alt Hacker NewsTake 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?
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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)?
> 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.
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...