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I agree. At the beginning I thought this was a conservation effort.

Turns out to be the modern equivalent of colonisers stealing local artefacts.

Why export this at all!?



Today I learned that carefully preserving an artefact that neither its owner nor anyone else in its origin country wanted = “colonizers stealing.”


This is the same for a lot of supposed “theft” by museums. Lots of “priceless” objects now were at the time junk, so they were thrown away.


> This is the same for a lot of supposed “theft” by museums.

Not to mention that in many countries art pieces predating a certain era are simply destroyed (on the ground that they're older than a particular religion).

And most of the pharaohs' tombs were pillaged and unique pieces were melt by actual thiefs for their gold.

These evil, evil, museums displaying these around the world for any visitor to see when you think these could have been melt for gold by thieves or simply destroyed because they were impure!

Evil western civilization. That western civilization is so evil it must be replaced!


Alternate theory, both are true.

Western societies took advantage of multiple other societies to plunder their treasures. Those same societies didn't have the infrastructure and/or care to preserve these things themselves.

Sometimes two things can be true.


If they do not care about them, they are not "treasures" by the standards of those cultures but rather "waste."


Not necessarily true- the majority of people don't know about 3-2-1 backup strategy and I've seen hundreds of "help! my { phone | SD card | computer } died and I lost all my family photos" posts


Conservation or not, that TV has been given out by its owner so there is no theft involved. Neither has it been moved out of the country by colons or illegaly.

And it is a damn TV. A big one for sure but it isn't Moctezuma II headdress nor are those Devatas carved from Banteay Srei cambodian temple.


This example is what makes much of the "stealing" claim bogus, both for this and many artifacts. The Japanese owner wanted it gone and considered it trash. It wasn't some beloved item. Even Sony didn't care.

And so much of what is considered "stolen" was given away by someone in that culture as trash.


That's the standard excuse of a thief. "I'm not stealing it, I'm saving it". Better stop the excusing.


Except that the owner is the one giving it away. The current owner doesn't claim theft.

The only people claiming theft are a third party that never owned the property in question or at the time gave it away freely.




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