Does Europe have any culture that isn’t stolen or brutality forced on others?
Since I don’t see much football stuff on Lemmy, this is Mohammed Salah, an Egyptian footballer and premier league royalty. YNWA
Will he burn if there’s crosses in the Museum?
Can someone explain the reactionary joke I’m missing here, what does this mean.
You see, when football is mentioned online, the collective intelligence of any comment section is cut by at least 90%. This stacks with another 90% if it’s women’s football or any token LGBT acknowledgement in football. The joke is Muslim Bad.
Which is a shame. I used to make fun of le sportsball amirite until it clicked that there was immense entertainment value in these matches, which could be super tense and exciting even when an individual match doesn’t have super high stakes. There’s storylines with each of the players and managers, there’s a lot of diverging personalities among them and they all handle the same game in their own way. And unlike scripted shows, when something unexpected happens it is so much more interesting. Like the story is real in a way that scripted entertainment isn’t.
On one hand, sure, the British took a lot of things from other places when their empire spanned the globe. And, it sucks for places that had their stuff taken that it is no longer where it was.
On the other hand the British Museum is probably one of the safest places in the world for these things. The museum cares about preservation, knows how to do it, and has the funds to do it. And, while there’s undoubtedly corruption in the UK, there’s a very low chance that any of these things is going to disappear out of the museum and into some powerful person’s private collection.
Mohamed Salah is standing in front of a statue from Egypt, which was taken from Egypt to London. But, the British didn’t manage to take the Buddhas of Bamiyan from Afghanistan to London, and what happened? The Taliban blew them up. The British also didn’t fully loot Iraq when they controlled that territory, which meant that in the 2003 war the museum was looted but not by people who wanted treasures for a public museum. The poorer and less politically stable a country is, the greater the chances that their cultural treasures will be stolen or destroyed.
Despite the repression and corruption, Egypt is now probably stable enough that if any of these items were returned to Egypt, they would probably be well treated and put on display for Egyptians to see. The power of the military in Egypt and the level of corruption probably means a few small items would disappear from the museum, but the most important items would make it. But, is Egypt stable enough that the museum would be safe for another 20, 40, 80 years? I have my doubts. I do think London is probably safe for that long.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think the number one priority should be preserving these things for the future. Displaying them for the public should be a lower priority. If there are items like scrolls or clothing that are too delicate to even display behind a glass case, they should be stored away. I know that’s how they handle things at the Smithsonian, and I assume the British Museum is the same. Because of that, my bias is that the most important cultural items should be in the care of the richest museums in the world, even if it means that they’re not in the places they came from.
Yes. Preservation that’s why it was taken. You see that statue was in imminent danger of being left there for the local people to preserve. The horror!
My favorite story about the British stealing shit is that time they stole a cultures entire written history. They had it all written on tablets and arranged in a specific order. It never occurred to them though that they should put page numbers because who would jumble them up? Who would destroy their history like that? Ah yes, the British, that’s who.
But that’s all in the past, and now it’s the only place on earth that can preserve these things. The only place. There is no other place. No possible other home for these artifacts.
Well, as I can see the comment remind you of what happen in when “Muslim Arab” did in Iraq where, “checking notes”, the US and the UK destroyed the country and move it to a civil war while stealing oil and gold, then blame them for what happen to the museum.
Then he also remind you of what “Muslim” did in Afghanistan where, “checks notes”, the US and UK made sure to fund an Islamic extremist ideology to fight the Russian, then complain when they destroyed a Buddhist statue.
The same comment doesn’t seems to see the irony of colonizer stealing shit, making money of it, and then finding lame excuse and ignoring that Arab and Muslim lived in these lands for over 1400 years where all these artifact survived to modern day.
You mean the ISIS which appeared after America invaded Iraq, destroyed it, and backed violent rebel groups with weapons?
Must be that “Islamic extremism” again.
In fairness it likely wouldn’t be preserved otherwise. So you’re welcome.
It was already thousands of years old. The British destroyed more artifacts than they “saved”.
White man’s burden
Exactly. Look at the state of it. We definitely should have taken that.
Lol, who do you think shot cannon balls at it for target practice? Fuckin’ wanker.
Got to practise firing cannons mate
except that not actually an other hand sorta thing at all, almost exclusively it was colonizers and their wars that destroyed so many of the artifacts that werent stolen, if they weren’t delivery destroyed by colonizers to erase history and beyond even that the colonizers carelessness, greed, and racism which they brought to archeology led to much more than just artifacts being destroyed. There are so many historical sites whose histories we will never know at all because these clown excavated them to take “relics” and took little if any records where their precious artifacts were found and how, and that is if sites were not destroyed in their entirety out of sheer idiocy in the search of something else like how troy was. 18th, 19th, and even some 20th century so called archeology is a history of the destruction of history.
It was doing fine where it was.
That’s an interesting point. While I agree it’s kinda shitty the UK nicked everyone’s cool stuff and shoved it in 1 building. I’m willing to bet if we hadn’t the number of pieces that would be lost to time would not be zero
This is just weird revisionist history. They moved in stole shit, colonized and murdered. The after the fact excuse of “we took it to preserve it” doesn’t play mostly because their colonizer bullshit is largely the reason areas they stole shit from are destabilized.
I’m not revising anything its a shitty thing to do and it should all be returned. It was just a thought with a beer given how volatile some of the areas where the stuff comes and yes I know most of them ended up volatile because of colonialism.
Yeah I’m totally sure the Brits didn’t break a single thing shipping artifacts to their big fancy museum. Let’s ignore all the mummies Europeans ground up into powder and ingested as “medicine”. Savagely eating dead humans with the same mouths that say brown people are too savage to take care of their own artifacts.
Honestly the concept of property here is just silly. Who specifically do they belong to, why, what claim, and how could such a claim exist?
I just don’t agree with the concept, this individual doesn’t have any right to ownership regardless of whether his specific family owned it at some point prior, but most likely a direct relative doesn’t even own it, just someone with his self same ‘race’ ( which race doesn’t really exist either tbh, not genetically anyway, but exists as a social construct ).
I just despise this mentality. I don’t own anything collectively with anyone of my ‘race’, neither their achievements nor shames, and same for even direct relatives.
There is not enough generic diversity in humans to even prop up the idea of race beyond being a cultural construct, it’s time to stop seeing our fellow humans as something other.
The phrasing was weird, but this guy was born in Egypt and the statue was taken from Egypt. This isn’t a matter of private property, he’s commenting on how the UK exploited Egypt.
Sure, race and nationality are social constructs and genetics don’t support the divisions we make along phenotypic lines, however, you can’t just hope to solve racism and colonialism by saying they are gone and meaningless. If you say they no longer exist, that doesn’t erase the impacts racism and colonialism have had on a people.
In essence, it’s like punching someone repeatedly until they are bloody, stealing the money from their wallet to buy yourself a house, and then saying, “why can’t we forget our differences and just be friends?” Is everything alright? Is it ok that you now have a home and the other person is destitute because you stole their money? Does it make it any better if it was your parents or grandparents who did this and now you’ve inherited the house?
Just claiming it’s a social construct and wiping your hands of the issue does not fix the problem. And that metaphor I made does not even encompass the entire issue! Reality is more along the lines of: now that you own this house, you enforce policies that continually raise the price of housing and put a tax on people who don’t own a house. The exploitation many people have suffered at the hands of racism and colonialism never stopped, it just changed it’s form.
they belong in Egypt not in en***nd
Property rights only exist when non-western countries want their stuff / land back. When the west stole them, then its finders keepers.
/s
funny for an Egyptian man to say this, considering that it was made by black people not Arabs. If such things went by blood then and culture then South Sudan would have the strongest claim to it, its like saying that art by ancient indigenous americans belongs to an amerikkkan only difference is time.
If you look at any of the ancient statues they don’t look black, whatever the recent propaganda tries to push. It doesn’t make any sense to put everyone in those four racial boxes - an Ethiopian looks as distinct from a South African as a Spaniard and a Swede
a clear lack of historical knowledge. plenty of the statue do have black features, they stop having black features first in lower Egypt and then much latter in upper Egypt, because there was a migration from asia/arabia and europe into Africa the vast majority of what we think of as ancient Egypt was created by black skinned people from Africa whos culture was preserved when they migrated south into Ethiopia and Sudan and later south Sudan the group of people we understand as Arabs today didnt even exists at the time. And the fact that Africa is diverse has nothing to do with this.
Just because Egypt is in Africa doesn’t automatically make Egyptians black. Look at a map. Northern Africa and Egypt were just as much part of southern Europe and the Middle East.
except that Egyptians were black some 4000 years ago, 2000 years for upper Egypt, it is quite literally named the “land of the blacks” after all that is what Egypt means, latter ancient civilizations in lower Egypt were not black and eventually upper Egypt too because of migration from Asia and Europe which in turn created migrations of the then Egyptians into at first upper Egypt and then Ethiopia and Sudan. Almost the entirety of what people think of when they think of “ancient Egypt” was made by black people not all but most.
It’s named “Black Land”. Their southern neigbors were black. why would they call themselves something that wouldn’t distinguish themselves from everyone else? It’s called black land because of the distinction between “Kemet” - Black Land, the Nile valley, and “Deshret” - Red Land, the surrounding desert.
But hey, afrocentrists gonna afrocenter
I think its country of origin has the best claim.
Oh cool. Hotep? So, what percentage of Nubian blood must Mo Salah have before he is allowed to claim a connection to Ancient Egypt? Upper or Lower? Pseudohistory aside, one’s own cultural history is not subject to some racial blood purity tests. That’s some borderline Nazi shit. Anyway, fuck the Brits.
Isn’t the idea of museums that you can learn about other cultures without going there?
holy shit I should totally call my apartment a museum so I can steal anything I want
