'All art must go underground:' Ukraine scrambles to shield its cultural heritage

[LetMyPeopleVote]

Putin is trying to destroy the Ukranian heritage and history.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/14/ukraine-odessa-russia-war/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social

— Emptying a museum is a gargantuan task, and the entire workforce of the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv had been at it for a week before the final piece — a century-old portrait of the museum’s namesake — was taken down, leaving the last of its walls bare.

Ihor Kozhan, the director of the grand gallery opposite Lviv’s opera house, explained the rush.

“There is an egomaniac in Moscow who doesn’t care about killing children, let alone destroying art,” he said. “If our history and heritage are to survive, all art must go underground.”

Across Ukraine, artists, gallerists, curators and museum directors are desperately but carefully unhooking, wrapping and stashing away the country’s hefty cultural endowment as Vladimir Putin’s onslaught closes in. Statues, stained-glass windows and monuments are being covered with shrapnel-proof material. Basement bunkers are crammed with paintings.

As Russian bombardments have so far been heavier in the eastern half of the country, two of Ukraine’s richest cities in terms of cultural heritage, Lviv and Odessa, have had the benefit of extra time. Volunteers in the latter, for instance, took days to stack hundreds of sandbags around a monument to the Duke of Richelieu, a Frenchman who was one of the cosmopolitan port city’s founders. Just his head and his outstretched right arm remain uncovered.

[Igel]

1. Yes.

If there's no ethnicity, how can the ethnicity have "art"?

Russian stuff is being "repatriated"--I assume Gogol' gives Putin heartburn. (If only it gave him multiple aneurysms.)

Ukrainian-specific stuff is simply being destroyed. If it can't exist, it mustn't exist, and never existed. Bullet holes, tank treads ... whatever.

That's sort of heart-and-core of one definition of "genocide." Extirpate the distinctiveness of an ethnicity--possibly by killing representatives of the abstraction (that seems somehow off, but murder is bad, so okay), possibly by destroying their stories and culture (that's sort of subversive, but there you go).

Given official pronouncements, endorsed and even *rewarded* acts, state-sponsored utterances ... Both murder and cultural aspects are fully represented. Those who say, "Well, you know, it'll take years to show that there may be genocide" seem utterly ball-less and spineless. Don't want to piss off the Putlin. But that's utterly expected on the part of those with physiological attributes, even if they are high-ranking officials in various countries or international orgs.

[Raine]

2. Wanton destruction, not even stealing it for monetary gain but just

destruction, sickening. Even the Nazis didn't destroy like that, they stole it for the value not to obliterate it.

[cbabe]

3. American native cultural genocide, Chinese cultural revolution, pol pot, taliban

And more. Crushing the heart and soul of a peoples.

Until they rise up again. Like sunflowers.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

4. Russia has destroyed a Kharkiv region museum dedicated to Ukrainian philosopher

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