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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Pretty brave of them considering some of the pieces were not acquired peacefully.

If the Royal Family was shy about things not acquired peacefully, that'd be interminably awkward.

Which ones, it doesn't mention it in the article.

No one really knows because they won't make the list of items public. It's all based on circumstantial evidence, and the fact that the British Museum has a bunch of stolen artifacts.

They're literally hanging on the walls of Buckingham Palace for the world to see for £26.50.

Some of them are, not all of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Collection#Collection

Complete BS. The Royal Collection is very public: you can view images of most of the significant pieces on the website: https://www.rct.uk/about/picture-library

Are there problems with how some of the stuff was acquired? Probably. I don't know. But the lazy assertion that their holdings are secret (the things in this exhibition or the collection more generally) is just completely off the wall.

It's fashionable to complain about colonial theft of artifacts. Fine. Please apply the same level of rigor to statements about this topic as you would to statements about technical subjects. Don't spread FUD or try to glamorize your ignorance by saying "no one knows."

"A computerised inventory of the collection was started in early 1991,[28] and it was completed in December 1997.[29] The full inventory is not available to the public"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Collection#Collection

Governments steal lots of stuff all the time. The least they can do is do something useful to the taxpayer with it.

Or they could give it back to the people they stole it from.

The UK has a long history of not returning anything - https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/07/wh...

The Chinese government's supposed approach is pretty interesting - https://www.gq.com/story/the-great-chinese-art-heist

well there are pros and cons to that, in many places in the world you would risk losing the piece forever regardless what the locals claim.

plus while something may have come from a region and people of the world that no longer exist and the attachment is in name only. As in, there is no connection to the society that created the works to the one that rules the area now. There is always a case for those stolen within a few generations but going back beyond that is not always warranted. Plus when you get into some art and such who was the last rightful owner, you stole from someone who stole it from another and so on.

I would prefer a world where these antiquities are preserved but open to anyone to see.

I really doubt the Elgin marbles would disappear from Greece

This type of attempt to intellectualize cultural theft is usually how colonizers rationalize it.

I understand what you're saying, but thats like making the argument that you shouldn't have the fancy car because it's safer in my driveway than yours.

Eh, without colonial cross-pollination and cultural appropriation, many of these works would never have been inspired or created to begin with.

You want to redress the past, invent a time machine. Otherwise, it is what it is (or, rather, was).

Let me go to your house, steal your stuff and keep it forever and call it crosspollination.

(Shrug) Being a white male landowner, I probably have it coming.

Or you know we could just agree to 1) not steal things and 2) return the stuff we stole from others

(Shrug) They're dead, and don't need their stuff back. I'm not.

So we can steal it right now and not return it to your descendants ?

If he fails to shoot you dead enough to prevent it then it's all yours. That's how these things work at the international level. Sure nowadays a country can appeal to the UN if they are being robbed but that isn't guaranteed to be helpful and back when the UK took most of the stuff there was no UN.

I guess the other option is stealing it back from the European museums holding it, but I suppose now it would be called theft rather than "cultural cross pollination"

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/08/28/chinese-art-theft

Since when has the UK become the arbiter and police of the World's Art. Is it also rescuing currently "at danger" heirlooms ? Who are they to decide that they get to show it? For e.g. the Kohinoor diamond from India. Blatant theft. But sure done by a white colony so it must be fine. Saviors and all that.

This collection is not owned by the UK Government. The Royal Collection has some items owned by the Queen herself as a private individual and some items are owned by the Crown (which is a difficult enough abstract concept even if you are British but in this context, it basically means the reigning monarch).

The collection is managed by a charity, The Royal Collection Trust, and other than the tax advantages all charities have, there's no taxpayer involvement here.

Regardless of who legally owns it or the circumstances under which it was acquired the queen acquired most of it as a side benefit to or result of her official position.

I see it no different than displaying some gift in a presidential library. It's simply the right thing to do.

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