Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Netherlands has returned some stolen artifacts to Indonesia

smithsonianmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 220 posts

Re: The Netherlands has returned some stolen artifacts to Indonesia

#131

Post by jogjayr »

jahewson wrote: post #129
comte7092 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While London is indeed a global city, access is very much not equal. Immigration/tourism requirements are always the strictest against the very countries who were plundered during colonial times, in comparison to rich countries with an imperial past/present. Most of the world will never visit the UK. Most of the value that the British museum supplies goes back to the UK in the form of tourism and to close allies of t…

> Immigration/tourism requirements are always the strictest against the very countries who were plundered during colonial times Trivially false. The UK has strict requirements for Russia, a former imperial power. The USA was formerly 13 British colonies and has few restrictions.

The USA wasn't plundered as a colony.

Re: The Netherlands has returned some stolen artifacts to Indonesia

#132

Post by waffleiron »

aunty_helen wrote: post #31

I've stood in the Cairo museum and looked at a wooden sarcophagus that's had all of it's gold chiseled off of it. Something that was once a work of art reduced to a wooden box for the price of a few ounces of gold. I have mixed feelings about repatriation and the elephant in the room, the British.

There literally was an curator of the British Museum that stole 1800 artifacts and sold them for personal profit. Don't pretend this doesn't happen to the British.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/26/british-museum-s...

Re: The Netherlands has returned some stolen artifacts to Indonesia

#133

Post by jahewson »

roughly wrote: post #61
umvi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but it gets absurd if enough time passes. "Your ancestors wronged my ancestors 1000 years ago, so now modern you owes modern me"

This is I think a thing that is difficult for Americans to understand, because the only Americans who have a thousand years of family history in the place they currently live are also asking museums for their stuff back.

There’s a big difference between a culture that mostly ceased to exist in the past 200 years, because of the USA, and one that ceased to exist 3500 years ago.

Re: The Netherlands has returned some stolen artifacts to Indonesia

#134

Post by bee_rider »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #128
bee_rider wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of a nation-state is surprisingly recent and not completely universal, right? Historically people might be organized along kinship, tribal, ethnic, religious, or some other lines. Then an empire could pop up and control various groups of those, often against their wills, sometimes via intermediaries (which might not even map well to the underlying peoples). I do think the best thing to do is to return artifa…

Interesting thought. Perhaps the Egyptian relics should be repatriated to modern day practitioners of Egyptian polytheism. I believe the Kemetic Orthodoxy is currently headquartered in Illinois, USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemetic_Orthodoxy#Worship

Hah. I’m going to intentionally pass on that one, my main point was that it is hard to make these decisions. The existence of surprising edge cases like yours just goes to show that it is a hard problem.

Re: The Netherlands has returned some stolen artifacts to Indonesia

#135

Post by thevillagechief »

tetris11 wrote: post #35
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should be thankful the British stole it!

Honestly, of all the empires that could have stolen I'm glad it was the British. Cruel, destabilizing, more atrocities than any other empire, but somehow the royal class had a culture of conservation for (some) wildlife and historical artefacts.

Hey listen, I come from a country colonized by the British, and it was brutal. It's created generational poverty because they stole the most fertile land and have kept it until today, while sharing with a few corrupt Africans. But have you met the Belgians? Heard of King Leopold II? Now those guys know cruelty and atrocities.

Re: The Netherlands has returned some stolen artifacts to Indonesia

#136

Post by golergka »

trwhite wrote: post #13
angry_moose wrote: post #7

Stuff the British Stole is a really good podcast (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) that explores the difficulties of these situations: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/stuff-the-british-sto... Things like: - The current government in power may not allow the artifacts to be returned to the original people, but will accept them and place them in the national museum. In many of these cases; the original people…

- the artifact is likely to be seen by significantly more people and serves a much greater purpose to expose/educate those people (from other cultures) to/about the culture from which it came

Also, in a lot of cases people living there have no relation to people of culture that the artefact has originated from. And usually the way that happened was not much better than what British did with their colonisation of these countries later on.

Re: The Netherlands has returned some stolen artifacts to Indonesia

#137

Post by rleigh »

bell-cot wrote: post #57
tivert wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see how that example is "giv[ing] things back." That stone is still the property of the British government and kept continuously on British territory.

It's Complicated(tm) - Scotland and England are, currently , both part of Britain. Historically, not so much. And they were often far-from-friendly, with wars fought and everything. In a referendum 10 years ago, ~45% of Scottish voters wanted to separate again.

They are both part of the United Kingdom (which is the union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland).

Great Britain the name of the island both are located upon. England and Scotland will always be a part of Britain, because that's a geographical area, not a political one.

Re: The Netherlands has returned some stolen artifacts to Indonesia

#138

Post by devsda »

ipaddr wrote: post #80
jntun wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

> 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.

Re: The Netherlands has returned some stolen artifacts to Indonesia

#140

Post by luaybs »

The amount of pro-colonial sentiment in the thread here is baffling. The people that were colonized and stolen from have the right to do whatever they want with these artifacts, even if you believe they may not have the means, or will sell them to private collectors.
Post reply on HN