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Comment by noworriesnate | Hacker News Reader

Because they are more secure there. These are irreplaceable items. Pick your favorite cultural artifact, would you help move it to a more secure location if there was a lot of instability that could lead to it being destroyed? Even if that more secure location was a different country? I personally would.

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I would recommend reading "Africa is Not a Country" that delves into this exact question. It is the pinnacle of self-serving arguments for European countries to first spend centuries colonising Africa, stolen its wealth and cultural artifacts, enriching themselves in the bargain, and dividing the continent in a way that would guarantee political instability, to then use that same instability as an excuse for not returning those cultural artifacts.

Of course this article is about Indonesia - that's not a country that screams instability in any case

Having been multiple times at the Chirac Quai Branly museums, it's pretty clear the argument is valid: most pieces seem totally forgettable and would likely have been discarded by their owners. Heck, even the "royal door of XXX king palace" is a 1-meter wooden door with carvings that aren't particularly fine. Those artifacts still exist and have value because they are exposed in a museum in Paris, otherwise nobody would care.

The Netherlands has accumulated so much art and antiques in the last 200 years that most of it never sees the light of day. It sits in giant secured vaults.

> Heck, even the "royal door of XXX king palace" is a 1-meter wooden door with carvings that aren't particularly fine

Perhaps your subjective standards are not universal when determining cultural/aesthetic significance of artifacts.

I saw a railroad spike in an American museum once, it wasn't decorative, or made of precious metal (just steel), but it meant something to the locals. I don't doubt the other adjacent pegs were scrapped or rusted away, but that peg was culturally significant due to the historical nature of the railroad itself.

To be honest, artifacts are not wealth. Resources are wealth and you do not use artifacts as resources. They can be a display of wealth but not the wealth itself.

Sorry: I must have explained myself badly. We agree (I preder the artifacts in, say, London rather than in modern “Egypt”).

I'm sure your keepsakes would be more secure in my safe deposit box but that doesn't give me the right to break into your house and take your shit.

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