I don't understand. Museums in the West are full of looted ancient art [1]. Why are they allowed to keep it, but this woman cannot keep this one item?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/learning/should-museums-r...
but reading closer it says:
>Back at home, Young had a problem: She was in possession of a looted piece of ancient art. She couldn't keep it. She couldn't sell it. And giving it back to its rightful owners was a lot harder than it sounds.
So it sounds more like she felt she couldn't keep it or sell it because of her morals.
on edit: of course if she had sold it maybe 10 years down the road the Germans come and say we want our head of Germanicus back please, then either the people who bought it are on the hook or maybe also her for selling stolen goods (depending on laws and how much people want to enforce them)
http://www.marcfennell.com/stolen (Sorry I couldn't find the RSS feed)
PODCAST MAIN PAGE: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stuff-the-brit...
RSS FEED: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/stuff-the-brit...
Anyways, I think to some extent our civilization is descending into a kind of mass packrat disorder. We seem to fetishize preservation to an unhealthy degree on both small and large scales. Sometimes things break, are burnt down, or are left unmaintained until they die. But new things are created all the time, and maybe sometimes we get a little too stuck on the old stuff and don't acknowledge the new.
Of course if you’re talking about architecture, there’s lots of fetishization of the not-very-old stuff from last century, because They don’t want you to know that we lost the building techniques of the Tartarian Empire. Or something.
Problem solved
But really I'm talking about broader social trends and what we do at the society level. Yes, architecture. Mustn't tear down that building that no one has been able to live in for 20 years, it's sacred. But also relics, ideas, monuments to even monumentally stupid and awful things, etc.
Or is all of that legitimate because they all spoke French? (Remember, Napoleon was a Corsican!)
My reading might be wrong.
I own land in the UK, which in reality means I brought it from someone who brought it from someone who brought it from someone who brought it from someone who was given it by the king as a reward for helping kill the previous owner.
And if someone quarries marble on my land to make a statue, it has the same provenance.
So we've basically decided there's a sliding scale. If it was stolen at gunpoint 1960 you've got to return it, but if it was in 1690 you get to keep it.
This is true for many things: homes which people own taken from Japanese-Americans, wage theft discovered too late,…
If you only care about your children and you have an effective means of transmitting wealth gotten through evil means, you merely have to forgo the benefit yourself.
Indeed, across the entire globe, only a tiny fraction of the population own the vast majority of land and other resources.
Let's all sort out this much bigger and globally impactful inequality first, before worrying about some museum pieces.