Utterly appalling. Seriously. So sad and pathetic that there are human beings out there with dirtiness on their minds and power to impose their interpretation of reality in something universal as art. Seriously, my blood boiled after reading that.
It only betrays their own insecurities and lack of restraint, doesn't it? If your morals are so strong then you needn't be worried about something you've presumably already experienced in private.
Any urge to smash things or ideas you disagree with is deeply human.
After ISIS took over parts of Iraq, they did what many have done before them through the millennia of destroying art and beauty because they disagreed.
A modern take is the climate activists destroying art because they fear the end of the world.
These differ in intent. The climate activists don't hate the underlying art, they just want to do some kind of stunt that gets people in the news. That's why these protests targeted art that was stored behind plexiglass; they wanted a protest medium that was highly disruptive and shocking but caused minimal harm.
ISIS on the other had specifically wants the art destroyed because their particular brand of brainworms is opposed to anything that isn't worm-shaped. The goal wasn't to shock people, it was to cause deliberate damage to human culture.
I believe many scholars said the goal of ISIS was to shock the mind, because shock creates abstract entities in the power of observers that can be used to wrestle control of and over them.
It was easier to terrify people into surrendering their mind than to defeat them physically (and have them surrender their SUV in the art example).
ISIS wanted to recreate the Caliphate, and shocking, violent videos were one of the most effective methods of recruiting young, belligerent, impressionable males. Martyrdom, beheadings, and violent Jihad were things long before ISIS, and they simply put on the mantle.
to put it another way, you only saw the violent propaganda, since it was in the interest of the US Gov, Israel, Turkey, et al, to make sure the world saw how brutal they were. You didn't watch the hundreds of hours of non-violent propaganda or theology, such as the recruiting videos aimed at young Islamic women.
This whole thread is full of takes like this - “how awful they have the wrong morals and erase things I agree with or don’t erase things I disagree with”.
It’s all power games. Trying to pretend your morals are correct is hypocritical.
The prevailing attitude is that this kind of social control is also widely accepted within certain religions, and nobody has the balls to address it even in the West. Nay, especially in the West.
Not sure if the "also" is necessary there, considering the above example was already religion based.
Also, the West interferes with the rest of the world quite enough - I'd suggest we try to stop exploiting the rest of the world before we 'save them from their backwards religions' or whatever.
Utterly appalling. Seriously. So sad and pathetic that there are human beings out there with dirtiness on their minds and power to impose their interpretation of reality in something universal as art. Seriously, my blood boiled after reading that.