Since I don't see much football stuff on Lemmy, this is Mohammed Salah, an Egyptian footballer and premier league royalty. YNWA
What does YNWA stand for/mean?
You'll Never Walk Alone. It's liverfool football club's motto. They sing it at every game. People get it tattooed.
It's something the Dunmer often say.
And the girl in the back on the original post photo, looking like this below meme photo. LoL
On one hand, sure, the British took a lot of things from other places when their empire spanned the globe. And, it sucks for places that had their stuff taken that it is no longer where it was.
On the other hand the British Museum is probably one of the safest places in the world for these things. The museum cares about preservation, knows how to do it, and has the funds to do it. And, while there's undoubtedly corruption in the UK, there's a very low chance that any of these things is going to disappear out of the museum and into some powerful person's private collection.
Mohamed Salah is standing in front of a statue from Egypt, which was taken from Egypt to London. But, the British didn't manage to take the Buddhas of Bamiyan from Afghanistan to London, and what happened? The Taliban blew them up. The British also didn't fully loot Iraq when they controlled that territory, which meant that in the 2003 war the museum was looted but not by people who wanted treasures for a public museum. The poorer and less politically stable a country is, the greater the chances that their cultural treasures will be stolen or destroyed.
Despite the repression and corruption, Egypt is now probably stable enough that if any of these items were returned to Egypt, they would probably be well treated and put on display for Egyptians to see. The power of the military in Egypt and the level of corruption probably means a few small items would disappear from the museum, but the most important items would make it. But, is Egypt stable enough that the museum would be safe for another 20, 40, 80 years? I have my doubts. I do think London is probably safe for that long.
Maybe it's just me, but I think the number one priority should be preserving these things for the future. Displaying them for the public should be a lower priority. If there are items like scrolls or clothing that are too delicate to even display behind a glass case, they should be stored away. I know that's how they handle things at the Smithsonian, and I assume the British Museum is the same. Because of that, my bias is that the most important cultural items should be in the care of the richest museums in the world, even if it means that they're not in the places they came from.
Yes. Preservation that's why it was taken. You see that statue was in imminent danger of being left there for the local people to preserve. The horror!
My favorite story about the British stealing shit is that time they stole a cultures entire written history. They had it all written on tablets and arranged in a specific order. It never occurred to them though that they should put page numbers because who would jumble them up? Who would destroy their history like that? Ah yes, the British, that's who.
But that's all in the past, and now it's the only place on earth that can preserve these things. The only place. There is no other place. No possible other home for these artifacts.
Well, as I can see the comment remind you of what happen in when "Muslim Arab" did in Iraq where, "checking notes", the US and the UK destroyed the country and move it to a civil war while stealing oil and gold, then blame them for what happen to the museum.
Then he also remind you of what "Muslim" did in Afghanistan where, "checks notes", the US and UK made sure to fund an Islamic extremist ideology to fight the Russian, then complain when they destroyed a Buddhist statue.
The same comment doesn't seems to see the irony of colonizer stealing shit, making money of it, and then finding lame excuse and ignoring that Arab and Muslim lived in these lands for over 1400 years where all these artifact survived to modern day.
The British Museum can't even keep its collection from being stolen (ironic), there are 2000 missing artifacts if I remember correctly. Any excuse that "the British Museum can protect the artefacts" doesn't hold true anymore. They should return the stolen artefacts to be displayed in the county of origin. Egypt has very strong laws to preserve and protect ancient artefacts.
Would be funny only if Mohammad Salah was aware that Egypt wasn't always inhabited by Arabs, but by lots of different people and ethnicities. Arab Muslims just conquered and colonized Egypt, they just colonize differently than Europeans.
As an Egyptian the sheer ignorance of this comment is absolutely stunning.
It's impressive
The Muslims conquered land and replaced its government, they did not murder and replace their entire population. This is why countries like Somalia are filled with black people who are Muslims and not Arabs.
Mohamed Salah has Egyptian ancestry. He is not a random Arab Muslim claiming that Egypt was Arab.
Settler colonization and replacing everything with 'superior white people' is a rather modern European tradion
To colonize doesn't exclusively mean to murder and entirely replace a population.
But keep on putting everything except European conquest and colonisation into perspective, you're good at it.
There's a difference between colonialism and conquest. Conquest was much much more common in the past than colonialism. Before modern European colonialism, the only people who had made colonial efforts had been the Greeks (with small city colonies in places like Libya, for example), and the Norse, with their colonization of Greenland and their attempt to colonize what is today Newfoundland. Otherwise, the rest was conquest. There's a significant difference between the two.
There are multiple forms of colonialism. The term settler colonialism' is relatively new.
Settler colonialism is a logic and structure of displacement by settlers, using colonial rule, over an environment for replacing it and its indigenous peoples with settlements and the society of the settlers.
Practically every example you will find is Europeans getting on a boat and killing natives. The most famous example is Manifest Destiny also known as America.
Time to plug one of my favorite podcasts: Stuff the British Stole
Needs a French version as well, they still allow active trade of stolen native objects.
In fairness it likely wouldn't be preserved otherwise. So you're welcome.
Sure, I'm gonna steal your TV because I'll take better care of it than you would.
You're welcome
White man’s burden
It was already thousands of years old. The British destroyed more artifacts than they "saved".
It was doing fine where it was.
except that not actually an other hand sorta thing at all, almost exclusively it was colonizers and their wars that destroyed so many of the artifacts that werent stolen, if they weren't delivery destroyed by colonizers to erase history and beyond even that the colonizers carelessness, greed, and racism which they brought to archeology led to much more than just artifacts being destroyed. There are so many historical sites whose histories we will never know at all because these clown excavated them to take "relics" and took little if any records where their precious artifacts were found and how, and that is if sites were not destroyed in their entirety out of sheer idiocy in the search of something else like how troy was. 18th, 19th, and even some 20th century so called archeology is a history of the destruction of history.
That's an interesting point. While I agree it's kinda shitty the UK nicked everyone's cool stuff and shoved it in 1 building. I'm willing to bet if we hadn't the number of pieces that would be lost to time would not be zero
This is just weird revisionist history. They moved in stole shit, colonized and murdered. The after the fact excuse of "we took it to preserve it" doesn't play mostly because their colonizer bullshit is largely the reason areas they stole shit from are destabilized.
Yeah I'm totally sure the Brits didn't break a single thing shipping artifacts to their big fancy museum. Let's ignore all the mummies Europeans ground up into powder and ingested as "medicine". Savagely eating dead humans with the same mouths that say brown people are too savage to take care of their own artifacts.
To be fair, they probably weren't able to take care of their own artifacts very well ... after having been invaded by the British.
Everything belongs to everyone because our ancestors were here first.
Isn't the idea of museums that you can learn about other cultures without going there?
Except the British museum where you do have to go there to experience their culture of theivery
Yup. It's not like they asked to have other people's stuff in their museums. They killed and conquered, then took anything that wasn't nailed down.
If it's on-loan, sure.
But this was straight up thievery.
Does Europe have any culture that isn't stolen or brutality forced on others?
Greece is in Europe.
So is Rome, but that's a terrible example after mentioning Greece.
Europe, yes. Britain, doubtful.
Pre-christian pagan cultures (Celts, Goths etc), but neo-nazis are also fans of those so you get to share with them.
