architectural warfare

I've been planning this post for a while, but a friend of mine beat me to it.

Blowing up buildings as a form of psychological warfare has a long and ignoble history. Sometimes, it takes the form of an

architectural ritual, played out over centuries between rival governments and religions. This is the "repeated demolition or adaptation of each other's buildings," and retaliation can sometimes take generations. For instance, Bevan writes about the site of the cathedral, in Córdoba, Spain, which "started out as a Roman temple" before being destroyed by Christian Visigoths: "A subsequent church on the site was replaced by a mosque following the Arab conquest of the early eighth century. Some seventy years later this was itself demolished to create the first stage of a massive new mosque. The Christian recaptured Córdoba in 1236 and consecrated the building as a cathedral."

I wonder if the tradition will continue?