Halloween is a good occasion to think about why the destruction of cemeteries is the nuclear option of cultural war. Attacks on places of the dead are aimed not just at the present of a people—a strike against the living whose ancestors are gathered there—but at their past. It is meant to wipe out the history that defines a community.

If Halloween is—or at least was, back when it was called All Souls Day and the names of generations of the dead in a churchyard were read aloud in every parish—an occasion for bringing the dead temporarily back to life, desecrating cemeteries is the opposite: an act of erasure.

The Guardian recently published satellite photographs that document the Chinese government’s large-scale use of this weapon of mass cultural genocide. In Aksu, Anjang Province, what in 2015 had been a large cemetery where the most important Uighur poet of the twentieth century, Lutpulla Mutellip, was buried, was in 2019 bulldozed to the ground and replaced by Happiness Park. Sulinim and Teywizim cemeteries in Hotan, were still intact in 2018; both are now empty spaces now except for a parking garage in one of them. At least forty-five cemeteries have been leveled according to an Agence France Press/Earthrise Alliance analysis as part of the Chinese assault on Uighar culture.

Such massive, politically motivated, attacks on the dead are mercifully rare but not unheard of. In 1943 Greek fascists laid waste in three weeks the world’s largest Jewish cemetery, more than fifty hectares, that had existed in some form in Thessaloniki since St. Paul had preached in the city. The ancient tombstones that survived the sledge hammers went into the paving of a local church’s courtyard and many other local building projects; rubble helped build a sea wall. The aim of these ultra-nationalists was to erase history, to claim that the city had always been Greek by destroying the dead who told a very different and less convenient story. (In fact, until the 1920’s Greeks were in a decided minority behind Jews and about equal in number to Turks.) With the destruction of the Jewish cemetery could come historical amnesia: there had never been Jews there.

A half century later the same sort of thing happened in the middle east. On September 2, 1994 several thousand workman armed with explosives and rocket launched grenades attacked the shrine of the major local saint in the port city of Aden destroying not only his tomb but thousands of tombs of ordinary believers and in many cases exhuming their bodies. In some measure this was fallout from the Yemeni Civil War; but more pointedly it was an effort by one group to destroy the locus of another group’s social being. Cemetery destruction in the modern world, like iconoclasm in the Reformation and other moments of religious turmoil, is meant to strike at the heart of an enemy.

But if such massive attacks are rare—or at least were until the recent spate of Chinese attacks—small desecrations are more common. Thirty-seven Jewish tombstones in a cemetery near Strasbourg were marked with swastikas last December, the same week as the deadly attacks on Jews in Paris; eighty graves vandalized in February this year.  Fifty nine Jewish graves in Massachusetts last March. Small scale attacks on the dead are cheap and easy.

The question is why, in this relatively secular age, is desecrating the graves of the dead still such a politically attractive tactic in a cultural war against the living?