Why Tyrants Fear Art
Following last week's close look at Milan Kundera, I wanted to take another look at the role of art in defending our values, this time examining why art needs defending at all.
In August of 1944, occupied Paris was handed to Dietrich von Choltitz, a Nazi general with a direct order from Hitler: Paris “must not fall into the enemy’s hand except lying in complete rubble”. If the Allied forces retook the city, Choltitz was ordered to destroy all of its historic monuments, including the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame. The general had unhesitatingly played a part in levelling other cities, from the bombardment of Rotterdam to the siege of Sevastopol. Hitler told him, “You will receive from me all the support you need,” giving him enough demolition units to blow up the city’s forty-five bridges and all if its landmarks.
Late in August, however, Hitler’s aids informed him that Allied forces had reached the centre of Paris. According to a general who was present at that day’s strategic conference, “Hitler immediately exploded in one of those bursts of anger which become more and more frequent.” He hollered about having made every preparation for the city to be destroyed. He turned to his Chief of Staff and screamed, “Brennt Paris?” — Is Paris burning? The answer was a defiant no. Rather than execute his order, Choltitz had surrendered Paris to Free French Forces, the resistance group and government-in-exile led by Charles de Gaulle.
Choltitz gave three reasons for ignoring his orders. First, that he saw the military futility of the action (no doubt a form of sacrilege to the general). Second, that he believed Hitler to be insane. Third, that he loved French culture and history. No doubt this final explanation would be enough for any of us — gazing on Notre Dame, or the pyramids of Giza, or a collection of art from antiquity, and handed the detonator — to defy authority. Perhaps even a Nazi might be susceptible to the influence of awe and transcendence. This question of why the order was defied, though resolvable, leads us to a greater mystery: why was the order given?
Of course, the easy answer is that Hitler’s ego was more inflated than German currency after the First World War, or that evil had turned his mind to mush, but let’s expand our view from the specific to the general. Hitler wasn’t alone in a desire to destroy cultural artefacts of “the enemy”. To the shame of humanity, many others have succeeded where he failed.
The Devil’s Work
The ancient Syrian city of Palmyra has survived the changing of many hands, and the Lion of Al-Lat has stood watch over much of this history. Carved in stone more than 2,000 years ago and standing twice as tall as a human, the lion was placed as a guard in front of the Temple of Al-Lat. On his left paw is an inscription: May Al-Lat bless whoever does not spill blood on this sanctuary. The blessing was ignored by 4th century Christians who, in their frenzied persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire, decapitated the lion, gouged its eyes out, and engraved a cross into its forehead.
The lion slept for over a century beneath the sands, until it was discovered in the 1970s. Reconstructed, it stood again as a proud emblem of the city, this time guarding the Palmyra Museum. In 2015, ISIS became the city’s latest philistine invaders. Like sightseers determined to take in every landmark, the ISIS thugs looked to wreak as much damage as possible. In the name of suppressing sin and disseminating their own primitive values, these jihadists attempted to destroy the lion, and succeeded in smashing to pieces the contents of the Palmyra Museum. This has been the tactic employed in every location they’ve occupied, taking up hammers, axes, bulldozers, bombs, and ignorant minds against great works of art.
To the nihilism of ISIS can be added many movements throughout history that asserted dominance through cultural destruction. Franco attempted to control Catalonia through the repression of Catalan culture so that an ultranationalist doctrine could take hold. The Nazis tried to purge their society of “degenerate art” and replace it with state-endorsed propaganda. Goebbels made clear that only those who regurgitate the Nazi credo “are allowed to be productive in our cultural life”. The French Revolution systematically destroyed monuments to the past and stripped churches of their artwork and grandeur.
Books pose a tougher problem for the cultural troglodyte. It’s easy, of course, for a single Evangelical household to ban Harry Potter from its bookshelves, or for a congregation to burn the Qur'an to make clear its point (“We’re ignorant and intend to remain so,” or something like that). But how should a multinational religious organisation like, for instance, the Catholic Church handle cultural artefacts that don’t toe the theological line? With printing presses churning out more texts than a good ol’ book burning could reasonably consume, the church turned from confiscation to condemnation. As Ray Bradbury put it, “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
The Index Librorum Prohibitorum first appeared in 1529 in primitive form. (Perhaps “early form” is more apt, given that the thing by its nature was always primitive.) The Index was a proliferating list of texts deemed contrary to Catholic morality, and which no good believer was permitted to read. The church didn’t have to burn books or destroy monuments; they simply instructed devoted followers to look away. Among the writers devout Catholics were forbidden to read were Ovid, Milton, Copernicus, Descartes, Spinoza, and Voltaire. To read your way through these prohibited books is to receive a thorough education in humanism and Western civilisation. The Index was abolished in 1966. The devil’s work is never done, but happily this work of the church is finished.
Totalitarian Truth
Among his many neologisms, Francoise Rabelais created the term “agelast”: a humourless person who never laughs. This category was revived by Milan Kundera in in The Art of the Novel (1986), where he considered Communist apparatchiks and, in doing so, pointed out that the agelast and the novelist (and, by extension, all artists) are forever in conflict. “One of the beginnings of human emancipation,” Christopher Hitchens once said, “is the ability to laugh at authority.” But the agelast is more than merely a person who can’t laugh — they also can’t tolerate the laughter of others. Insisting that the joke cannot be told, they seek to impose order where the very lack of order is the point.
“Totalitarian Truth,” Kundera wrote, “excludes relativity, doubt, questioning; it can never accommodate what I would call the spirit of the novel.” The difference between the pamphlet and the short story, between propaganda and art, is the difference between being given an answer or a question. The tyrant imposes his solution, while the artist insists on the freedom to interrogate our certainty. This is the ineffable, the numinous, the transcendent quality that makes art so valuable — and so dangerous to those who seek total control. They’re not wrong to fear it: the creative chaos of irony and art is fundamentally opposed to tyrannical order.
These totalitarians are outraged that the world isn’t as they want it to be, and refuse to modify themselves to fit the world as it is. Instead, they insist that the world must change to suit them. We find this in the groups who ban books and impose legislation based on their personal whims. When these appetencies are religious in nature, they’re often motivated by personality and then justified by a dogma made to measure. At their worst, these inflexible tyrants inspire Fascism and Nazism. When they try to change the world to suit them, culture is usually the first target, before people replace books in their fires.
The Visible Evidence of Free Minds
The results of these destructive movements are retroactive as well. In The Library Book (2018), Susan Orlean writes, “Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.” As Frank Stokes puts it in the film Monuments Men (2014), about the Allied program to protect art against its destruction by the Nazis:
“You can wipe out an entire generation, you can burn their homes to the ground, and somehow they will still find their way back. But if you destroy their history, you destroy their achievements and it’s as if they never existed. That is what Hitler wants and that is exactly what we are fighting for.”
For just as long as we’ve had desecrators who would destroy culture, we’ve had those who’ve lived and sometimes died to protect it. The Monuments Men were another in this long line of culture’s defenders. Museum director Paul Sachs, who was instrumental in setting the initiative in motion, made an eloquent case for why the project was so urgently necessary even in the midst of the war:
“If, in time of peace, our museums and art galleries are important to the community, in time of war they are doubly valuable. For then, when the petty and the trivial fall away and we are face to face with final and lasting values, we… must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future. Art is the imperishable and dynamic expression of these aims.”
(Quoted in The Monuments Men, Robert M Edsel)
Culture, then, is the manifestation of why we fight to keep our way of life alive, why we hope to survive at all, beyond mere animal instinct. In the inheritance and potential of culture, we find a plurality of ways to live, myriad approaches to the deepest questions of existence. The enemies of culture don’t require that plurality because they already have — or so they claim — the answer to everything. The Nazis and their racial “solutions”, every political and religious fundamentalist with a one-size-fits-all answer, they all fear defiance to their authority. Art and culture are the most potent challenges to such tyranny.
Paul Sachs added to his defence of culture, “[Art] is, and always has been, the visible evidence of the activity of free minds.” This is what the struggle between those who would build and those who would destroy comes down to: nothing less than freedom itself. The freedom to think, to live, to flourish, to create, and quite simply to be. Art is a form of resistance against injustice and ignorance. This is why tyrants fear art and why we should do everything we can to preserve it.
I want to finish by returning to that Syrian city discussed above, to remember Khaled al-Asaad, a man that anyone with a love of culture ought to regard as a hero. Al-Asaad was the head of antiquities for Palmyra until ISIS militants captured him. For almost a month, they tortured him in a vain attempt to discover the whereabouts of hidden artefacts. He never gave them up. He was then publicly beheaded. His body was strung up by the wrists to a Roman column, a monument of the ancient world to which al-Asaad had devoted his life. Khaled al-Asaad was 83. His life and death stand in defiance to the barbarism of ISIS, declaring that we love culture, and history, and art, and humanity more than they love death. They know what they are against, which is why we must always remember what we are for.