“Erasure, though, can never be wholly complete. Desecration can rarely — if ever — truly stamp out the vestiges of cultural memory. As the essayist Teju Cole observes: “Iconoclasm carries within itself two paradoxical traits: thoroughness and fury.” Partly those impulses are driven by the self-propelling momentum which, we have seen, lies at the heart of iconoclastic violence; destruction is its own addiction. But these impulses are also propelled by another emotion: fear. The iconoclast fears that unless their desecration is complete, the potency of the icon will linger. “The theological pretext for image destruction is that images are powerless,” Cole notes, “but in reality, iconoclasm is motivated by the iconoclasts’ profound belief in the power of the image being destroyed.”

[Quote from: An Unnatural History of Destruction: On Iconoclasm as a Tool of war, by Alex Diggins (2020)]