Shared Past And Perhaps Its Future By Michael Kimmelm Article Analysis

The The New York Times article “A Struggle to Secure Iraq’s Shared Past, and Perhaps Its Future”, was written by Michael Kimmelman on April 9, 2015. The article mainly focuses on the unfortunate aspect that Iraqis lost their sense of heritage. Tragic results like these aren’t developed in years, but in fact several decades. It all started with Saddam Hussein’s barbaric form of ruling, whom destroyed various artifacts and cultural institutions. Instead of building a stronger nation, Saddam, the Tyrant, focused on glorifying himself. He did that by replacing valued old neighborhoods, with “ghastly towers and blasting highways”. Similarly, ISIS has contributed on these recents years to the decay of cultural identity, alienating their society, and

Iraq is on a critic condition, remarked with poverty and corruption, it’s not surprising that in a certain day only two people visited the museum. The population is striving to be alive and afford food, how in any reasonable way would they be able to visit the museum? Unless it was free, yet even children must pay to visit. Despite that, the museum reassures Iraqi heritage and highlights that Baghdad was the origin of civilization. Luckily, there are other ways that Iraqis combat their current situation, such as the effect of shopping malls. For them, shopping malls attract people of different social status, provide shopping opportunities, and offer lots of recreation. By going to these places they challenge ISIS, whose sole objective is to frantically terrorize people and recruit them for their use. Iraqis have lost the sense of who they really are, and as Ahmed Khaled states: “We lost our history. We need to spread this message about culture as a thing that unifies us- if is not too late.” Hope keeps them moving, and hopefully culture will unite them. They are just like every other culture, they only want peace and