The First Thing They Burn: Why War Always Comes for Beauty
When the Mongol army sacked Baghdad in 1258, they did not stop at killing the Caliph. They threw the contents of the House of Wisdom into the Tigris. Manuscripts on astronomy, medicine, mathematics, philosophy, and poetry turned the river black with ink for days. Killing people was not enough. What those people had made, what they had thought and dreamed and rendered into form, that had to be annihilated too. Kill a generation and you end a bloodline. Destroy what a generation built and you erase the proof that the bloodline mattered. This is strategy, not collateral damage. Invading armies have always understood something about beauty that peacetime democracies pretend not to know: beauty is power. A public display of beauty is a sovereignty claim, and no occupying force has ever been able to tolerate one.
The Testimony of Walls
When an army takes a city, the administrative buildings get repurposed. The granaries get seized. The roads still work. But a cathedral cannot serve a conqueror who worships a different god. A public statue celebrating a national hero cannot remain standing in a square patrolled by the forces that hero fought against. And a library full of a people’s philosophy, jurisprudence, and literature makes a case, just by sitting there on its shelves, that the conquered had minds worth preserving. That case has to be silenced.
The Nazis grasped this with clinical precision. The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the regime’s art looting operation, was organized before the invasions were finished. It was catalogued and systematic. Over five million cultural objects were seized across occupied Europe. Paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Raphael ended up crated in salt mines or hanging in private collections. But for Jewish communities, the seizure of Torah scrolls, menorahs, and cultural artifacts did something beyond theft. If you take a people’s art, you remove the physical evidence that they existed as a civilization. You flatten them from a culture into a population, from citizens into bodies. Bodies are easier to dispose of than civilizations.
ISIS followed the same logic at Palmyra in 2015. The Temple of Baalshamin had stood for nearly two thousand years. It threatened no one. It held no weapons, commanded no strategic high ground, and generated no revenue for the Syrian state. But it was beautiful, and old, and it testified to a version of human civilization that predated the caliphate’s claim to be the sole legitimate ordering of human life. So they packed it with explosives and filmed the detonation for propaganda. They filmed it. The explosion was not a byproduct of the war. The explosion was the content.
The Taliban’s demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001 spoke the same language. Mullah Omar initially said the statues would be preserved. Then the order reversed: destroy them. Artillery, anti-aircraft weapons, and dynamite were unleashed on sixth-century sandstone carvings. Those statues had survived over 1,400 years of Islamic governance in the region without incident. The destruction had nothing to do with theology and everything to do with demonstrating total authority, authority that extended beyond the living and reached backward into the inherited visual landscape of Afghan memory. If you can obliterate what a people have looked at for a millennium, you have announced a power that administration alone cannot claim.
Beauty as Collective Selfhood
So why does beauty threaten power? Strip away the geopolitics and the answer is startlingly intimate.
A fountain in a town square is not decoration. People sit near it, eat lunch beside it, talk beside it, propose marriage in front of it. Over decades, a public work of beauty weaves itself into the social fabric of a place. It accrues meaning the way a family home accrues meaning, not because of its market value but because of what happened there. The residents of Sarajevo did not love their National Library because it held books. They loved it because it was theirs, because its existence confirmed that Sarajevo was a city of readers, of thinkers, of people who built beautiful things and expected them to last. When Serbian forces shelled it in August 1992, destroying an estimated 1.5 million volumes and over 155,000 rare books and manuscripts, the target was never the building. The target was the idea of Sarajevo as a civilized place.
Beauty is identity made visible. A mural on a government building announces: we are the kind of people who commission murals. A concert hall full on a Tuesday night announces: we gather to hear music performed with skill, and we do it on a weeknight because it matters that much. Under occupation, every one of these announcements becomes defiance. They all say the same thing: we had a life before you arrived, and that life had grace.
Conquerors understand this instinctively. Occupation depends on the conquered internalizing a particular story: the old order was weak, corrupt, worthless, and the new order is the only legitimate reality. But every beautiful thing that predates the conquest talks back. Every church, every mosaic, every hand-carved doorframe contradicts the occupier’s narrative just by continuing to exist. Something fine was here before you, and it did not need you.
The American Erasure
Bring this logic home. The United States is not being invaded by a foreign army. But beauty is being removed from American public life through a mechanism that is slower and quieter than artillery while producing a structurally identical outcome: defunding.
The National Endowment for the Arts runs on a budget that, adjusted for inflation, has been shrinking for decades. In 2024 its allocation stood at roughly $207 million, which is approximately what the Department of Defense spends in under three hours. The NEA funds the infrastructure that makes beauty visible where people actually live: murals in post offices, sculptures in civic plazas, theater programs in rural communities, music education in public schools. Cut that funding and you do not inconvenience artists. You remove beauty from the spaces where ordinary people encounter it without paying admission.
Arts education in American public schools has been gutted with special thoroughness. Since the 1980s, school boards under budget pressure have treated music, visual art, drama, and dance as luxuries to be trimmed first. The framing is always fiscal: we cannot afford it. But the effect is ideological, and it compounds. A child who never learns to draw, who never stands on a stage, who never reads music, becomes an adult for whom beauty is something that happens elsewhere, to other people, in expensive places behind glass. Beauty turns into a class marker instead of a civic inheritance. The public square goes aesthetically bare, and nobody notices because nobody was taught to notice.
No conspiracy is required. Indifference operating over time is the peacetime equivalent of what artillery accomplishes in a week. The Mongols threw the books into the river. American school boards stopped buying them. The destination is the same: a population severed from its own capacity to create, recognize, and demand beauty.
The Deeper Threat
Beneath the political, there is a still more fundamental reason beauty makes power nervous. Beauty tells the truth. Not factual truth in the journalistic sense, but existential truth: that human life has dimensions which cannot be quantified, administered, or optimized. A Rothko painting produces no revenue. A Beethoven string quartet contributes nothing to GDP. A poem by Wislawa Szymborska will never improve worker productivity. These things assert, simply by existing, that the economic vocabulary fails to describe what it means to be alive.
Authoritarians have always known this. Stalin did not go after Shostakovich because the symphonies were bad. He went after him because the symphonies were good, because they carried an emotional truth that exceeded the party’s official version of reality and, by exceeding it, exposed it as insufficient. Mao’s Cultural Revolution did not target art by accident. Art is where a culture keeps its unauthorized thoughts, its unofficial feelings, its capacity for complexity that slogans cannot hold. The Red Guards who smashed temple carvings and burned classical texts were doing what the Mongols had done in Baghdad seven centuries earlier: destroying the evidence that human experience is richer than any ideology can contain.
Beauty is an argument for human dignity. A carved stone lintel above a doorway in a medieval village means that someone, centuries ago, decided it was worth spending hours making that doorway more than functional. That impulse, the impulse to ornament, is the fundamental assertion of human worth. We are not creatures that only eat, sleep, reproduce, and die. We are creatures that decorate our world because the world, and our brief presence in it, deserves decoration.
Destroy the ornamentation, by bombs or by budget cuts, and you deny the premise. The invading army denies it with fire. The indifferent legislature denies it with a line item. And the child who graduates from an American high school without ever having held a paintbrush has received the same message the people of Palmyra received when the temple came down: beauty is not for you.
The Preservation Imperative
When a government defunds the arts, it is declaring what kind of citizens it wants: consumers instead of creators, audiences instead of participants, workers instead of whole human beings. When an army shells a library, it makes the same declaration with more efficient tools. The scale differs. The intent rhymes.
Preserving beauty, then, is a form of resistance, and it always has been. A community that maintains a public mural, a school that fights to keep a music program, a city that funds a free museum day, these are acts of civilizational self-defense, whether the people performing them think of it that way or not.
The people who rebuilt the Mostar Bridge in Bosnia understood. Croat forces destroyed the bridge in 1993, a masterpiece of Ottoman architecture that had spanned the Neretva River since 1566. Its reconstruction, completed in 2004, was not an engineering project. It was a rebuttal. You may destroy what we build, but we will build it again, because the building is the point.
In the American context, every fight over arts funding is a fight over something much larger than a budget line. Do we believe beauty belongs in public life, or are we content to let it retreat behind gallery walls and subscription paywalls? Does a child in rural Nebraska deserve the same access to the experience of beauty as a child on the Upper East Side? What kind of civilization do we intend to be?
The armies that burn the beautiful things know exactly what they are destroying. The rest of us should start asking whether we know what we are losing.
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