US returns huge haul of stolen artefacts to Italy

MicroWave@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 241 points –
US returns huge haul of stolen artefacts to Italy
bbc.com

The United States has returned more than 250 ancient artifacts to Italy after police discovered that they had been stolen.

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BBC trying to ignore the elephant in the room with all of their stolen artefacts

Q: Why are the pyramids in Egypt?

A: Because they were too heavy to move to England

Italy wouldn’t want to start that conversation - the city of Rome has more Egyptian obelisks than Egypt.

The house I'm living in in Germany is built on top of a Roman pottery district. I hope they don't want that one back.

Difference is that those Egyptian obelisks were not built in modern day Italy by the Egyptians, but the Roman pottery district was built in modern day Germany by the Romans

A lot of the obelisks in European cities were stolen from Egypt

The art unit of Italy's police force found the items had been looted and sold to US museums and private collectors in the 1990s.

Kind of different, a lot of the same.

Great. You've done the first world nation justice. Now do your own indigenous nations justice and return all of their stolen artifacts.

Anything won by military action is legitimately owned. Note all of human history

Are you really pro-colonialism? Wow.

I see it as a realist view. Land has been exchanging hands since Sumer and Elam fought the first war in history.

Practically all land on earth has been contested, and isn't inhabited by the original human group to walk to it.

It seems odd to draw the line between human nature and colonialism.

You could make the same argument about slavery. It's happened for all of human history.

So there's no issues with slavery, right?

How about rape? No problem with rape? It's been happening since time immemorial. Animals even do it. So rape is fine, right?

I would like to note that there's plenty of war loot the US has that we took from dead Nazis, Imperial Japanese, Central Powers, Confederates, etc, and that's pretty dope and they shouldn't have it back.

You misspelled land and culture.

I doubt that will ever happen, but artifacts in museums can absolutely be given back to indigenous nations without much effort on the museum's part. They just don't want to.