No doubt. But you know what will (sadly) never be given back? Land taken from indigenous tribes the world over, whether by force or “treaty” or some other absurd “legal” means. Just like the note (above) about Indy taking the idol that was actively being worshiped, the land was actively being used. It’s a sad, fucked up world we find ourselves in, where the colonial spirit runs rampant even though we generally pretend it doesn’t.
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2a. They didn’t have a flag.
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Possibly but that was obviously intentional. Like Quentin Tarantino putting Bruce Lee’s outfit in Kill Bill (or any of a million other classic film homages he’s done). They did it for the love of that genre, not out of desperation for ideas. (OK, maybe a little of both)
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Oh! This is good news: the one in New York City’s American Museum of Natural History is not the real thing but a cast. I was just about to wonder if they were next. I thought it was real. https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent/pacific-peoples/easter-island-moai-cast
Sure, but it’s also a logistically and legally simpler matter to return a stolen statue than a stolen continent.
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Which is as bad as the headline. England does not equal Britain. As the article said - a British ship and The British Museum.
I have no desire to defend the BM, whatsoever. But @frauenfelder please correct the sloppy headline.
And @NashRambler your points 1-5 rather do sum up the scale and complexity of the problem.
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Came here to say exactly that.
As NashRambler said, Rapa Nui isn’t a separate nation. Nor is England; it’s merely a component part of the UK.
Okay, it’s slightly off-topic, but seriously; when will people understand that lazily conflating England with the whole of the UK is kind of offensive, particularly to us non-English Brits?
…
And French, and German, and Spanish (IIRC) and, so far as I’ve experienced, American.
[To be fair, not those I’ve visited in San Francisco]
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It’s also kind of offensive to those of us who see ourselves as British first and foremost and English a distant second (as did many of the Scots or Welsh or Irish plunderers, perhaps). Which is one of the conundrums of Britishness, seeing as almost no Welsh or Scottish ever seem to admit the same. (Leaving the Northern Irish out of this - half vehemently do and half vehemently don’t with a few in between.)
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In a modern era when an item like this can be 3-dimensionally scanned and then a duplicate cast, is there really any reason to hold on to such an item anymore? Is there any greater knowledge to be gleaned by a museum-goer by looking at the original instead of an accurate replica?
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The Greeks remain deeply, deeply pissed about the Elgin Marbles as well. When we visit family there it is a regularly visited topic of conversation at the coffee shop. I’m not exaggerating when I say it is a fundamental root of a lot of resentment against the British in particular. (That and choosing not to liberate them from Nazi oppression sooner, which is less resolvable at this point).
I suspect most Brits have no idea what the Elgin Marbles are, yet they are willing to put up with the seething resentment of an entire (Allied) country just to keep the things.
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The real reason they hesitate to give it back is because the mana of that moai is the only thing keeping the monarchy going at this point.
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The monarchy seems to be doing better than the actual institutions of the British Government…
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There is a little difference in my opinion…the stuff in Egypt is from the past…there is no religion which uses this artifacts.
The Easter Island statue was 1869 used for worship and more imported (according to a German documentary) a missionary had pushed for the removal, because he wants to get rid of this staue to avoid further worship, which was idolatrous in his eyes.
bj68
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My first thought on reading the headline was “Oh shit, what if we’ve lost it?”
The museum still has the Elgin Marbles, stolen from the Parthenon around 1800. They have been fought over for centuries.
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Um no, the context it’s displayed in was “Look at our mighty Empire! We have ALL the shiny things!”
Now, it’s “Look at how we cling on to our past glories. Why, yes, we are the equivalent of the guy in a bar droning on about how he once scored 5 touchdowns in one game in high school.”
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good luck with that. greece still wants the parthenon back, and the museum’s response when there is one has been simple paternalism.
Well, seeing as how the Catholic Church considers the Shroud to be a fake, they may not make as much of a fuss as might be expected.
Although, they may be just saying that, and might kick up an unholy fuss if it did go missing!
For much of the Victorian era, the distinction between ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ was not as clear-cut as it became in the 20th century. I have been looking for a cartoon from ‘Punch’ from the First World War, which has a wall with “GOTT STRAFE ENGLAND” written on it, and a Highland soldier in a kilt is crossing out “ENGLAND” and writing “GREAT BRITAIN”. We have the “Queen of England” and the “Bank of England”, but we have the “British Museum” and had "The British Empire’.
I don’t know about you, but the “Queen of the Britons” ought to have blades on her chariot wheels. Or at least red hair.
If the US wants Britain to send back all heavy lumps of squat humanoid orange stuff to its original owners, we have something that belongs to you.
Depends on how much getting relics back impacts Sisi’s ability to buy arms from the US…
