massacre. They might have compared the massacre to earlier colonial massacres, such as Amritsar or Sétif. Or they might have linked the event to American atrocities—The Orangeburg Massacre, The Jackson State Massacre, or The Kent State Massacre. 

But that would have entailed viewing Gazans as human and their killers as vicious perpetrators. Instead, most American pundits tended to frame last week’s events into a familiar, even dominant narrative form: on one side, an Judeo-Christian “City Upon a Hill;” and on the other, barbarians at the gates. 

Screen-Shot-2018-05-14-at-11.11.31-AM.png

 

For some, the city-upon-a-hill narrative is apocalyptic in nature: the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy in an alliance that is as spiritual and civilizational as it is military and political. There exist both Christian-Zionist and Jewish-Zionist versions of this, and they are well represented in Conservative, Rightwing and evangelical media forums.[1]

But there is also a secular, often liberal version—a civilizing mission—which goes by many names: Light Unto The Nations, Making the Desert BloomStart-Up Nation, The Only Democracy in the Middle East, A Tiny Country Surrounded By EnemiesA Small Country in a Big, Bad Neighborhood, and so on. This myth may not necessarily be millenialist in nature, but it no less cosmic.

For right-wing commentators, Gazans who were protesting their interminable imprisonment were nothing more barbarians deserving to be shot. For most liberal pundits, however, Gazan demonstrators were simple people who had been manipulated by the barbaric Hamas. But either way, in this narrative, the Gazan victims can only appear as nameless hordes howling at the gates of The City. Whether as criminal subhuman, or merely dupe, the Gazan as barbarian is as fixed in liberal commentary as it is in conservative and right-wing opinion. 

Elite Commentary on Gaza

Right-wing commentary on FoxNews, The National Review, Brietbart, The DailyWire and elsewhere, presented the Gaza massacre/US embassy opening according to the city-upon-a-hill narrative in its baldest terms: the epic struggle between good and evil, us and them. Some voices in liberal-centrist outlets, like CNN and MSNBC, temporarily broke with the narrative when confronted with footage that showed thousands being shot by snipers sitting far away in quiet hunting blinds. But these voices were balanced (or canceled) by the many other pundits on those liberal-centrist platforms advising audiences not to cry over the bloodbath: these people brought the violence upon themselves. 

As usual, the New York Times opinion pages were emblematic of what is normal, possible and allowable in elite American commentary on Palestine. Bret Stephens put it most succinctly on 16 May: “Gaza’s miseries have Palestinian authors.” Stephens’ essay was a classic example of the city-upon-a-hill story where the vitality of Israeli humanity, ingenuity and entrepreneurialism is met by the baseness of Palestinian ignorance, resentment and rejection. Stephens was not alone in the paper of record: while NYT journalists were reporting—often, but not always[2], accurately and fairly—about the overwhelming and unnecessary Israeli violence against Palestinians, the NYT opinion pages filled with other stories, as if to off-set the damage done by stating facts clearly. On 16 May, David Brooks also weighed in to decry the rise of “extremist” thought on both sides of the conflict, placing the lion’s share of the blame on Hamas, as if the organization were capable of total mind control over the Gaza Strip. 

Only one other regular NYT columnist commented in the pages on the Gaza protests last week: on 14 May, Michelle Goldberg wrote forcefully about Palestinian rights and history and about the alliance between Israeli Jews and evangelical Americans, from a position that was not so much “pro-Palestinian” as it was progressive and diasporic Jewish. Two other columnists— Thomas Friedman and Bari Weiss—who might have been expected to write something were silent, at least on the page. For his part, though, Friedman had already advised that Israel deal with Arabs most aggressively in a recent column. And in an appearance on Bill Maher, Weiss blamed dying Palestinians for raining on Israel’s parade. She also admonished audiences for feeling sorry for Israel’s victims who were, nothing more than dupes of Hamas: “Let’s not fall for a trap that is being set by a theocratic, authoritarian group that are sending women and children to be human shields.”

By that time, there had already been a steady stream of other pieces in the opinion pages of the paper. On Monday, 14 May, one contributor made the provocative claim that Zionists invented human rights, suggesting—though not explicitly saying—that human rights and norms belong to Israel and its supporters, even when it comes to Gaza. On that same day, Ahmad Abu Artema—a Gaza organizer—effectively laid out the case and rationale behind the Gaza protests. On 16 May, an Israeli soldier-writer, Matti Friedman, reflected on his experience in the Israeli military to argue that American audiences were being tricked by Hamas. Friedman urged readers to reject "simplistic" stories, presumably like the ones that showed how Israeli snipers were shooting unarmed Palestinians. On 17 May, in a perfect counterpoint to Friedman, Gazan author Atef Abu Saif, published a poetic reflection on the experience of protesting at Israel’s fence.

Reflecting on these pieces, we can reasonably say that the editors at the opinion page were working to create a balance. On one side, three pieces that begin from the premise that Palestinians are human beings who possess inalienable rights and who are survivors of a long history of dispossession that includes the 1947-8 Nakba and also a brutal military occupation that has lasted from 1967 until the present. And on the other, four pieces that do not acknowledge this history, do not grant Gazans normal rights and agency, and do not axiomatically recognize Gazans as humans. Given how rarely Gazan realities appear in the pages of the New York Times, it is striking that two of the seven pieces were penned by Gazan authors. While three out of seven does not strike a perfect balance, it does indicate an attempt to include narratives of Palestinian humanity.

 That attempt was torched on 18 May when Shmuel Rosner, an American-Israeli contributing opinion writer to the NYT, was effectively given the final word on Gaza. Rosner wrote, “It is customary to adopt an apologetic tone when scores of people have been killed, as they were this week in Gaza. But I will avoid this sanctimonious instinct and declare coldly: Israel had a clear objective when it was shooting, sometimes to kill, well-organized “demonstrators” near the border… I feel no need to engage in ingénue mourning.”

What does it mean for Rosner put the word demonstratorsin square quotes? That and the observation that they were well-organizedimply that they are not “real” for at least two reasons.  First, because protestors are being manipulated—by Hamas, no doubt. And second, because the demonstrations are being organized at all, rather than occurring in a wholly spontaneous fashion. In other words, these are not authenticdemonstrations and therefore the demands apparently being made by protesters—ending the siege of Gaza and allowing them return to their homes—can be ignored out of hand. And what do protests become when we take away demands? Nothing less than a riot. A seething, angry—and inarticulate—threat that must be dealt with in terms of security and control. 

But Rosner’s comments went far beyond dismissal of demands. He was also arguing that to mourn Palestinian losses was ingénue, that is, naïve and childish. We might ask Rosner: when are Gazan lives worthy of mourning? Fortunately, Rosner tells us: when they cease resisting their defeat. In this, he is in line with Stephens who delivered the same message to Gazans in his column: 

No decent Palestinian society can emerge from the culture of victimhood, violence and fatalism symbolized by these protests. No worthy Palestinian government can emerge if the international community continues to indulge the corrupt, anti-Semitic autocrats of the Palestinian Authority or fails to condemn and sanction the despotic killers of Hamas. And no Palestinian economy will ever flourish through repeated acts of self-harm and destructive provocation.

According to these authors, there is no point in lamenting Palestinian losses. Whatever tragedy befalls them, they have no one else to blame but themselves. Lest we mistake callousness for thoughtlessness, Rosner rejects empathy with Palestinians by way of timeless wisdom from the Talmudic tradition: 

The Jewish sages had a famous, if not necessarily pleasant, saying that went something like this: Those who are kind to the cruel end up being cruel to the kind. As harsh as this sounds amid the scenes from Gaza, as problematic as this seems to good-intentioned people whose instinct is to sympathize with the weaker side in every conflict, sometimes there is no better choice than being clear, than being firm, than drawing a line that cannot be crossed by those wanting to harm you. By fire, if necessary.

This is how the opinion pages at the NYT ended a very busy week last week: with a call to slaughter, wrapped in an exhortation not to mourn the Palestinian death that would occur as a direct result.

As we have already seen, the narrative of the City and the Gate is fully portable, and ready-for deployment in the USA. And it resonates deeply with a pop culture crowded with humanoid monsters. Those who use this framework to dehumanize Palestinians will use it to dehumanize others. And in fact, they already are, and have been for some time. It is not just Ann Coulter asking to shoot people on the US-Mexico border, or Trump referring to immigrants as "animals."  It's not just loonies on the racist right either: these arguments already appear routinely in the nation's leading liberal newspaper. 

Screen Shot 2018-05-23 at 10.24.10 PM.png

[1] As David D. Kirkpatrick reported this same week, the alliance with Christian Zionists is severely straining the older alliance with Jewish Americans.  

[2] A particularly egregious exception was the “shooting-and-crying” piece filed by Isabel Kershner and David Halbfinger on 14 May. 

Preservation and Destruction

It is exceedingly difficult to know "what to do" as ISIS continues to attack the ancient material culture of Iraq and Syria. A few months ago, I weighed in on the subject in an essay that suggested that those of us who value antiquities for their historic, scientific and aesthetic value would do well to reflect on the ironies of the situation.

One of my main theses, which would be non-controversial for students of history, was that there is nothing inherently "Islamic" about the particular form of iconoclasm (or vandalism) practiced by ISIS. Throughout Islamic history, Muslims have held a wide range of beliefs about, and engaged in a wide range of practices involving, the objects of pre-Islamic antiquity. These range from admiration and wonder to indifference and doubt. The same range of attitudes exists in other traditions. 

Admittedly, I could have focused on the specifically "Islamic" elements of ISIS's campaign, which is to say, how they belong to a modern, Wahhabi tradition of attacking artifacts said to belong to other pasts. This tradition, while "Islamic" in the sense that its Muslim proponents practice it in the name of "Islam," should be seen for nothing more or less than what it is: a strategy of projecting, in brutal and spectacular ways, the material and cultural power of a nascent jihadi state. When viewed against the backdrop of 1400 years of Muslim cultural attitudes toward the distant past, it is a remarkably bleak aberration, though not one without precedents. The more dominant intellectual and textual traditions looked at the past as something to learn from, not something to destroy. Which is to say, ISIS's attacks on Palmyra have their roots not in the Qur'an or Hadith, but rather in the cruel 18th- and 19th-century Wahhabi-Saudi campaigns against tombs and Sufi shrines in the Arabian Peninsula as well as sites of Shiite veneration in southern Iraq.

Similarly, my blog post could have focused on ISIS's iconoclasm as a problem inside Islam, insofar as the Wahhabi-Saudi state theology really is a problem within Islam. But it did not because, as an American, I have a greater responsibility to respond the problems of my own national community, and in this case, the disingenuous posturing of neocons and their liberal allies who, in decrying the destruction of things, call once again for more US military intervention, as if that could be a solution. Contrary to what was said about my piece by interventionists, my piece did not seek to defend ISIS or attempt to rationalist its abhorrent actions. Similarly, there was nothing in the piece seeking to argue that the toppling of cheap Baathist-era statues was the equivalent of destroying priceless ancient artifacts. There was a juxtaposition of images of toppling statues meant to suggest that similar military logics were at work: destroying the arts of the defeated is what triumphalists have always done. If reckless interventionists were bothered by that suggestion, then all the better.

In the main, my post tried to shed light on the deep hypocrisies at home that have become, since ISIS's emergence, more and more manifest. 

The first hypocrisy is a disjointed form of American compassion marked, on the one hand, by newfound concern regarding Mesopotamian objects and on the other, a longstanding indifference toward the suffering of Iraqi people.

The second hypocrisy is rooted in the failure to recognize that the current moment of looting and destruction belongs to a historical context where the US military figures prominently, sometimes as an enemy of antiquities preservation and sometimes as its incompetent champion.

The third hypocrisy has to do with the witting participation in mass antiquities thefts by Western and Gulf antiquities dealers and buyers over the last decade. Without their willingness to traffic in stolen artifacts, the looting would not have reached the scale it has.

ISIS’s attacks on antiquities, like its reported involvement in the illicit antiquities trade, come directly from these contemporary histories. This remains true, even as ISIS spokesmen hide behind pious invocations of anti-pagan, iconoclastic "traditions" that far from being age-old are in fact largely modern phenomena, invented often during protracted conflicts with Western military incursions.  

Each of these hypocrisies is rooted in our culpability as American citizens whose democratically-elected governments and all-volunteer armies have been at war with Iraq and in Iraq continuously since 1991. It has been more than twenty-four years now since we first began our direct war against Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the process, laying waste to large swaths of the landscape, and destroying—through harm and negligence—massive amounts of the country's cultural heritage. In this context, it is ridiculous for commentators to seek explanations of ISIS’s actions in seventh-century Meccan history or tenth-cenury Quranic commentaries while ignoring the well-documented rise of mass looting and theft that occurred during the US occupation and as a direct result of Washington's policies. Likewise, it is disingenuous for American commentators to imagine that the US was merely a distant spectator as Baathist thugs turned into pious Islamists during the years of US-led sanctions, and, during the years of US military occupation, a network of militants were gathered together in US prison camps and eventually morphed into ISIS.

In my blog, I did not comment at length on the depth of the crisis and what it has meant for archaeology and museums. Other commentators, like Fred Bohrer and Ömür Harmanşah have brought these points home in powerful ways. Nonetheless, let it be stated explicitly: anyone who cares about the past should be distraught, troubled and astonished by ISIS’s wanton destruction of museums and archeological sites. The materials under attack are nothing less than the priceless patrimony of Iraqi society, and perhaps something called humanity, if such a thing exists. In some cases, these objects under attack are the only surviving material culture we have of ancient eras of human history, and their value to the study of our own human development cannot be overstated. 

Is there any debate as to whether these objects deserve to be conserved in order to be studied by people trained to study them? There shouldn’t be -- but apparently since I did not repeat my allegiance to the principles of conservation explicitly, it was assumed I was against them. But my point wasn't to confirm a widely-embraced truism. Rather it was to question whether the only solution to this crisis was to pour more US bombs on it. I did this by attempting to problematize the way antiquities figure as important material signs in our modern, still-colonized world, and that as signs, antiquities can be used to mobilize senseless violence.

Affective Attachments

It is a truism that talk about artifacts often slips into talk about civilization. The slippage is common because it was intended to be. And because it is taught to some of us from a very early age. For example, the image or even silhouette of an ancient monument is usually enough to suggest a cultural, even spiritual meaning that far transcends the material dimensions of the object itself. The great pilgrimages that people make in order to be in the presence of artifacts unearthed by archaeologists is another indicator of the expansive meaning these objects have. A visit to the Parthenon or Jerash is for many an occasion to dwell in the presence of something that goes beyond the rocks themselves. It may be awkward to call monuments sacred or the modern veneration of antiquities a form of modern, secular religion, but I can think of no better terms that capture the sense of transcendent value, and the rituals of adoration that accrue around such objects.

From here, it is but a short step to the notion that an attack on such an artifact is an attack on civilization itself.  This is precisely where caution and critique are most needed. Why? Because this slippage from material object to moral argument has a genealogy, and a history. 

The affective attachments linking material objects to broad, moral claims about civilization are not natural but constructed. To point this out is not to suggest that they are unreasonable or undesireable, but rather that they are the result of human activity. Which is also to say, they emerge in histories of struggle, both as terms of struggle and as sites of struggle.

In my own study of a separate history of struggle over antiquities in Egypt, I found that the colonial context of archaeology marked the scientific and humanistic study of the objects in indelible ways. The history of archaeology and museums in modern Iraq is different, and yet it is marked by similar processes. For instance, in Mesopotamia, as in the Nile Valley, the great discoveries of colonial archaeology profoundly, and often negatively impacted the land rights, labor markets and local cultures of indigenous peoples. Similarly, in Iraq as in Egypt, those who most championed the civilizational meanings of ancient objects also tended to voice the most racist views about the modern inhabitants of ancient lands. Antiquities policies were built on these racist views, and it mattered to the people whose lives were impacted. (And as Nadia Abu El-Haj showed, the impact of Zionist archaeology on Palestine was even more pronounced.) While the move to nationalize the professions of archaeology and museum curatorship overturned and corrected some aspects of this colonial legacy, it also compounded them in other ways. Peasants, for instance, continued to be imagined primarily as a problem in the preservation regimes of the nationalist period just as they were during the colonial era. Scholars of colonial and nationalist archaeology have noticed similar patterns in the region, in Palestine, Iran, Turkey and elsewhere.

These dynamics are well known by those of us who study the region’s history, even if there is wide variation about how to interpret their meaning. Moreover, it is not just students of Middle Eastern history who have tried to grapple with these legacies: across the archaeological disciplines, similar lessons have been learned by a generation of post-processualists who have struggled to make ways for local populations to participate in the interpretation and conservation of ancient artifacts. And yet, as the present moment reminds us, colonial-era moral claims about civilization still dominate discussions about antiquities.

Artifact Interventionism

Many commentators on ISIS’s actions have pointed to a range of other historical contexts of iconoclasm—Revolutionary France, Byzantium, Bamiyan—with resonances to our moment. These analogies are rich in some ways, but they seem to miss one powerful fact—namely that ISIS is very aware of the kind of response its actions will garner and this, perhaps more than its rather inarticulate destruction of the objects themselves, seems to be the point. The destruction of the material objects is central to the story, but it also matters that these event are scripted and staged for the camera, and then mounted onto global media platforms as a spectacle assured to provoke intense reactions. 

As suggestive as the history of iconoclasm is, and as tempting as it is to imagine the motivations of ISIS iconoclasts, we should not fail to notice that the perpetrators of these crimes understand, or hope, that their actions will trigger intervention. To understand this, we need to situate these events within a history of artifact interventionism.

What is this history? In the nineteenth century, some of the first calls for direct European military invasion in the Arab world took place in the following way: a traveler or diplomat observes that an area is rich in ancient artifacts; the writer claims that such artifacts are under threat by the actions of local populations; using moral arguments about civilization, the writer urges his government to save the artifacts, employing military force if necessary; months later, the artifacts appear in the metropolitan museum. The process, to paraphrase Gayatri Spivak, is one of “white men saving antiquities from brown men.”

In the twentieth century, as colonized states won qualified forms of political independence, the terms changed slightly. Whereas in the colonial past, Western archaeologists had sought the protection of strong colonial governors, in the postcolonial era, archaeologists tended to favor strong autocratic local regimes because they believed that such regimes were more stable and thus better for securing exploration, excavation, and preservation. In this regard, we might consider the popular perception that many Egyptologists were glad when General Sisi came to power and they could finally get back to work. If true, this too would need to be seen as another variation on the old theme of antiquities interventionism. 

By invoking this history as relevant, I am not claiming that all calls to preserve objects from attacks are spurious, nor am I saying that all champions of conservation are warmongers or enablers of dictatorships. The reality is more complicated than that. As the current response of archaeologists and museum curators to the ISIS emergency shows, preservationism is complex, creative and often self-critical. 

Nonetheless, this history must be part of the conversation (and it is in some circles) since historically, many of the most urgent calls for preserving antiquities have served as the prelude to (and rhetorical grounding for) military intervention. And it is this history—as much as the intricacies of iconoclasm as a recurring historical theme and practice—that seems so relevant to our moment. 

I doubt whether ISIS iconoclasts know much of this history, just as their command over the textual traditions of Islam is so widely doubted. But they do not need to know any of this history to understand that an attack on a cultural icon revered in the West will shock elite opinion in the West, and thus enable broad tolerance for intervention among people who might be otherwise averse to military adventurism. ISIS strategists bet that their attacks will mobilize our own extremists—those who have called for open-ended military assault for many years now—thus provoking the kinds of conflict that help them recruit more jihadists.

After Bamiyan, Charlie Hebdo, the Mosul Museum and Palmyra, it should be clear that there is a broad, jihadi strategy to bait the West, staging crises where something civilizational needs saving. ISIS does not need a Quranic verse or fatwa to tell them to attack artifacts and art, for the simple reason that they already know there will always be white men who volunteer to save civilization from brown men. Again, this strategy is not grounded in any supposed theological aversion in Islam towards the image or the pagan past, but rather in a bloody colonial inheritance whereby national liberation has degraded into a logic of 'trading dead bodies', as Faisal Devji put it in his 2009 book, Landscapes of the Jihad. Juan Cole has talked about this same strategy in terms of “sharpening contradictions.” 

Beyond Colonial Rhetorics of Civilization 

Many of the loudest voices calling to protect the objects have never shied away from the call to defend civilization from barbarism. Likewise, many even parrot nineteenth-century antiquities interventionist rhetoric, calling for boots on the ground to secure objects on the ground. The civilization-barbarism binary is objectionable not just because it is historically inaccurate, but also because, when made into policy, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

It is not an accident that many of those now calling for the defense of civilization against the attack of ISIS were the same ones championing the US invasion of Iraq in the first place. This hypocrisy, as the use of moral discourse about civilization more generally, will only lead to more of the same. 

So, what is to be done? Those who speak most forcefully for action tend to think that only one thing can be done: more US intervention. They say this, knowing full well that US intervention played an outsized role in creating the collapse of the Iraqi state and in fostering the sectarian politics of post-war Iraqi society, just to take two of the principle catalysts for the rise of ISIS. Similarly, US military intervention played a direct role in the collapse of an already fragile Iraqi antiquities conservation system, and in the rise of new markets for looted artifacts. I have no doubt that the proponents of US intervention could produce examples of when the US military helped to secure particular excavation sites—but these, I think, are exceptions that prove the rule. And so perhaps it is easier to begin by saying what should not be done. Repeating past mistakes, for instance, is something we should not do, no matter how much we are provoked by the crimes of ISIS. Imagining that somehow this time, US military intervention will be different is another thing we should not do.

Long ago, Homi Bhabha reminded us of the ties between ‘emergency’ and ‘emergence,’ in order to suggest that crises are also opportunities for the emergence of something different. In that spirit, here’s a thought: what if, instead of responding to this emergency with more bombs we were to work toward producing more democratic, inclusive and effective systems of preserving antiquities? Forms of conservation and study built not on threats of violence, but rather on equitable participation in discovery and conservation as well as a transparent and fair distribution of resources? If it is justice that is desired, we could more consistently and vigorously enforce already-existing laws that ban the traffic of looted artifacts. While we're at it, if we are truly outraged by the destruction of Mesopotamian artifacts, we might even begin to hold those American officials legally accountable for the negligence and malfeasance of the occupation of Iraq, especially actions those that set in motion the waves of looting. 

Reasonable critics might say that is fine, but such things involve decades of education, inclusion and building and that right now we have an emergency on our hands. To them we should say: this has always been the case. Moreover, military intervention is not so much a solution to the destruction of antiquities, but one of its causes. Since Napoleon's intervention to save Egypt from the Ottomans, there is always an emergency and there has always been a crisis, and the great patrimony of human civilization is under threat. These things are related to one another in direct ways. And in the meantime, this greater work of education, inclusion and building is always postponed.

If we could move past the military incursions of the past, and past support for local strongmen promising security, we might finally attend to these larger and nobler tasks, which means we might have a chance to preserve the past and also learn from it. Anything less is the real threat to the patrimony of human civilization.