By Frank Chalk, Special to The Gazette<\/p>\n
Is there a link between these two recent events?<\/p>\n
Germany: The discovery of 1,400 modernist paintings in a Munich apartment, art that was stolen from German-Jewish art collectors by the Nazis.<\/p>\n
Mali: The murder of two French journalists and the renewed determination of local al-Qaida militia to invade Timbuktu and destroy mosques and 500-year-old Arabic manuscripts.<\/p>\n
Yes, these incidents are linked, and the links will be explored more closely Thursday at a Concordia University conference titled Plundered Cultures, Stolen Heritage.<\/p>\n
The seizure of modernist art in Nazi Germany (where the Nazis considered such art \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093degenerate\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d) and the growing threat to cultural heritage in Mali illustrate how an ingrained insistence on there being only one \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093right way\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d of doing things \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009d dividing people into \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093us\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d vs. \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093them\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0080\u009d binds together the plunderers of cultures and the killers among them.<\/p>\n
It should remind every one of us that attacks on cultures, religions and \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093races\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d can often foreshadow mass atrocities.<\/p>\n
\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093Ethnocide\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d is the term for the attempted annihilation of a culture. It is the often-neglected precedent of some of the greatest mass atrocities in history. In Canada, we have seen the attempted annihilation of aboriginal languages and cultures that led to the introduction of residential schools, just as the expropriation and mislabelling of Armenian property in the aftermath of the genocide suffered by the Armenian people stains modern Turkey today.<\/p>\n
The scarlet connecting threads are the perpetrators\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7 overlapping world views, their intention on annihilation of difference. According to this way of thinking, there is just one version of Islam, the most extreme version, just as for the Nazis there was just one legitimate version of artistic expression, and all other versions, including the modernist works found this week in Munch, were \u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u056a\u0093degenerate.\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0539\u009d<\/p>\n
Under propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis not only banned such artists as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall and Paul Klee, but denied Jewish art collectors and gallery owners like Julius and Max Stern the right to collect classical European paintings.<\/p>\n
The jihadists who occupied Timbuktu before a combined force of French special forces and African Union troops drove them out claim that medieval Muslim accounts of the achievements of African kingdoms like Ghana, Mali and Songhay contained perfidious heresies. They sound retrospectively like Goebbels\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7 demonization of Jews as carriers of the twin plagues of tolerance and liberalism.<\/p>\n
The pursuit of racial purity drove the agenda for Nazi Germany before and during the Second World War. In the same way, the pursuit of religious purity by Islamist extremists is threatening Mali, Nigeria, Somalia and many other countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.<\/p>\n
The two-day conference at Concordia, which is open to the public, will see participants share the lessons that scholars are learning about the motives of such perpetrators, the impact of their assaults on their victims, and the significance of the legacy of these attacks on restitution and reconciliation today.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
Although Thursday\u0569\u00a7\u0549\u0082-\u0549\u0084\u00a7s Plundered Cultures, Stolen Heritage conference is open to the public, registration is required at www.concordia.ca\/plunderedcultures<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Frank Chalk is a Concordia University history professor and director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies.<\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n By Frank Chalk, Special to The Gazette Is there a link between these two recent events? Germany: The discovery of 1,400 modernist paintings in a Munich apartment, art that was stolen from German-Jewish art collectors […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14284,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kadence_starter_templates_imported_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14480"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14480\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aaeurop.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}