Culture war:

Culture has long been a proxy in the assertion of power by one people over another. Recent egregious examples include the Chinese government’s attempt to suppress Uyghur religion, literature, music, even food, and Islamic State’s destruction of ancient monuments. In war, culture is a second front. At their most extreme, wars are about eradicating a people’s cultural memory altogether, wiping them from the slate as if they had never been.

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In some ways, intentions are less important than effects, amid war’s messy reality. A missile strike in Kyiv that reportedly killed five people was seemingly directed at the television tower, but it lies close to Babyn Yar, the site of the massacre of 150,000 people during the second world war, including 30,000 Jews – a great irony given Mr Putin’s stated ambition to “denazify” Ukraine. An attack on the town of Ivankiv, 50 miles north-west of Kyiv, set afire the town’s Historical and Local History Museum, destroying precious works by the 20th-century folk artist Maria Prymachenko. The artist is an important symbol of Ukrainian art – and Ukrainian hope.

Three decades ago, war in the former Yugoslavia saw sacred and beautiful places such as Dubrovnik or the Mostar bridge and old town targeted, sometimes with the intention of erasing the evidence that people of another religion or ethnicity had once lived there. Whether or not sites like Babyn Yar and Ivankiv’s museum have been collateral damage rather than actual targets, the cultural front in war is never trivial. This is a conflict, like so many others, that’s not just about controlling territory – but owning narrative.

And trying to smash all evidence of a culture often backfires, as with the manuscripts from Mali. I’m betting Maria Prymachenko is now known to a lot more people outside Ukraine than she was before. The Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed but their fame was amplified in the process. Trying to dominate a narrative is hampered by the fact that narratives can’t be bombed or torched out of existence.