WHAT’S REALLY WORTH FIGHTING FOR

Forget the customary glorification of all things military. If you wish to find, celebrate, and honor a real hero for our and future ages, one still living among us, here's Mr. Abdelkader Haidara, the librarian of Mali Who saved Timbuktu’s vast and mostly unexplored cultural treasures (377,000 ancient manuscripts) from certain destruction at the hands of invading al Qaeda religious zealots in 2012.

But just so that nobody feels superior or smug: two famous episodes of prior vast cultural and intellectual destruction are the destruction of the Library of Alexandria - destroyed by Christian zealots in late Roman/early Christian times; and centuries later, the destruction of vast numbers of Maya codices - the only fully literary Indigenous civilization of the Americas prior to the Europeans’ arrival - by Catholic zealots under the orders of Yucatán’s Bishop Diego de Landa in early Spanish colonial times.

(A personal note: I was born, by chance, exactly 400 years to the day after de Landa disembarked on the shores of Yucatán as a friar with a mission. Perhaps that’s why I, partially a descendant of Spanish colonizers, Have always felt compelled to denounce and never forget this or any other kind of cultural genocide).

Nobody had their hands clean. Many other instances of cultural destruction in the name of a deity liter human history: the Aztec destruction of Toltec codices is much less known, but it happened; then there are the many Muslim campaigns of destruction of ancient texts and temples in non-Arab countries with rich civilizations (India, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc.), the more recent destructions of Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan by the Taliban after they took power from the Soviets, and the most recent destruction of Greco-Roman architecture by ISIS in the Levant.

Chalk all of these destructions to religious intolerance and the danger of applied theology to the world of human affairs.

But it can also occur among fanatics of secular ideologies. Hitler, for example, following in the footsteps of the Spanish Inquisition, mandated the burning of all books authored by Jews - even Einstein.

Today, the world is witnessing a perverse resurrection of BOTH types of fanatical orthodoxy seeking to impose censorship - especially in the U.S., where a toxic brew of Christian nationalism has taken hold of the body politics and controls one of the major parties already.

The task of defending unfettered speech, text, and expression has never been so urgent since the end of the last world war.

Those that defend, protect, and preserve humanity’s cultural treasures - whether texts, sculptures, monuments, music, oral traditions and languages, and cuisines, textiles, and crafts are the greatest heroes of our rich and diverse emerging global civilization.

No divine absolutism, racial prejudice, or radical nationalism should ever be allowed to eradicate these treasures and silent its creators.

And that, by the way and ironically, includes the sacred texts, temples, and icons of all religions and secular ideologies - even the most intolerant ones.

“Let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend” - A Maoist aphorism cut short by the crazy Cultural Revolution Mao instigated.