Wiped Away: The destruction of cultural artifacts-and identity.

Soon after Chairman Mao died, I went to China. That monstrous man had leveled without a trace the ancient and magnificent walls of the Forbidden City in Peking, now virtually a shantytown. I took a boat down the Yangtze. (Today, they are damming and diverting the river, so such a trip is impossible.) An old guidebook listed pagodas and other monuments along the banks. These had been pulled down in the Cultural Revolution-all there is to see now are industrial plants. Bang goes the Chinese past.

In the cause of Chinese imperialism, Mao's successors are busy eradicating the age-old and unique monasteries and lamaseries of Tibet. Bang goes the Tibetan past, too.

The killing of human beings goes to the moral core of our existence, whereas the destruction of artifacts primarily raises aesthetic concerns. True: except that killers devise ethnic, religious, or ideological justifications for themselves, and so make sure to attack the monuments and places of worship defining the identity of their victims. Cultural cleansing is part and parcel of the obliteration of a people.

Wasn't it ever so? Vandals, Goths, Huns, Mongols, made themselves bywords for ravaging everybody and everything within reach. Law-and- order Romans burnt Carthage and Jerusalem to the ground. Napoleon systematically looted the countries he conquered. A civilization builds slowly, and along comes some brute to stamp it out. "Everything that exists deserves to perish," says the devil in Goethe's Faust. That is the creed of nihilism.

Nihilism in the modern age gained the upper hand over civilization through Communism and Nazism. These totalitarian systems dispensed with everything that did not fit their project for the future. Thousands of historic churches and villages in the Soviet Union were deliberately eradicated. Then came the Germans, and by the time they had finished, Russia was virtually bare of its living past, as it is today. Marcus Hindus, reporting for the New York Herald Tribune, could describe the country elegiacally in 1945 as "a desert strewn with wreckages" from which had been blown away "some of the most exquisite and most joyful art man has created." The wastage is being repeated at Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, once a charming garrison town familiar to Lermontov and Tolstoy, today shelled by the Russians themselves to uninhabitable rubble.

The Rape of Europa (1994), by the cultural historian Lynn H. Nicholas, amounts to an inventory of artistic losses during the last war. Great cities like Warsaw, Danzig, Dresden, Hamburg, and Konigsberg were devastated, and so were palaces, country houses, and monuments everywhere. As in a hurricane, libraries and scientific collections, altarpieces, the famous Amber Room from the czars' palace at Tsarskoye Selo, innumerable paintings and drawings by old masters, were blown away forever. Special attention was given by the Germans, Nicholas writes, to '"the trashing of the houses and museums of great cultural figures" such as Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Tchaikovsky.

Victorious Russians then repaid the Germans with interest. "Trophy art" was the euphemism they gave to everything they stole. Two Russian specialists, Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov, describe in their book Stolen Treasure (1995) the wholesale robbery of more millions of works of art, many of them to be lost in transit or damaged beyond restoration. Like Russia, postwar Germany remains permanently damaged.