Racist Countryside Art

[Jack by the hedge]

By the metric I pulled out of my bum. I didn't expect the damn Spanish Inquisition.

As a descendent of those colonisers, I have become keenly aware of how awful they were. I'm sure other European colonial powers were pretty damn awful too, but I know more about how bad the British were. The ABC and CBC didn't produce three seasons of a podcast called Stuff The Dutch Stole.

Fair enough. I didn't want to join some pile-on, just wondered if I was complacently kidding myself the Belgians or Japanese deserved their reputations for greater callousness or cruelty.

 

[theprestige]

By the metric I pulled out of my bum. I didn't expect the damn Spanish Inquisition.

As a descendent of those colonisers, I have become keenly aware of how awful they were. I'm sure other European colonial powers were pretty damn awful too, but I know more about how bad the British were. The ABC and CBC didn't produce three seasons of a podcast called Stuff The Dutch Stole.

So it's selection bias and self-hatred, then. ABC and CBC don't make their bread and butter pandering to Dutch colonial audiences wallowing in Dutch guilt.

And appropriating cultural artifacts is hardly the worst thing a colonizer could do. The Americans appropriated the better part of a continent, committing numerous acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the process.

 

[arthwollipot]

Fair enough. I didn't want to join some pile-on, just wondered if I was complacently kidding myself the Belgians or Japanese deserved their reputations for greater callousness or cruelty.

Yeah they were certainly bad in terms of absolute depravity of individual acts. But they weren't spread across the world the way the British were. The British ****** up almost every continent.

So it's selection bias and self-hatred, then. ABC and CBC don't make their bread and butter pandering to Dutch colonial audiences wallowing in Dutch guilt.

And appropriating cultural artifacts is hardly the worst thing a colonizer could do. The Americans appropriated the better part of a continent, committing numerous acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the process.

Of course it's not the worst that they did. And I think you'll find that it was the British (and to a lesser extent the Spanish and French) who appropriated that continent, and then they became American.

 

[Trausti]

That's ********.

That's ********.

That's also ********.

If those bad colonizers had not valued and saved those items, you really think they'd exist today? If the "indigineous" folks didn't care about the items then, whence the sudden interest?

 

[arthwollipot]

If those bad colonizers had not valued and saved those items, you really think they'd exist today?

Ooh, let's take a look at the Elgin Marbles, yeah? Do I think those would still exist? Yeah I absolutely do. They're frickin marble. It doesn't exactly decay.

If the "indigineous" folks didn't care about the items then, whence the sudden interest?

Oh, nice scare quotes, as though the term "indigenous" is just made up or something.

 

[Trausti]

The Americans appropriated the better part of a continent, committing numerous acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the process.

These things were going on long before Columbus set sail.

 

[Hercules56]

These things were going on long before Columbus set sail.

Yeah but Europeans brought it to an industrial scale.

 

[arthwollipot]

Apropos of nothing and not intended as a reply to anybody in particular, this quote came to mind:

"History should be uncomfortable. If you are not uncomfortable reading history, then you are not reading history, you are reading propaganda."

In my short google I wasn't able to find who first said it. If you know, please share.

 

[theprestige]

Ooh, let's take a look at the Elgin Marbles, yeah? Do I think those would still exist? Yeah I absolutely do. They're frickin marble. It doesn't exactly decay.

The Elgin Marbles? You mean the marble sculptures that were taken from the Parthenon of Athens?

The Parthenon of Athens that was subsequently used by the Turks as a powder magazine, and was then severely damaged when the magazine exploded? That Parthenon? Those Elgin Marbles?

Let's not even talk about how marble, like everything else, does deteriorate over centuries of exposure to the elements, to pollution, to vandalism - and that's without people packing it with explosives and shooting at it until it blows up.

Just the fact that the Elgin Marbles are your go-to example of how the Brits were the worst colonizers ever is already too tragicomic. Just on that same page of history, competing by the rules you have set, the Ottomans were objectively worse.

 

[arthwollipot]

Just the fact that the Elgin Marbles are your go-to example of how the Brits were the worst colonizers ever is already too tragicomic. Just on that same page of history, competing by the rules you have set, the Ottomans were objectively worse.

Well, I could have brought up Pocahontas instead.

 

[theprestige]

Apropos of nothing and not intended as a reply to anybody in particular, this quote came to mind:

"History should be uncomfortable. If you are not uncomfortable reading history, then you are not reading history, you are reading propaganda."

I get uncomfortable reading propaganda, too. Calling propaganda history is like Stephen Segal practicing jiu jitsu: Not awesome, just creepy and sad.

 

[theprestige]

Well, I could have brought up Pocahontas instead.

I know, right? You could have brought up literally any other example, besides the Elgin Marbles. The mind boggles that you went with history's most obvious counter-example to your argument. That podcast you touted must have been a real piece of work.

 

[arthwollipot]

I know, right? You could have brought up literally any other example, besides the Elgin Marbles. The mind boggles that you went with history's most obvious counter-example to your argument. That podcast you touted must have been a real piece of work.

You might try listening to it. They had a whole episode on the Elgin Marbles. Elgin did a lot of damage to the Parthenon himself when he took to it with hammers and saws. He didn't leave much for the Turkish to destroy.

But no, just as examples from that show, I could have brought up the Benin Bronzes, or the Pekingese dog that was stolen from the Summer Palace when it was sacked, returned to England as a gift for Queen Victoria and named "Looty" (yes, that's true, look it up), or the rum (and slave) trade from Barbados, or the Shellal Mosaic, or the Golden Guardian, or the Motonui epa - these are just singular examples of the British in particular rampaging around the world just taking whatever they felt like and trampling all over the rich cultures and peoples wherever they went.

And Pocahontas, or Matoaka to call her by her name. Look up that story too, if you want to see how brutal and callous British colonials were, and how mercilessly Disney butchered that story.

The suggestion that the indigenous populations weren't going to take care of the artifacts is answered in the very first episode of the podcast, on Tipu's Tiger. From the transcript:

Shashi thinks for Tipu, the tiger now belonging to his hated rivals is the ultimate humiliation.

“A statue that had been prepared essentially for him to actually demonstrate his contempt for the British to actually be in British hands. He would have been pretty, pretty, pretty upset about that.”

Historian Zareer Masani isn’t so sure.

“I think Tipu would be quite pleased because he was a very vain man, and [would like] the idea that the whole world was learning about him, which is something that happens via an object like the tiger.”

He says there is no tradition of museums in India, before colonial times.

“The reason it survived is that it was shipped off to England and conserved and preserved. Had it been in India would have just fallen to pieces eventually because no-one would have been interested for a couple of hundred years.”

While the V&A tells the ABC that there has not been an official request for repatriation, Shashi wants the tiger back.

“There’s something wrong about stealing items that belong to another people and then, self righteously claiming you look after them better than those who are entitled to own them would,” he says.

“I mean, if someone literally dug your father’s grave up and put it on display in his backyard, would you feel that morality was on his side? It’s that kind of story you’re talking about.”

 

[arthwollipot]

Okay, I've edited that post far too much so I'll say this last bit in a new one.

Britain claims that the Marbles are safer in the British Museum than they would be in Greece. So Greece built a museum to house the Marbles. It contains about 40% of the original statues, which somehow still survived despite not being in Britain. Britain still won't return the ones that Elgin stole. So the argument that they are "safer" in Britain is pretty spurious if you ask me. They'd be just as "safe" back in Greece.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

Maybe there's a selection bias which makes people who steal other people's treasure and put it on display in a museum more obvious thieves than people who just steal other people's treasure and then it's their treasure.

Less facetiously, there's a lot of grey area even in fields like botany where collectors travelled to very remote places to send back examples of plants they discovered to places like Kew Gardens. Some of that was genuinely altruistic fascination with discovery and cataloguing. Some was deliberately aimed at finding medically useful or commercially exploitable species. Some of it was downright subterfuge, smuggling out what were already known to be valuable species and whose export was banned, in the hope of cultivating them elsewhere. Quinine is a fascinating example.

 

[catsmate]

It's only recently that we in British cultural dependencies are starting to understand and accept what absolute ***** the colonial British really were. I mean, they were awful. Really, really terrible human beings who routinely committed atrocities and massacres and stole cultural artifacts with reckless abandon. Terrible, terrible people, the British colonials were. Some of the worst people the planet has ever seen. Well, among the worst - a group that is distressingly large.

Indeed. But the 'Imperial Delusion' died slowly, especially when you have scum apologising for it.

 

[catsmate]

The idea of valuing artifacts is a Western value that the British/Europeans imposed on the rest of the world. If the Europeans had not saved these artifacts these would have been plundered or destroyed. Indeed, that such artifacts exist today is due to those evil colonizers a century ago thinking they were worth saving.

Oh good grief.......

 

[Hercules56]

The idea of valuing artifacts is a Western value that the British/Europeans imposed on the rest of the world. If the Europeans had not saved these artifacts these would have been plundered or destroyed. Indeed, that such artifacts exist today is due to those evil colonizers a century ago thinking they were worth saving.

White Supremacist bull ****.

 

[bruto]

Oh good grief.......

Every year, millions of Chinese gather on the ramparts of the Great Wall, and yell out "Thank you England!"

 

[theprestige]

Oh, nice scare quotes, as though the term "indigenous" is just made up or something.

In the case of Elgin Marbles, the quotes kind of make sense. Modern Greeks have more of an ethnic and cultural connection to the Ottomans, than to the ancient Greek civilization that produced the marbles.