IS are ‘rewriting’ history, just as the Nazis did

The destruction of historical and religious artifacts in Nimrud, by the so-called Islamic State, is merely the latest example of these fundamentalists hiding evidence of a past that contradicts their rigid contemporary orthodoxy (Irish Examiner, April 13). 

Professor Fawaz Gerges, of the London School of Economics, summarises the nihilistic impetus of the Islamic State as a “puritanical sense of an ideology, an ideology that really believes in cultural cleansing”.

While Professor Gerges is correct, the obliteration of these wonderful monuments is merely a physical manifestation of a fanatical determination to control a contemporary, fundamentalist template. IS is imposing its narrow ideological interpretation of Islam on the present to design the future narrative. This is not a new strategy. It reflects the Nazi campaign of annihilation against Germany’s Jews in the 1930s, when Joseph Goebbles, the Third Reich’s propaganda master, understood better than anyone else that when a regime controls the past it can mould a future predicated on its own imagined narrative.

It is essential that the West understands the ideological imperative behind this wanton destruction — the overarching goal of IS is an imposition of its perverted interpretation of Islam.

As an organisation, it is astute enough to know that obliteration of the past is a prerequisite for controlling the future, and it is implementing the very same template that the Nazis did to denigrate, and dehumanise, German Jews in the 1930s.

Dr Kevin McCarthy

Kinsale

Co Cork