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Comment by jntun | Hacker News Reader

Looting and pillaging is fine, as long as you build an entire economic / social system around it? Because that is the only semblance of logic I can take away from your statements. These museums didn't just pop into place for the artifacts to reside in; they were built to show off their spoils.

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Take the Taliban example of destroying Buddhist culture in the 90s. They are/were the current people in power would you suggest returning items to be destroyed or carefully preserving them for future. Would you return items to a place incapable of taking care of them?

Do you have any interest in talking about the British & American roles in funding, training, and arming the Taliban in the 70, 80s, and early 90s? Or would you prefer creating a hypothetical where we are burdened to take care of the people who just can't take care of themselves (after we wreak havoc on them)?

We can talk about the US and USSR proxy wars and how they trained and armed people on different sides because they did not want to engage directly. Doesn't change the fact that the Buddhist cultural items were being destroyed because it conflicted with their version of Islam. Handing them back would be unwise.

Well I don't want to talk about that first part, mainly because it's a very poor interpretation of history. You brought up the Taliban and I wanted to investigate that thought you had further. You seem to be trying to paint an ideological picture unrelated to the topic and insist on a leading question built on the assumption "if you give the artifact back, it will be destroyed".

> Would you return items to a place incapable of taking care of them?

Isn't this like saying "I'm not going to return what I stole because you clearly aren't capable of taking care of it, if you are it would never have been stolen"

I think there's a misunderstanding about the intention behind asking for return of stolen artifacts. It's not aleays about the artifacts themselves or how valuable they are or preserving them at all.

Returning items is like acknowledgment of historical mistakes and a signal that the other party is ready to make amends.

Merely acknowledging the mistake while holding onto the stolen artifacts is just a lip service that isn't even sincere.

It's like taking a pet fish from your friends house. He moves but you want to give it back to the new home owner who doesn't have tank. Not a good remedy. Neither is giving it back to your friend if he isn't allowed pets in his new home.

The fish should never been taken but trying to do the ideal thing will kill the fish. Be practical not idealist.

I love how an extreme example of one country doing this to their historical artifacts, is used to deny entire swathes of billions of people access to their artifacts. So all colonized countries must be damned by the record of Afghanistan (which itself owes a lot of its instability to meddling by colonial powers), while the British Museum must NOT be damned by it's own record of having hundreds of artifacts defaced and parts sold for scrap: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/13/style/artefacts-british-m...

> These museums didn't just pop into place for the artifacts to reside in; they were built to show off their spoils.

You have a very cynical and skewed view of things. These museums were built specifically for the public good, to show off things that were of no interest in their original countries at that time. The British didn't say they wanted to build public museums to increase tourism, that came later as an unintended consequence.

> to show off things that were of no interest in their original countries at that time

You have a very cynical and skewed view of things.

Please tell me how I'm wrong with arguments.

Was anyone in the Mesopotamian area interested about cuneiform tablets a century ago? Where locals doing any archeological digs at Ur or Uruk?

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