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.