Nationalist destruction of culture ironically proves that culture existed

Evidence

Those who have done the most to disprove Kissinger’s claim that there is no Bosnian culture are Ratko Mladic and Mate Boban, the Serb and Croat nationalists who devoted such extraordinary energy to destroying the vast testimony to Bosnian culture: the National Library, the Oriental Institute, and the National Museum, all in Sarajevo; the archives of Herzegovina; music schools; local museums; graveyards; ancient bridges and clocktowers; entire historic districts; covered marketplaces; and of course thousands of churches, synagogues, and mosques, from masterworks of South Slavic architecture to the humble, local houses of worship. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 381

Categorization

• SEED: A powerful inversion worth an essay: the scale of a destruction campaign is itself irrefutable evidence for the existence of the thing claim to not exist.
• XREF: connects to: Violent extremism signals cultural collapse, not traditional cultural resurgence — Scott Atran, The Devoted Actor: Unconditional…, 65; Awareness of culture’s mechanisms destroys the ability to hold earnest taste. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 751

Related

• The destruction campaign attempted to erase an existing Bosnian culture (similarity 0.87)
• Cultural destruction was performed to make later denial plausible (similarity 0.84)