AIBU to wonder why the British Museum gets singled out?

[BluesandClues]

I am forever seeing posts on social media about how the British Museum stole everything, and they should give things back. It always someone just ranting at the camera as well, with lots of bad guy/good guy vibes. There’s never a discussion of the various facts of the matter.

I never see posts about other museums, why is it always the British museum?

thats my point too, people seem obsessed that we robbed it ect but however we did acquire the items if we had not then yes most would have been lost etc

Why bristle when your obvious use of an AI is pointed out? Are you embarrassed?

Nevertheless ChatGPT's answer, when checked against more reliable sources, demonstrated my point - your suggestion that such (ahem) "informal acquisitions" were by agreement was utterly specious. A lot of the contents of the British Museum were simply stolen. And in a lot of other cases were the British Museum claims there was some form of agreement, the legitimacy of those agreements is often murky at best and outright specious at worst.

In what way is it better for 6,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural and sacred items to be stored somewhere in the basements of the British museum instead of being left on the lands of their ancestors where they belong?

"Look, if I hadn't stolen your car you'd only have gone and crashed it. I was doing you a favour!"

why would i be embarrassed about using faster tools to make or take part in a debate better than saying i dunno is it not ?

if i read instead 20 books on the topic the answer would largley be the same answer so why the facts of using googles summary should that make any difference ?

before ai we had to rely on so called experts in their fields with their wisdom on what ever topic now ai gives the normal average person the ability to debate and understand complex issues, so why stifle debate just because someone uses ai / google. rather than spending over 100 hours in a library reading the books to get the same conclusion or answers ?

thats different and you know it is, a car can be replaced, a single artifact cannot

because chances are they would not care then the items would have been destroyed by whoever conquered them, similar with Egyptian rulers wiping out inscriptions or names of their enemies etc

There is nothing inherently intellectually superior about having spent 100 hours reading twenty books instead of spending an hour using modern information-retrieval and synthesis tools. Research has always involved information compression. Historians use bibliographies, indexes, reviews, encyclopaedias, archival finding aids, specialist reference works and the conclusions of other scholars precisely so they do not have to rediscover everything themselves.

AI simply accelerates that process.

What? Indigenous Australians would never have destroyed their cultural and sacred items. And the only people to have 'conquered' Australia are the British who stole the items. They were perfectly safe on ancestral lands and there is no excuse for not returning them.

Is the Louvre going to take Venus de Milo back to the island of Milos

Oh here we go.

Learn something about how much of the past was forgotten, unmourned and uncared for, by those who moved into the regions where other peoples used to live. Sumer was forgotten, despite the huge number of ruins and clay tablets littering the surface. No one remembered any of the pharaohs of mighty Egypt even, could not even read the language, until huge amounts of work by Western scholars.

If our civilization was dead and buried for a couple of thousand years, our language and history forgotten, invaders in the land despising our language, not caring about what stories we told each other about the meaning of our existence or the daily realities of our lives. Then a new civilization came along that actually examined this, dug up our lives and released our history to the world. Would you want our artifacts, the objects that had enabled our story to be re-told, to be held as symbols of power and status or for the making of riches by the invaders of our land who despised us for so long? Or by the civilization that unearthed our lives? Who would be our most true successors?

Are you having a laugh?

socialdilemmawhattodo · Today 14:29
Nazi looted art wasn't appropriately purchased. Either stolen or forcible sales.
Ophy83 · Today 15:31 · Today 15:31
And people quite rightly object to it

Quite a few countries have agreed to return art which was proved to have been stolen to its rightful owners or their descendants.
However, Russians stole a lot of art from Germany at the end of the war, some (most?) of which had been stolen by the Nazis and good luck getting Russia to give anything back.

then you would be complaining to the french as they landed ships 6 days after the british did, so had Britain not succeeded the French would have conquered

The cultures that made them are mostly long dead. Dead and lost for an eon.

There may be a few objects taken from living cultures, but in the British museum those are relatively very few in number.

The Race to Botany Bay: Just six days after the British First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove in January 1788, two French ships led by the explorer Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse, arrived at the exact same location

How about the items, including human remains, the UK took from communities when they themselves conquered them? From communities that valued those items and mourned their loss?

After the colonisation of Australia, anthropologists, doctors, scientists and others took both ancestors and sacred objects from communities. They were traded, sold, experimented on, displayed as “curiosities”, and sometimes stored or forgotten. Around 6000 of these items still sit in the basement of the British museum despite repeated request to return them. Thankfully they've returned most of the ancestors by now, but you can't paint this as some sort of noble deed.

It would depend on the history surrounding those items. If they stole them from the British Museum I’d think they should give them back. If they were collected as interesting antiquity as part of a war or a historical event I would expect that they belonged to whoever found them, particularly if they’d been part of that estate for hundreds or thousands of years.

Fair enough, living items from living cultures should probably be returned.

But the Rosetta Stone?

How and where was it found? Does the pp who mentioned that even know its significance, in both ancient and modern times? Or is it just a thing they’ve heard the name of in a current trend?

Yes, that's why I regularly see Sikhs gathering at the V and A to look at Ranjit Singh's golden throne or Hindus to see the Chola bronzes in the BM. There are no Hindus or Sikhs in the world today. All dead as dodos.

Some of you need to read more widely. Perhaps read how Queen Victoria took the 11 year old Duleep Singh from his mother and brought him to England, along with the Kohinoor, the golden throne and other riches in the BM and V and A. But hey, why read when you can watch Tiktok?

It’s the same argument about stolen land. When was the land conquered, by who, which community owns the land, can it stay in the hands of the last people who own it if the indigenous population who previously owned it are still alive? These are all points or argument. Didn’t Billy Eilish shout about stolen land at an award ceremony whilst owning a mansion on indigenous land? That community asked for her house I believe 🤣🤣. Priceless.

i believe your answer is missing some important context : Following the annexation of the Punjab, the British separated the young Maharaja Duleep Singh from his mother, forcing him to surrender his sovereignty and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. Subsequently, he was sent to England, placed under the guardianship of Queen Victoria, and converted to Christianity

Neutralising a Powerful Symbol

• Crushing Sikh Resistance: Duleep Singh was the final Maharaja of the Sikh Empire. Keeping him in India risked making him a powerful figurehead for future anti-British uprisings.
• Breaking Royal Influence: His mother, Maharani Jindan Kaur, was fiercely anti-British and highly influential. The British viewed her as a major threat capable of rallying the Sikh army, making her removal necessary to cement their power.
• Erasing Native Identity: Moving the young Maharaja to England, isolating him from his culture, and converting him to Christianity effectively erased his ties to his homeland, ensuring he could never return to claim his throne.

so what should Britain have done then, bend over and pretend to be weak ? why was it so wrong for nations to be strong and conquer ?

What a strange argument! Of course we'd be 'complaining' to France if they had been the successful conquerors and took ancestors and sacred items. In fact the Australian government works with all countries that still hold these items to return them, including France who have been pretty good at returning them. Its quite rude to categorise the desire of indigenous Australians to have important items, including their actual ancestors, returned to them as 'complaining'.