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Comment by roflc0ptic | Hacker News Reader

> Fashioning himself as a cultural preservationist rather than an opportunistic pilferer, Latchford knowingly purchased looted statues and stones from ancient sites of worship

Honestly, I think buying and selling looted artifacts from the Khmer Rouge regime seems at least morally neutral.

> Year Zero (Khmer: ឆ្នាំសូន្យ, Chhnăm Sony [cʰnam soːn]) is an idea put into practice by Pol Pot in Democratic Kampuchea that all culture and traditions within a society must be completely destroyed or discarded and that a new revolutionary culture must replace it starting from scratch

The article really doesn't give a good explanation of why Latchford's actions are bad in context.

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The same issue arises over and over. Like the destruction of antiquities by religious radicals in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It's good to round up antiquities at risk and export them, but with the right provenance and to suitable institutions to hold with a public display of that provenance, so that when an appropriate time comes, they can be returned. I.e. treat it as "borrowing" or "safe-keeping".

Not just take it and sell it to unscrupulous buyers who will keep it.

How would you like it if someone swooped down on your house in advance of a hurricane and said "hey, your house is going to get destroyed anyway; why don't I take your appliances and electronics and sell them to other interested parties for my profit? After all, you won't be able to use them while you don't have a home, so what's the harm?"

Holding artifacts for safe-keeping is a nice idea in theory, but in practice has been used as a way to justify retaining colonial-era thefts long after any reasonable concerns have subsided.

This has been cited for the Elgin marbles for example, and US museums for indigenous cultural artifacts, and even by the Germans in WW2 to justify keeping things like the Ishtar gate as they were being bombed.

That makes sense - I certainly see how “I’m doing this for your own good” opens up a bit of moral hazard.

Agreed. Maoists (which the Khmer were) would bulldoze two thousand year old cultural sites. They were simple minded communists and could care less...Some of the most complex and distributed forms of government in the history of human kind existed in ancient china and these maoist boneheads wiped a lot of that history out of existence.

1. who gets to decide whether the owners of something get to destroy it or not?

2. the west has zero claim to any of it regardless of the circumstances. even if you think its justifiable to take it for preservation, what right do you have to keep it if it can be safely returned?

Possession is 9 tenths of the law. What right do you have to all the metal, diamonds, gold, oil etc that you're using right now if it can be safely returned?

say Latchford now goes to occupied parts of Ukraine and buys up all their atifacts from the Russian regime and sells them around in order to preserve them

not only would he symbolically support the Russian regime by uprooting Ukrainian cultural heritage from the area, but he'd also support it financially by buying the stuff in the first place

well, that's pretty damning. I got irritated and stopped reading, shame on me.

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