Buddha statues destroyed by Taliban
Yes, the Taliban were armed by the
The statues had stood at Bamiyan for over 1500 years and in the early days of the Taliban, they felt no need to destroy them, as there were no Buddhists left in the region to worship them and thus offend against Islam. It was only when the Taliban received a request from an international delegation for access to restore the statues that the Taliban decided to blow them up.
The argument for destruction offered by Mullah Mohammed Omar was that it was offensive to spend money to restore statues and not for humanitarian purposes. The irony in that statement from a the leader of the Taliban is almost funny.
There was an interesting plan to restore the Buddhas by a Japanese artist:
I don't know what became of it.
For today’s good news, I was going to mention that it would
have been Johnny Cash’s birthday, and I’m grateful he was around to record
performances like this
But I can’t have too many birthdays in this blog, so I’ll go for a kind of antidote to the Taliban:
Tim Berners Lee invents the World Wide Web.
It was today in 1991. I don’t pretend to understand this – I think technically the Internet is the computers and wires and the Web is the shared information. Tim Berners Lee enabled people to share stuff like documents, sound and videos on the Internet without understanding computers. It’s the sharing thing that defines the internet for me – stuff you can see for free because someone you don’t know thought you might like it. An astonishingly powerful agent for change that nobody could have predicted in an incredibly mercenary age. I don’t think people should be able to own other people’s creative work for nothing, but looking at it, browsing (the operative word) stuff at your leisure is an amazing and brilliant thing. Youtube, Wikipedia and Google – where would we be without them? I think Tim could borrow Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph – si momentum requires, circumspice.
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