Tin-pot propaganda at the British Museum

[Originally posted at NOW]

"One thing is certain" - except it's not (NOW/Alex Rowell)

The British tendency to understatement is a virtue rivalled only by an equal and opposite vice of euphemism. The difficulty outsiders often have in distinguishing between the two can cause a great deal of confusion: of innocent self-deprecating humor with gloom, in the former case; and of serious malice with wit or genteel decorum, in the latter. The resulting losses in translation can be costly: one British brigadier in the Korean War, believing that describing his troops’ situation over the radio as “a bit sticky” would adequately convey their total encirclement by Chinese Communists, had the misfortune of having an American interlocutor, who interpreted him as saying all was basically well, and thus failed to send the reinforcements that might have averted the slaughter and capture of hundreds of the British men.

With such rich and various – but comparatively subtle – means of deception, it’s rare to catch British officialdom uttering an outright, demonstrable lie. Which is why it was so arresting for me to read the information panels at the Parthenon marbles display in the British Museum last week. While initially contenting themselves with describing the 19th century disfigurement and theft, by our own ‘Lord’ Elgin, of the finest surviving monument of all antiquity as a “matter for discussion” – a truly magnificent euphemism, trivializing the plunder of Socrates’ Athens to the level of tea-table chatter – the curators then waded overconfidently into the terrain of plain falsehood:

“Elgin’s removal of the sculptures from the ruins of the building has always been a matter for discussion, but one thing is certain – his actions spared them further damage by vandalism, weathering and pollution.”

That is one way of putting it. But consider, if only for “discussion’s” sake, some of the other ways. Here, for instance, is how Edward Daniel Clarke, an eyewitness to Elgin’s conduct, described a day on the job*:

“After a short time spent in examining the several parts of the temple, one of the workmen came to inform Don Battista that they were then going to lower one of the metopes. We saw this fine piece of sculpture raised from its station between the triglyphs; but the workmen endeavouring to give it a position adapted to the projected line of descent, a part of the adjoining masonry was loosened by the machinery; and down came the fine masses of Pentelican marble, scattering their white fragments with thundering noise among the ruins […]”

Nor was this sort of thing uncommon. Take Giovanni Lusieri, an Italian subordinate of Elgin’s, reporting a mishap encountered in making off with a section of the eastern frieze:

“Not being well-sawn, for want of sufficiently fine saws, and being a little weak in the middle it parted in two in course of transport […] Happily it broke in the middle, in a straight line, at a place where there was no work, so that the accident has helped us to transport it quickly […]”

Then there was the time Elgin quite literally lost his marbles at sea, when the Mentor, a ship he had bought for the purpose of carrying the loot back to his house in Scotland (only after he later ran into money problems did he contemplate selling them to the government), sank in the Mediterranean. It was only with what Christopher Hitchens described as “enormous labour on the part of local fisherman” that the stones were eventually recovered.

So far from delivering the masterpiece of Phidias from vandalism, then, it’s obvious that Elgin was himself the principal vandal. But were the marbles, at least, secure once they passed out of His Lordship’s clumsy mitts into the curators’ assiduous custody?

Not according to a 1938 entry in the minutes of the British Museum Standing Committee titled, ‘Damage to Sculpture of the Parthenon,’ in which it is quietly admitted that years of systematic ill-maintenance in Bloomsbury have resulted in “great damage” to several “important pieces,” likely arising from the alarming practice of brushing them all with copper wire.

You really couldn’t make it up, which is why I was unable to stop myself from blurting out loud, while reading the information panel (see above photo), that it was “the sheerest propaganda.” When I did, I was heartened to hear a laugh from a European woman behind me, who had evidently been reading along with much the same thought in mind. How much longer will the British government refuse to accept the Greek request for restitution, and persist in what is not only a moral disgrace and national embarrassment, but an object of mockery and contempt from visitors?

* This and other quotes taken from Christopher Hitchens’ The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification

Right and wrong: British conservatives, still falling for Assad

[Originally posted at NOW]

Reviled though he might officially be by David Cameron’s right-of-centre cabinet, Bashar al-Assad has never been short of friends in the fustier, more bucolic hinterlands of authentic, red-blooded British reactionism.

Everyone knows of the now-bankrupt British National Party leader MEP Nick Griffin’s “fact-finding” trip to Damascus in June, which was short on facts but long on things like warm handshakes with Assad’s prime minister and praise for the “better job” Hezbollah has done than London’s policemen in “dealing with ‘British’ Jihadi cut-throats.”

But while Griffin may be a crackpot – he has since washed up in Athens, where he denounced the government’s “totally illegal” crackdown on the “patriots” of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn crime gang – his way of thinking on Syria is shared by somewhat saner conservatives, like Peter Hitchens, who has insinuated the 2011 protests were a foreign conspiracy and said the region-wide refugee crisis is “largely [Cameron’s] fault.”

And it’s a sign of how much further this rot has spread that yesterday’s Telegraph brought us a column titled, “If we’re not talking to President Bashar al-Assad, we should be.” The writer, veteran foreign correspondent Con Coughlin, welcomes the news that Western governments are “finally persuaded” that the fall of Assad is not in their “countries’ long-term security interests” (“Better late than never, I say”), and are thus seeking to work with Damascus to combat the Islamists among the opposition’s ranks “who pose the greatest threat” to the West. He refers to recent claims by Syrian Foreign Minister Faisal Moqdad that western intelligence services had indeed done just that; claims which are quite believable in the current zeitgeist in which Assad’s continuing rule is said out loud to be, in former US ambassador Ryan Crocker’s words, the “least worst option.”

Coughlin, at least, has the honesty to admit his is not a moral argument but one of realpolitik (or “common-sense,” as he prefers). How could it not be, when the atrocities committed by Assad – chemical weapons attacks, airstrikes, SCUD missiles, aerial barrel bombs, cluster bombs, and what Michael Weiss has called terror-famines – are so many multitudes vaster than anything seen from the rebels? What Coughlin is really saying is that Assad, while naturally far worse for mere Syrians, can at least be relied on to leave our civilians alone, which is all that counts.

This would be a repellent thing to say at any point in time, but is especially distasteful coming just a month after the cold-blooded murder of a British surgeon, Abbas Khan, by his Syrian regime jailors, who had passed the previous eight months beating, burning, and electrocuting him until his weight dropped to a childlike five stone (32kg). To this day, the regime continues to humiliate not just Dr Khan’s family but the entire British government with its ludicrous claim that he committed suicide, only days before a scheduled release that his mother spent six terrifying months in Damascus trying to secure, and to which he was known to be looking forward tremendously.

Yet the Khan murder is only the most recent example of Assad’s danger to “us” as well as “them,” which has been amply demonstrated over the course not of years but of decades. Perhaps Coughlin has forgotten the last-minute discovery of a bomb on the tarmac at Heathrow in 1986, planted there by a Syrian national on orders from the Syrian embassy in London, which later harbored the would-have-been-bomber.

And it’s certainly odd, given Coughlin’s aversion to “Islamist fanatics,” that he would overlook Assad’s frantic funneling of al-Qaeda fighters into Iraq after 2003, where they helped kill nearly 200 British troops. His glossing over Assad’s history of incubating jihadist cells in Lebanon, for use whenever expedient against whoever is convenient, including the Lebanese army of whom Britain is supposed to be an ally, is similarly curious.

But perhaps strangest is Coughlin’s apparent insouciance at Assad’s watertight alliance with Hezbollah, the formidable jihadist militia whose kidnapping of British and other civilians in the 1980s supplied the material for one of Coughlin’s own books. All behind us now, perhaps. What, then, about Hezbollah’s refusal to hand over its members indicted by UN prosecutors for the assassination of Lebanon’s former prime minister; its continuing violation of UN Security Council Resolutions 1559 and 1701; or its intimidation of UN peacekeeping units in south Lebanon? None of Britain’s business, evidently. Not that that stops Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, from making Britain his business. In a rousing war speech on Jerusalem Day last year, the Sayyid made special mention of Coughlin’s compatriots, promoting them to the uniquely villainous status of being worse than both the Greater and the Lesser Satans:

“Today, we want to say to all of them: to America, Israel, and the English… [pauses for emphasis, smiles] they’re the most cunning at [manipulation] [applause erupts]”

Nasrallah may have his hierarchy of enemies, but for Western policymakers, picking favorites between Sunni and Shiite jihadists doesn’t suggest itself as the most thoughtful approach. Coughlin is undoubtedly right to raise concerns about what passes for “moderation” among Syria’s rebels nowadays. But it’s a complete non sequitur – not to mention a moral outrage – to jump into bed with Assad, Hezbollah and Iran in response. If Britain doesn’t want to help Syria’s rebels, the least it can do is not bolster their enemy; an enemy which, in Syria more than anywhere, is certainly not its friend.

[Correction: An earlier version of this text mistakenly ended with "the enemy of which, in Syria more than anywhere, is certainly not its friend". This has been amended as above]

Note to Turkey: Not everything has to be a mosque

[Originally posted at NOW]

With moderates like Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, I often wonder, who needs Islamists?

Having only last week referred to the UNESCO World Heritage Listed Hagia Sophia museum as a “mosque,” the ruling party is now turning its conversionary zeal on the 5th-century Monastery of Stoudios – or the “Imrahor Ilyas Bey Mosque,” as it will apparently soon be known. This follows the unpardonable Islamisation that has already been inflicted on other priceless Byzantine-era churches in the towns of Trabzon and Iznik.

This kind of thing has a long and ugly history, implicating Christians as much as Muslims. No less a structure than the Parthenon of Athens, the finest monument of all antiquity, was irreparably wrecked during its conversion in the 6th century into a Byzantine church (also named Hagia Sophia, as it happens).

Though the Ottomans later turned this too into a mosque, they had enough reverence for it not to make alterations beyond painting over the Christian mosaics, which were anyway disfigurements in the first place. One wishes one could say the same of the Istanbul Hagia Sophia, where the Ottomans placed lugubrious black calligraphy discs like crude stickers over the still-visible and colourful artwork with which the building had originally been decorated. Of course, to this day, a crackpot Christian fringe still dreams of knocking down the minarets there and restoring it as an Orthodox place of worship. Not for nothing did Ataturk decide to do away with the building’s religious significance altogether and make it a museum.

That his secularizing project looks to be under redoubled and fortified threat in today’s Turkey is already very clear. Yet the notion of purifying or “conquering” (fetih in Turkish) every last pebble of non-Muslim heritage is a much larger issue than the domestic secularist/Islamist debate. It is, in fact, nothing short of an aesthetic and cultural crime; the spoliation of unique and irreplaceable remnants of world history; and for these reasons demands the attention – and if, necessary, intervention – of the international community.

Holy Wisdom: The other Parthenon marbles scandal

It has for years been something of a custom for visitors to the Acropolis and its accompanying museums to take the occasion to comment on the enduring dispute over what were once called the ‘Elgin marbles’, named after the British ambassador to Constantinople who in the early 19th century took a saw to the Parthenon – the crowning glory of 5th-century-B.C. Athens – and shipped the best part of its sculptures back to Britain, where they remain in the national museum to this day. I won’t go into this old and tired debate except to say that, as someone who was already convinced of the case for returning the Parthenon marbles (as they are properly called) to Athens on principle alone, to see the consequences of Elgin’s surgery first-hand at the new Acropolis Museum at the base of the temple last month was to appreciate also the irrefutable aesthetic argument for restitution.

It dawns on you the moment you realize, when examining the panels of the frieze (which once ran along the outside of the naos, or inner temple) and the metopes (the high-relief sculptures carved into the outermost rim), that only the sand-coloured marbles are real, while the white ones – which are the majority – are merely replicas of the originals kept in Bloomsbury. It’s as if the Louvre were to exhibit only a torn-off half of the Mona Lisa, the remainder having been painted on in different colours a couple of years ago. One sees instantly that, even more than the duplicity and injustice and avarice of Elgin’s crime, it’s the absolute vulgarity of it all that is so singularly embarrassing. As the 19th-century travel writer Edward Daniel Clarke put it, “Could any one believe that this was actually done? and that it was done, too, in the name of a nation vain of its distinction in the fine art?”

And yet, for all the opprobrium rightly directed at Elgin, his was not the only deliberate disfiguration of the Parthenon in its two and a half millennia of existence. As I learnt with fascination from the information panels accompanying the marbles – or, more accurately, the gaps in them – the Parthenon lost 6 of its original 115 frieze slabs, as well as several metopes and a major chunk of its eastern pediment (the largest and perhaps most dramatic group of sculptures, comprising a 30-metre-wide triangle atop the 10-metre-tall columns) when in the 6th century A.D. it was converted into a Church of the Holy Wisdom. This involved destroying three frieze panels on each side to create windows; cutting three doorways through the walls of the naos; and demolishing the centre of the eastern pediment along with the adjacent metopes to construct the signature Byzantine Christian apse, or half-dome; all of which amounted to “irreversible damage”, according to Prof. Charalambos Bouras, now director of the Acropolis’ restoration committee.

Having amended the structure of the pagan temple to their satisfaction, the Christians proceeded to redecorate the interior, painting the walls and installing the necessary altar, benches, etc. According to the late Prof. Robert Browning, who contributed an electrifying introduction to Christopher Hitchens’ The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification (which I happily picked up at the Acropolis Museum’s gift shop), there was even “occasional, apparently deliberate, defacement of sculptured figures [by] over-zealous Christians at this time”, although this wasn’t “systematic”. Up until its conversion into a Catholic church in 1204, “notices of the deaths of the bishops and archbishops of Athens were carved high up on some of the peristyle columns”.

Thereafter, the damage inflicted tended to be basically secular in nature. Even when the Ottomans made the Parthenon a mosque after capturing Athens in 1458, and erected a minaret on the Acropolis, actual alterations were limited to whitewashing or plastering over the Christian mosaics and frescoes, which were of course anyway disfigurements to begin with.

Yet the parties of God were to play one final, and central, role in the ruin of the Parthenon, this time in direct collaboration with its most famous vandal. At every moment of Elgin’s looting campaign, his chaplain at Constantinople, one Reverend Philip Hunt, was to be his inexhaustible fixer and accomplice: delivering saws to his workmen; procuring the necessary paperwork from the Ottoman occupiers, by bribery when necessary; impelling him to take ever more precious sculptures, such as the priceless caryatid porch of the Erechtheion; and even indulging in some not insignificant plunder all of his own. As Hitchens puts it, “Reverend Hunt seems to have been a most worldly chaplain”.

Perhaps it will be said that it’s unfair to blame today’s Christians for the sins of their fathers (though I can’t help thinking the whole sorry history rather undermines the argument that a world without faith would be poorer in art and beauty. Among the first acts of restoration carried out on the Parthenon after Greece attained independence in 1832 was the removal of the Byzantine apse, in recognition that the alien appendage had no business spoiling the finest monument of antiquity). But the Church’s hands are by no means clean even now. Though it loaned one of them to the Acropolis Museum in 2008, the Vatican still claims ownership of three Parthenon marble fragments it acquired in the 19th century – one from the western pediment, one from the northern frieze, and one from the southern metopes – two of which it continues to display in its Gregoriano Profano museum.

Is this, too, not shameful? Does it not warrant at least some fraction of the international outrage reserved for Elgin and his present-day apologists at the British Museum? Those who think Downing Street’s covetousness is the only obstacle to the sight of a reunited set of Parthenon marbles might recall that the Greek Culture Minister Georgios Voulgarakis asked in 2006 that “all foreign museums that possess sculptural elements of the Parthenon” return them, and that in the same year the late Athenian Archbishop Christodoulos explicitly requested the return of the Vatican’s holdings in a private meeting with Pope Benedict XVI. The Parthenon, as is often pointed out, is no ordinary temple, built simply to glorify the tyrant of the day. It is instead the greatest remnant (much more than a mere “symbol”) of the most extraordinary intellectual and cultural awakening of all time – the age of Socrates, Sophocles and Herodotus, which gave us philosophy, ethics, logic, physics, history and of course democracy (all of them Greek words). “It was to be”, in Browning’s words, “an everlasting monument to a unique and dazzling society”. If the new Pope Francis is indeed the generous and compassionate maverick we’re so often told he is, he might reflect on what his co-religionists have done over the centuries to impair this monument, and make the necessary gesture of atonement.