Two Buddhas are worth 1,000 Lenins

Jonathan Kay

National Post

'God does not forgive idolatry," the Qur'an tells us in Sura 4. "Anyone who sets up idols beside God has forged a horrendous offence." Members of the Taleban, the fundamentalist Muslim movement that rules nine-tenths of Afghanistan, take these words literally. This week, the group began destroying two ancient statues in Bamiyan -- the world's largest rock-carved representations of the standing Buddha. The action shocked the world. "Words fail me to describe adequately my feelings of consternation and powerlessness," said Koichiro Matsuura, director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Even Iran, itself a Muslim state, has criticized the Taleban's decision to erase a part of Afghanistan's history with dynamite and mortars.

The Taleban are not hypocrites, for they do not even pretend to be religious pluralists. Still, there is something profoundly shocking in reports of a regime that systematically destroys historical artifacts. The gesture reminds us of the 16th-century English protestants who demolished Catholic churches, or the Hindu zealots who wrecked the centuries-old Babri Mosque in India in 1992.

And yet a large group of European and Asian governments went on a similar rampage 10 years ago -- and the Western world stood and applauded. Why have the Taleban not asked UNESCO about the forest of Lenin statues that came down in 1991? Some specimens were sent to museums. But many others were simply abandoned and left to crumble.

The two cases are different, and instructively so. Two Buddhas are indeed worth more than a thousand Vladimirs. Here's why.

At the time the Bamiyan statues were carved, between the 5th and 7th centuries, most scholars believe, the area was home to a large Buddhist monastic centre. Though Afghanistan is now 99% Muslim, Buddhism is still the world's fourth largest religion, and remains the dominant belief system in many Southeast Asian countries. The Bamiyan Buddhas are part of a spiritual tradition that goes back 2,500 years.

This is important, because destroying an artifact is a crime against history only if the object symbolizes something larger than itself: a unique race of people, a traditional way of life, or, as with the Bamiyan Buddhas, an enduring system of beliefs. But, as François Furet wrote in his 1999 book, The Passing of an Illusion, "Lenin ... left no estate. The October Revolution ended not by being defeated in war but by liquidating all that it had created. When the Soviet empire fell apart, it was in the strange position of having been a superpower without incarnating a civilization. It was an assemblage of supporters, clients, and colonies ... Nonetheless, its rapid dissolution left nothing behind, neither principles, nor laws, nor even a history."

If Lenin can be broken down into souvenirs in capitalist Russia yet Buddha must remain unmolested even as he stares down on Muslims, where do we draw the line? Where does kitsch stop and history begin?

Examples help. Soviet Russia, we know, left behind kitsch. So did Mobutu Sese Seko's Zaire and Albania's Enver Hoxha. And when their rulers die, so will Kim Jong- il's North Korea, Fidel Castro's Cuba and Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. Like Soviet Russia, each of these nations houses an unreal society, where announced ideals bear no relation to the way ordinary people think and live. They suffer from the syndrome George Orwell described in 1946 to explain the difference between propaganda and art. A totalitarian society, he wrote, inevitably produces a "structure [that] becomes flagrantly artificial ... [This occurs] when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud."

In Soviet Russia, the statues of Lenin were part of that fraud. They did not signify a popularly endorsed system of beliefs and way of life, as did the Bamiyan Buddhas. Together with the slogans people mouthed, and the propaganda they saw on television, these statues were a way of life -- empty symbols meant to lend dignity and credence to an ideology no one believed. That is why it doesn't bother us to watch Lenin lying in the weeds: You can't erase from history something that was never really there.

In Afghanistan, the Taleban are creating a society every bit as artificial as that of Soviet Russia. The country's rulers are poorly educated xenophobes indoctrinated at Pakistani religious schools. Their ideology is an obscurantist, misogynistic mix of the Wahabi cult of Saudi Arabia and a 19th-century anti-Western Muslim movement called Deobandi. Taleban ideology is foreign to the nation's majority, who practise a far more relaxed brand of Islam. Like the Soviet Union, the Taleban's Afghanistan is the invention of a small, unrepresentative, dogma-driven cabal.

The Taleban are not building statues -- like many orthodox Muslims, they have a deep suspicion of representational art. But if they ever do, we can be certain no one will care much if they are hacked to pieces by successors.