Vandalism
In order to have a deeper understanding of a concept, one must look inward into its origin. Although vandalism is one of the ill concepts that have rendered our society very volatile, we must always understand what birthed this concept and how it has been sustained till this generation in order to have a very co-ordinated way of waging war against it.
Historically, vandalism has been justified by painter Gustave Courbet as destruction of monuments symbolizing “war and conquest”. Therefore, it is often done as an expression of contempt, creativity, or both. Gustave Courbet’s attempt, during the 1871 Paris Commune, to dismantle the Vendôme column, a symbol of the past Napoleon III authoritarian Empire, was one of the most celebrated events of vandalism. Nietzsche himself would meditate after the Commune on the “fight against culture”, taking as example the intentional burning of the Tuileries Palace on 23 May 1871. “The criminal fight against culture is only the reverse side of a criminal culture” wrote Klossowski after quoting Nietzsche.
However, the history of the heinous act of vandalism goes beyond a mere act of creativity as described in the preceding paragraph. Perpetration of vandalism is traceable to the ancient Germanic people known as Vandals. They were directly associated with senseless destruction as a result of their sack of Rome under King Gensericin 455. During the Enlightenment era, Rome was idealized, while the Goths and Vandals were blamed for its destruction. The Vandals may not have been any more destructive than other invaders of ancient times. However, the Vandals did intentionally damage statues, which may be why their name is associated with the vandalism of art. The term Vandalisme was coined in 1794 by Henri Grégoire, bishop of Blois, to describe the destruction of artwork following the French Revolution. The term was quickly adopted across Europe. This new use of the term was important in coloring the perception of the Vandals from later Late Antiquity, popularizing the pre-existing idea that they were a barbaric group with a taste for destruction (Merrilles& Miles, 2010).
Let’s further peruse the story of the Vandals so as to have a practical understanding of how they operated. Fleeing westward from the Huns at the beginning of the 5th century, the Vandals invaded and devastated parts of Gaul before settling in Spain in 409. There the Asdingi Vandals under King Gunderic became the ascendant group after attacks by allies of the Romans had dissipated the Silingi and Alani Vandals. In 429 Gunderic’s brother and successor, Gaiseric (reigned 428–477), settled his people in North Africa, where they became federates of Rome in 435. Four years later Gaiseric threw off Roman overlordship, captured Carthage, and established an independent autocracy. With their rule firmly established in what is now northern Tunisia and northeastern Algeria, the Vandals eventually annexed Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily, and their pirate fleets controlled much of the western Mediterranean. Under Gaiseric, the Vandals even invaded Italy and captured Rome in June 455. For a fortnight they occupied the city and systematically plundered it, carrying off many valuable works of art (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019).
Vandalism
The Vandals were ardent Arian Christians, and their persecutions of the Roman Catholic Church in Africa were at times fierce, particularly during the last years of the reign of Gaiseric’s successor, Huneric (reigned 477–484). In 533 the Byzantines under Belisarius invaded North Africa following the deposition by the usurper Gelimer of Huneric’s son, Hilderich, who was a close friend of the Byzantineemperor Justinian I. In one campaigning season the Vandal kingdom was destroyed. Rome again ruled the area and restored the churches to the Roman Catholics. The Vandals played no further role in history (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019).
Coming down home, vandalism has always been part of Asian history and this was prevalent in the 14th century at Bezekilk in Xinjiang province, China. It was a community dominated by Buddhist before it was conquered by Muslims in a holy war. After the conquest, since Islam proscribes figurative images of human beings, they destroyed all the cave grottoes that belonged to the people. I wouldn’t like to go into details because Central Asian history can be confusing for the non-specialist.
However, Christoph Baumer with a masterly third volume in his four-volume series on Central Asia, covering the Age of Islam and the Mongols, cuts through the historical smokescreen and gives a detailed and authoritative account appropriate for both scholar and layman alike. He explains that prior to the eighth century, Islam had established itself in Central Asia through a combination of Iranian book and Turkish sword. Turkic-Muslim dynasties were established and Islam offered these new dynasties an ideological method of breaking down borders between warring clans and tribes (Hare, 2016).
By the mid-11th century, science, scholarship and the arts flourished as this newly established Central Asian hegemony spread to other parts of the Muslim world. This cultural development in turn is followed between 1000 and 1220 by a complete reconfiguration of the region — ethnically, linguistically and politically — by further Islamic Turkic migrations and through dynasties they established such as the Seljuks, the Karakhanids, and the Ghaznavids. However, from the mid-12th to the mid-13th centuries, Genghis Khan and his successors abruptly and comprehensively extinguished this cultural Islamic renaissance with the establishment of a Mongol empire — which became the largest land empire ever known, more than three times the size of the United States, and remained in a mutated form until the last great Mogul of India was deposed in 1857 (Hare, 2016).
A non-Mongol’s life under their jurisdiction was worth considerably less than that of a good horse. ‘There is no better place for an enemy of our nation than the grave,’ said Genghis Khan, in answer to his son Joshi’s appeal for clemency for a prisoner.
However, the Mongols were secular rulers with no regard for any one particular religion and had a great inquisitiveness about all of them. Not for them the eradication of Buddhist images (Hare, 2016). So, this marked the beginning of vandalism in Asia before it took modern approach through which people arbitrarily destroy the property of other people.
References
Encyclopaedia Britannica (2019).Vandal. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Vandal-Germanic-people
Hare, J (2016).Conquest and Vandalism in Central Asia. Retrieved from https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/07/conquest-and-vandalism-in-central-asia/
Scott, A (1978). “The Graffiti Solution”(PDF). The Wharton Magazine
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