DESTRUCTION OF CULTURAL HERITAGE AS A TOOL OF CIVILIZATIONAL CONFLICT: PHILOSOPHICAL AND CULTUROLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE PHENOMENA OF «CULTURAL GENOCIDE» AND «WAR OF MEMORY»

Abstract

The article reveals the destruction of cultural heritage as a conscious strategy of civilizational confrontation. The author explores how the destruction of temples, museums, archives and monuments turns into a tool for reformatting historical space and collective memory. Using the material of the modern war against Ukraine, the experience of Syria and Iraq, the Nazi occupation of Poland and the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s, it is shown that each successive blow to heritage is aimed at undermining the ability of the people to exist as a subject of history. The philosophical and cultural analysis is based on the concept of cultural genocide by R. Lemkin, the concept of «places of memory» by P. Nohr, Heidegger’s understanding of the thing that collects the world, and P. Ricoeur’s ideas about memory as an active work of narrative identity. The article reveals that the destruction of material carriers of memory breaks the bond of generations, legitimizes aggression and exercises symbolic dominance over the space of the other’s being. Special attention is paid to colonial processes of appropriation and contemporary practices of repatriation, which is expressed by examples of Benin bronze, the Parthenon marbles and the return of Maori tattooed heads and the remains of indigenous peoples. The study demonstrates that, despite all attempts to destroy subjectivity, consciously established cultural existence shows extraordinary resilience even in the face of systemic physical destruction. Memory, displaced from stone and paper, continues to live in gestures of resistance, in everyday language choices, in digital archiving, in new works of art and in efforts to restore destroyed shrines, or to defend existing ones. The protection and restoration of cultural heritage appears as a defense of the very right of the people to their own narrative, to historical subjectivity and to a full-fledged future. In this sense, the struggle for heritage becomes an integral part of civilizational resistance, a struggle for the opportunity to remain themselves in time and space.