On the night of May 14, 1940, the German Luftwaffe bombed the Dutch city of Rotterdam. When government administrators entered the streets to tally their losses the next morning, they learned that 900 people had lost their lives. As if this was not bad enough, the Luftwaffe had also destroyed hundreds of historic houses; Rotterdam’s city center — one of the oldest in the country and jam-packed with seventeenth century architecture — had been reduced to dust. In 2001, the Taliban pulverized two statues of Vairocana and Guatama Buddha that had been carved from a cliffside in the Bamyan valley of central Afghanistan. Standing no less than 38 and 55 meters tall, respectively, the statues were two of the tallest Buddhist monuments in the entire world and an important destination for traveling monks. The Buddhas were leveled on orders of Taliban co-founder Mullah Mohammed Omar, who tried to rid his country of any religious tributes that were not aimed at Allah.…