DESTRUCTION AND APPROPRIATION OF CULTURAL HERITAGE

Destruction and appropriation of other people’s cultural property is a phenomenon that’s as old as the culture itself. Being the top predator and the deadliest of them all, driven by insatiable greed and hatred of everything that’s foreign, which is stemming equally from fear and out of a sense of inferiority, man has always been keen to destroy the symbols of another’s culture, because the cultural monuments (and culture in general) marked the territory occupied by a nation, as well as to appropriate what he thought could be appropriated, so that other people’s valuables may become his and a part of his culture.

This book is a modest attempt to raise a voice for the benefits of both justice and culture, and to give an impetus to the civil side that exists in every man and to oppose the instinctive side which is persistent in surviving inside him, making him a beast, and beasts have no place in culture, nor should they have it in history.

Professor Dragan Simeunović, Ph.D.