It is striking, even shocking, how distressed many of us felt, amid the real destruction and brutality of a war, by the mere loss of cultural artifacts (at Baghdad’s National Museum) and documents (in its national library and archives). Are we so effete that we get queasier over objects and records than lives? Are we trying to avert our eyes from the real human horror? Or is it something else.

Sixty years ago, economist Karl Polanyi argued, amid the inferno of world war that — aside from outright obliteration — the worst damage to human beings comes from cultural, not physical, causes. He took as examples the African slave trade and the experience of native Americans. He said it was possible that the lives of both groups, by some economic measures, might have improved slightly under slavery and on reserves. It didn’t matter, he said, because “a social calamity is primarily a cultural, not an economic phenomenon. … It lies in the lethal injury to the institutions in which … social existence is embedded.”

What keeps people going in the worst of times is a sense of who they are, and connection to their community. These reach into the past as well as grounding them in the present. When their world disintegrates around them, they turn in need to the past, for assurance that there will be a future, and that they have value worth persevering for. It works on many levels. Individuals leaf through photos of those who are gone, and find some purpose. When much of a group, or generation, has been wasted, the rest seek assurance that the collectivity they belong to will continue in the tokens of its past. Jews around the world, it seems to me, tend to see the state of Israel itself as a memorial to those who died in the Holocaust and insist fervently on recognition of its “right to exist,” as a guarantee that the obliteration ultimately failed.

Think what Iraqis experienced over two decades: terror and torture; eight years of bloodletting with Iran; the first gulf war, then twelve years of stifling sanctions; and this war, with its aerial pounding, deaths and maiming. Then the main repositories of the national sense of self, to which they could have turned, are destroyed in a night or two! I think this is something any of us can empathize with. Imagine how those of us in Toronto would feel about the sudden loss of the ROM, where we went as kids, and take our own kids. It’s hardly comparable — totem poles and dinosaur bones, and we aren’t living through Iraqi times — yet it would be devastating.

The reactions — or lack of — by U.S. authorities have not helped. They were warned by archeologists and others before the war. (“We told them looting was the biggest danger …”) But Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says that bad stuff happens and that free people go looting. They had the ability to protect buildings and knew the locations, but the only institutions in Baghdad they chose to guard were the ministries of the interior and oil.

Let me add in this light that what often bothers people around the world about U.S. culture isn’t the culture itself, which they adore — jazz, Schwarzenegger movies, the mouse; it’s the fact that American culture, true to its commercial core, tends to disrespect other cultures, seeing them as competitors to outgross, absorb or wipe out. When Donald Rumsfeld wisecracked about seeing one clip of a vase being stolen eight times, and the assembled yahoos of the press guffawed in a reaction shot, well, maybe it was the 5,000-year-old alabaster Uruk Vase, containing “the earliest known depiction of a ritual.”

Or think of it this way. Since 9/11, the pop media version of world politics has had Civilization, as in Western, versus the dark forces, mainly Muslim. In the runup to this war, the Iraqi people figured mostly as distraught, deprived, oppressed, depressed, passive — and needing bestowal of democracy from above to raise them from their essentially negative state. The idea of Iraq as the vibrant cradle of civilization, witnessed by its culture troves, hardly fits this frame. I’m not suggesting any U.S. plan to destroy Iraqi culture, but the Americans’ lack of response, or comprehension of a real problem, jibes with that mental preset.

People sometimes muse about the connection between globalization and the post-9/11 world. Has the latter supplanted the former? Or are they closely related? Well, one huge problem facing the process of economic globalization before 9/11 was culture. The U.S. wanted it included, just like any product you trade or sell. Others, led by France and supported by Canada, based on our long experience with American culture, wanted special status for culture. It would have been nice if those vases, scrolls etc. in Baghdad had at least a chance to be part of the debate.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.