Parting Words and Thoughts, and a Welcome to our Incoming Board Members and Officers
by Douglas Comer
December 2025
It has been my honor to have served as President ICOMOS-USA and our supporting organization, World Heritage USA, for three terms, a total of nine years. Because of the work of our Board of Trustees, officers, and Executive Committee, we have grown: in membership, in advocacy, and in our activities and programs. We can look forward to increasing all of these further as we launch World Heritage USA in earnest.
We have moved ahead during some difficult times. Through financial challenges, the pandemic, and in this last year, 2025, during an assault on factual presentation of the past. This is understandable to me, at least, because, as an archaeologist I have encountered the brutal conflicts and the exploitation of the many by the few that has characterized almost all times and places in the world. There have been countless delusional leaders who imagine that they will find immortality in spectacular and grotesque demonstrations of power.
And this power predictably comes from exploiting the human tendency to distrust and dislike people who do not look like or believe as they do. For every king and emperor that you can think of that fits this description, I can tell you that there are hundreds more. Forgotten. As they all will be.
I write from Warsaw, Poland. The 1965 UNESCO conference in Warsaw was the Constitutive Assembly that led to the founding of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), which was established to promote the conservation and protection of cultural heritage worldwide.
The United States played the leading role in drafting and in working for ratification. Warsaw was a fitting place for this. Approximately 90% of the city was destroyed during the Second World War. This destruction was ordered by a dictator who had pledged to restore the greatness of a neighboring country. Within a decade, many cities in that neighboring country suffered similar levels of destruction.
Poland is replete with monuments to the millions here who were victimized. Many museums present this era of the past in horrifying detail.
The past is, for the most part, a nightmare that is not fit children, so we tell them fairytales. Responsible adults, however, must face the past and especially the most disturbing episodes of it to prevent yet another nightmare.
The founders in our own country, the United States, were responsible adults. They set guardrails—the division of power -to prevent the despotism they saw in the ancient world and in the thousands of years of recorded history in Europe and other continents. As Abigail Adams said, “Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.“
Members and friends of ICOMOS-USA are also adults and so, while it might often be painful, are devoted to the research and communication that provide access to a usable past. What was clearly seen in 1965, during the rebuilding following the Second World War, was that checks and balances were essential in international relations to make possible the avoidance of the wholesale destruction and misery that humanity had endured countless times in the past.
The World Heritage List is the most visible and recognized output of ICOMOS. It most essentially celebrates the contributions to the global network made by sovereign states and cultures In doing so, it serves an essential purpose: enhancing understanding and appreciation of cultural diversity The sites on the World Heritage List are a means by which people interact with people who usually don’t look like them, speak like them, or understand the cosmos in exactly the way they do. The List is a triumph, I have seen so many examples of people becoming enamored of a country and its people about which they knew little before visiting a World Heritage Site in that country. There is a place for celebrating certain, special monuments and sites.
Therefore, I am not suggesting that we inscribe more sites of consciousness on the World Heritage List, more sites like Hiroshimas or Auschwitz. There are simply too many of them. They are all tragic, but almost always regarded as especially tragic by one country or culture. To inscribe one such site risks elevating the suffering of one group over another. On the other hand, we perhaps do not have enough monuments and sites that have served to resolve conflicts or relieve oppression on a global scale.
The question that we must deal with is what to do with monuments and sites that celebrate and thus propagate oppression and civil disunity And how, when, and where to tell the whole story behind the efforts to eliminate autocratic rule and the oppression. The suffering that inevitably follows is first experienced by those least able to defend themselves, typically minorities, but as night follows day, eventually by all but those who have monopolized power. And those elites have inevitably fallen when the suffering by many became intolerable.
Efforts to break this cycle of oppression and reaction are as old as humanity. Especially notable and I would argue far reaching are the aspirations inherent in the founding documents for the United States. Relevant to ICOMOS-USA is the discussions that we have begun to develop a usable past, one that serves to make further progress toward those aspirations Here in Poland, the urgency of this project seems extraordinarily clear.
The incoming new Board of Trustees members and officers of ICOMOS-USA are more than prepared to take the reins of our organization, which after the 1965 Warsaw UNESCO meeting became the first national committee. They are exceptionally well prepared, and to a person exceptional people. I would ask that you welcome them and give them the support that they will need in what will surely be for many of you and our organization an especially challenging three years.