The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 brought the question of iconoclasm and cultural heritage into stark relief for the first time in many years. The Taliban were portrayed as ‘barbarians’ and ‘vandals’, but their act of destruction is part of a very long history of violence committed by people either bent on overthrowing the existing order – revolution – or erasing the past – a form of cultural cleansing. Sometimes the destruction even involves the physical remains of former kings, saints and political opponents. While we have a good understanding of what iconoclasm is, we do not necessarily understand the iconoclasts themselves. Why do people feel compelled to destroy images that offend their religious or political sensibilities? Can any meaningful comparisons be drawn between, say, sixteenth-century Protestants and contemporary Islamicists destroying what they consider to be ‘false idols’? What connects the image-breakers across time? What do we lose by ‘purifying’ the past of objectionable monuments, as is happening with the disappearance of statue around the contemporary world?

Drawing on a wide variety of examples that range from ancient Egypt through to contemporary debates about the removal of modern political, military and colonial icons, this book presents iconoclasm as both a religious and a political act that cuts across time and historical boundaries. Of course, we lament the destruction of art and often the history that goes with it, but this work, whose principal focus is on the ‘image breakers’, the iconoclasts, comes at the topic a little differently by trying to understand their logic, and the reasons why they feel compelled to obliterate images, statues and symbols. Fundamentally, iconoclasm is a clash between ‘image-makers’ and ‘image-breakers’. It’s the ‘image-breakers’, the iconoclasts, the people doing the destroying, that is the focus of this book. There are three principal arguments running through the book.

The first is that iconoclasm is rarely the result of mindless violence. It is not about the unthinking mob – the act of destruction is often orchestrated – but it is also interesting to note that the outcome, the end point – the destruction of an object – can be arrived at from many different paths depending on the period we are talking about. The iconoclasts, on the other hand, whether we are talking about ancient Christians, sixteenth century Protestants zealots (who destroyed statues and stained glass windows that were masterpieces), the Taliban, or indeed the Serbians in Bosnia and Kosovo, always justify their actions, and always convince themselves that what they are doing is not only necessary but just. When iconoclasm is intertwined with religion, the iconoclasts often believe that they were not only carrying out the destruction in the name of God, but with God’s approval.

In other words, and this is the second argument, iconoclasm is almost invariably a tool used by groups across the religious and political spectrum to assert a particular point of view, or indeed to contest a particular idea, but it is also ultimately about the destruction of the past, and in most instances, about obliterating the memory of that past.

It can, therefore, involve the destruction or the elimination of things that we might not always associate with iconoclasm: yes, a statue or some other politically-charged monument, but also things like the renaming of streets, towns, and squares; the burning of national flags; the destruction of buildings (think of 9/11 as a form of iconoclasm (the Twin Towers were, after all, a symbol of global capitalism)); the deliberate targeting of cultural-religious sites such as churches and temples (this happened in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the conflict in 1989, but also during Kristallnacht in 1934); the careless destruction of heritage sites by resources and mining companies (a 40,000 year-old Aboriginal site was recently sacrificed to a mining concern in Australia); the destruction of texts (which dates back at least to Ancient Mesopotamia, which we witnessed recently with the destruction of ancient manuscripts in the north of Mali in Timbuktu in 2012-13, but which also includes Nazi and Communist book burnings); and even the disappearance of people from photos, or what are now considered be offensive images from films. All these acts of destruction speak to particular religious or political groups wanting to control how we think about and remember the past.

The third argument is that iconoclasts interact with the object, and indeed often mutilate the object as though they were mutilating the body of a living person. We can see this in the behaviour of crowds right up to the present day, but there is something else as well, something that is often overlooked and that will be underlined in this work. Iconoclasts don’t just satisfy themselves with mutilating the object. The act is often accompanied by the death and the mutilation of the living associated with the object. It is striking how during periods of revolutionary violence, the living, the inanimate, and the dead – that is people, objects and human remains – are all targeted. This was the case for the French, the Mexican and the Russian Revolutions, as well as during the Spanish Civil War, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Iconoclasm as an act of forgetting can tell us a great deal about how we prefer to remember the past, and what kind of societies we want to build in the future. As a form of violence, one that has existed throughout recorded history, it is central to understanding humanity’s cultural legacy. There is no chronological order, rather this is a thematic treatment of the topic that jumps from one period of history to another. Important too is to place each object in context before we examine its ‘take-down’. That is, we also need to consider the circumstances under which statues, buildings, and images were created in the first place. That puts the object in context and helps us better understand why they became the target of iconoclasts in later years.