A Euro Border Guard and Hybrid Warfare. An Art Theft Perspective: Human Dimensions and a Moral Imperative

Abstract

Before 9/11, when Mohammed Atta was at Hamburg's Technical University, Atta made an attempt to sell stolen Afghan antiquities to subsidize the cost of his flying school training in the United States. The archaeologist at the University of Gottingen to whom he made his approach in 1999 declined it, but it is indicative of one Islamist fanatic's mindset.1 Atta was not alone in his thinking. Antiquities from the Middle East, North Africa and Central and South Asia are useful in the world of Islamist fanaticism as potential money earners and for iconoclasm.For centuries, in the art world has been of basically two types, stealing or looting in a conventional sense and by deception. In English law,2 theft itself is dishonestly appropriating the property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the owner of it; and the terms 'thief' and 'steal' are construed accordingly. Theft by deception includes fakes, forgeries, and frauds of all kinds, including through intentionally bogus provenance and wrongful attribution. This art fraud category of crime is where money is made by art crooks. However, there has been an upsurge in another kind of through the rise of international terrorism in recent decades - by destruction. (A development of cyber crime in the future may well develop art fraud and by algorithm as well.) But curiously, art also often presents an Achilles' heel for thieves in terrorist organizations, organized crime and for disorganized criminals.Theft by destruction is a relatively new expression for an old concept. It occurs when art objects are destroyed and objects of cultural history are extirpated by their destruction. In recent decades, the Bamiyan buddhas in Afghanistan were destroyed by the Taliban, many medieval Sufi shrines were smashed by Ansar Dine (an Al Qaeda franchise) in Timbuktu, Mali in 2012, and important buildings and objects in Palmyra, Syria were destroyed by Da'esh in 2015. The dismal list goes on and on, with religious shrines of many varieties in Pakistan, Iraq and elsewhere blown up in the past two decades, often with devotees, pilgrims and tourists around them massacred. The World Trade Center's Twin Towers in New York on 9/11 can be viewed as by destruction of those examples of architectural art, whatever their value as shrines of mammon to the Al Qaeda fanatics who destroyed them, or to others who viewed them on the Manhattan skyline.In Western Judaeo-Christian civilization with its great input from medieval Islam, a human and moral basis for countering begins with the Book of Genesis concept of stewardship, and is explicit in one of the Ten Commandments, Thou shalt not steal (in the English words in the 1611 King James Version of the Bible). The concept of stewardship is a moral imperative rather than a morally relative matter, and extends to the worldly domain in which we live, in which our ancestors lived and our descendants will. It is a teaching among Koranic People of the Book, the monotheists of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and we influence one another and many who do not share it with us.Hybrid or multifaceted warfare is seen in the calculations of Sun Tzu's Art of War, Captain Basil Liddell Hart's Indirect Approach, and Captain Wass' Jedi Knight ideas. All provide insights into where we are today, and with them here in this article comes an added art crime perspective. The use of the word hybrid is convenient shorthand for multifaceted warfare. Multidimensional may be better.Sun Tzu was a Chinese warrior who wrote about military strategy roughly two and a half millennia ago. Of the many Art of War translations and commentaries in English, Samuel B. Griffith's translation with a foreword by B.H. Liddell Hart (Oxford, 1963) is comprehensive, especially about the crucial use of informants and information to develop war fighting intelligence.3 Reading Clausewitz is the alternative, for what it's worth in our era of warfare with terrorists that may last a long time. …