The youth who bombed the Bamyan Buddha full of vigor and vitality have now become middle-aged men who are happy all over, the world is finally theirs. If these people had not taken selfies back then, then they would claim today that the Bamyan Buddha was not blown up by them by choice. They would blame humanitarian aid groups, claiming that because of the Buddha’s existence, they spent their money on repairing a statue rather than helping improve the lives of Afghanistan’s impoverished population. But the Buddha himself saw the stupidity and misery of the humans below his cliff and felt ashamed and powerless to collapse on his own. 

Certain types of restoration can be classified as secondary violence, which is no different from the atrocities committed by countless vandals in history. Suppose the power of nature is a violent and awe-inspiring force, and violence is a kind of revenge that makes people feel sad and angry. In that case, this kind of destructive restoration "in the name of love" is extremely insulting and stupid to the Buddha statue. It is ridiculous. 

Think of the Cultural Revolution: millions of Red Guards around China striving to form a utopian socialist movement by violently purging all aspects of capitalism and traditionalist values in Chinese society. From ransacking Imperial tombs to wiping the faces off of Buddhist sculptures, the “Four Olds” campaign aimed to wipe all traces of China’s past as a feudalist and “counter-revolutionary” nation. They dismantled everything down to the traditional way of Chinese thinking: Confucianism, making way for a new ideologically pure society. The irony here is that by rooting out Confucianism, the revolutionaries rooted out the culture that brought them together in the first place. An ideology that emphasizes respect toward authority, and replaced it with one that instead calls upon the overthrow of it. Sooner or later these actions backfired with the leaders of the revolution prosecuted and a growing anti-Communist sentiment which resulted in the Tiananmen Square Protests.

Once again, our changing perspectives have caused the greatest damage to the relics of our past. The millions of students riding a wave of fervor to establish a new socialist world, have become old now and regretful of their actions. When you visit a historical site in China today, over 70-90% of them are either partly or completely reconstructed thanks to the Cultural Revolution. We may rebuild and regret, but what is to say that these sentiments will last? Today in China, you will feel a strong presence and commitment to preserving its cultural roots but only 50 years ago these values were completely suppressed and silenced. Moreover, how are we sure that these values are instilled worldwide? Today, in a world far away from large city centers, in the rural villages of Gansu, people chip away at the bricks of the Great Wall, hoping to sell them for an extra buck. They are not ideologically manipulated, they are simply oblivious.