Cultural cleansing

Cultural cleansing is the eradication and destruction of cultural artifacts, such as books, artworks, and structures, and the suppression of cultural activities that do not conform to the destroyer's notion of what is appropriate. Motives may include the religious (e.g., iconoclasm), as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing to remove the evidence of a people from a locale or history, as part of an effort to implement a Year Zero, in which the past and its associated culture is deleted and history is "reset", the suppression of an indigenous culture by invaders and colonisers, along with many other potential reasons.

In Nazi Germany's campaign against degenerate art (Kulturelle Säuberung), the oppression was carried out in the belief that it would cleanse the psyche of the German people of degeneracy. In China, as part of the Cultural Revolution, the most radical of the Red Guards destroyed artifacts in order to free the Chinese people from the old ways of thinking and the shackles of the past. So-called bourgeois art, theatre, and books were suppressed in favour of that which glorified the communist class struggle.

In 2014 to 2015, in areas that it controls, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has carried out a campaign of cultural cleansing, destroying artifacts^[1] and historical sites in a campaign of iconoclasm and/or idolatry.^[2] Included in this destruction are Shi'ite Islamic sites, including shrines and mosques,^[3] and artifacts that do not conform to ISIL's interpretation of Islam.

See also

• Buddhas of Bamiyan
• Cultural genocide
• Korea under Japanese rule
• List of book-burning incidents

References