The Site of Cultural Destruction

“...52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some... important to Iran & the Iranian culture... WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD...”

– Donald J. Trump on January 4, 2020 (2:52 PM) via Twitter

Clearly, these words show a moral baseness, political stupidity, and symbolic cheapness that only President Trump can concoct in such an appalling combination. The fact that it is objectionable is obvious. The fact that it combines current politics and architecture led many architects to rightly see it as their responsibility to decry this publicly announced intention to commit a war crime. This was best represented in the statement disseminated by the Society of Architectural Historians that warned against the targeting of “cultural sites”.[1]  Without taking away from the centrality of both President Trump’s repulsive threat and its outright rejection, I want to offer an alternative reading of the tweet.

It is significant that the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict used the term “cultural property” and not “cultural site”.[2]  Indeed, a ‘site’ usually refers to a place where artifacts, architecture, or events of cultural significance occur. In itself, a site is not ‘cultural’, but can host things of cultural significance.

President Trump was threatening the destruction of property with cultural value, such as historical mosques and tombs. That’s what the “beautiful”[3]  American weapons are built to destroy: property. They can neither destroy the placeness of a ‘site’ nor the immateriality that defines ‘culture’.[4]

Having said this, there is a site of cultural destruction in this story. That site is the white rectangle with rounded corners that hosts the reprehensible words of President Trump. The culture being destroyed is not Iranian, but American. President Trump’s Twitter platform acts as a site from which repeated attacks on American decency are launched. The aftermath, which can be seen in the peripheral site of the comments section, often shows the success of those attacks. Notions of civility, honor, and kinship are blown to pieces right off the face of American culture. They are replaced with vulgarity, pettiness, and narcissism.

Notes

[1] “Targeting Cultural Sites Is a War Crime.” AmericanAnthro.org, January 6, 2020. https://www.americananthro.org/ParticipateAndAdvocate/AdvocacyDetail.aspx?ItemNumber=25357#/8/.

[2] “1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.” Unesco.org. Accessed January 8, 2020. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/armed-conflict-and-heritage/convention-and-protocols/1954-hague-convention/.

[3] Brian Williams, on MSNBC, infamously described images showing the launching of American missiles towards Syria as “beautiful”, triggering an immediate backlash.

[4] This is not to deny the existence of ‘material culture’ or that cultural heritage can be lost as a consequence of physical destruction, but rather to say that although a people’s culture can be reflected in their physical artifacts, it is not fundamentally physical.