It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk. – Rebecca West

The stink is mine.

Should I be embarrassed?   After all, people are being left hungry and homeless, raped, murdered, drowned, hanged, enslaved.    And here am I, sniveling about the loss of another World Heritage Site: a stack of stones put up by a tribe of human beings over 2000 years ago.  Pathetic.

These ruin and mosques and temples and artworks are representations of aspirations but they aren’t the people who aspired.  These buildings and books destroyed by one faction to express their abhorrence of another may be irreplaceable examples of humankind’s history but what’s history, after all?

The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
–Mark Twain
The only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.
-Henry Ford
History viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.
-Dan Simmons

On the other hand:

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.  –George Orwell

Thank you, Mr. Orwell.  That’s the heart, the gut, the spine of the argument.   When a mosque, a temple, a tomb, a book are destroyed, down falls humankind.

And my tears are saltless

If mankind were a body, what would be our history?  Our skeleton.  Protects our vital ogans.  Holds us upright.

If humankind were one body, history would be our skeleton.  We are held upright, propelled forward, stiffened when we detect aggression but flexible enough to bend.  remind us that we  were once knuckle draggers but now we stand upright

Science our feet; literature our head

Language our nervous system