Before the British came [to India], there was no indigenous tradition of exploring or conserving antiquity. The wonderful Buddhist stupas of the Mauryan empire (circa 2nd century BC) were destroyed, abandoned and forgotten during the Hindu revival, and then many Hindu temples met a similar fate during Muslim invasions from the 12th century… The fact is that we have no idea what would have become of the world’s ‘looted’ antiquities if they hadn’t been preserved in Western collections. Would the treasures of Beijing’s Summer palace have survived Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Would the Elgin marbles have survived Turkish tour guides chopping off chunks to sell as souvenirs? Would ISIS have spared those Middle Eastern artefacts that survive in European museums?
Zareer Masani on preserving antiquity. One of these.
And that’s why western societies advance, plain and simple, because the current health and prosperity of their democracies is tied to the advancement and collection of knowledge and science; and pretty much all of it was paid for by the hard work that capitalism demands. Socialism and tribalism buries and burns facts and that’s how they control the ignorant masses. But you all knew that.
religious shrines in any future caliphate country certainly don’t survive
The Antiquity’s of a society include the good & the bad…The destruction of the Southern Confederate statues removes the History of that struggle from future generations… The Jewish mantra to never forget the Holocaust supports the desire to never repeat the errors of the past…The existing generation of delusional children, who consider themselves adults, don’t see the error of erasing the past.
The communists are hell bent on destroying all things they fear.
We have our own Taliban tearing down statues in Canada also. Statues of Edward Cornwallis have been taken down in eastern Canada, and there have been calls for the removal of statues of Canada’s first prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald around the country.
you do know that along with all the other stuff the left and primitive societies destroy white people and our culture is number one on the list for destruction. they think that if we can only get back to tribal pre-industrial societies without any modern inventions all will be well. they are all idiots.
The left firmly believes that before white men, the world was nothing but sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns. There was no hunger, no strife, no poverty, no hatred, no injustice. All women were goddesses and all men were like Adonis.
Eradicate white society, and paradise shall return, right?
How well do you recall the second commandment?
The existing generation of delusional children, who consider themselves adults, don’t see the error of erasing the past.
They don’t consider it an error; they consider it a fresh start, a renewal, a reset to Year Zero, or, in current parlance, a re-boot. Destroying the past always means re-inventing one’s country or society.
And one reason they keep doing it? They never accomplish anything of value in the first place, find out that what they started turned out to be a dead end, and figure that the world owes them a “do over”.
Look at what’s happening south of the border right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia
White people and their righteous cultures and norms are the saving grace of mankind. We are a gift to the otherwise uncivilized self-destructive “other” cultures and races. We rule the world based on our goodness, intellect, industry and benevolence. A question for any white person regardless of ideology, which of the other races would you rather be?
are you telling me that we white westerners are cultural saviours? who would a thunk we were the only people in the world who appreciate others art and cultures. of course that is no reason to be overrun by them.
Stuff white people like … Archaeology.
Why? Because we white folk, by the turn of the 20th Century had tamed nature by delivering abundant energy in the form of petroleum, and unleashed a technological revolution that moved our people from struggling for survival to thriving. We suddenly had the free time to pursue intellectual activities. Meanwhile, the rest of the planet were still scratching around in the dirt trying to stay alive. Many of those cultures are still scratching the dirt, trying not to be eaten by larger mammals … no time for antiquities.
https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/02/24/75-threatening-to-move-to-canada/
Most American Indian artifacts held by Indians are now dust. The very few artifacts preserved by whitey should be returned because they were obviously stolen? The artifacts were likely sold by the former owner to buy food or booze. Only Whitey saves old junk until it becomes valuable.
“The fact is that we have no idea what would have become of the world’s ‘looted’ antiquities if they hadn’t been preserved in Western collections.”
Yes we do.
“Would the treasures of Beijing’s Summer palace have survived Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Would the Elgin marbles have survived Turkish tour guides chopping off chunks to sell as souvenirs? Would ISIS have spared those Middle Eastern artefacts that survive in European museums?”
The answers, in order, are no, no, and no. The closest thing to “art” communism and Islam are capable of is building monuments to their Satanic ideologies.
According to contemporary accounts, it was actually laughable how easily the Turks parted with their antiquities, sure they were of value only to idolaters.
If, God forbid, Britain does fall utterly into Islamic hands, only those treasures of the British Museum that disappear into the private collection of Chinese oligarchs courtesy of looters have much chance of surviving. Muslims hate what they think of as idolatry, but they love having money they did nothing to earn.
Preservation is a double edged sword.
There are many artifacts which should not have been preserved and been thoroughly demolished and eradicated, many occult symbols which usually turn out to be their gods, writings and spiritual practices are not worthy of preservation.
Where evil is allowed to remain, usually through diety statues, carvings and mementos, curiosity will eventually turn into state sanctioned adherence to their supremacy and worship.
History has proved this over and over again.
Not that Progressives pay any attention to history anyways. At least not to history which has not been revised, edited and whitewashed to align with their worldview.
So about those pyramids, do they have to come down? The Sphinx? Those Buddha statues in Afghanistan? What about the Pantheon in Rome? The Parthenon?
We should not become too enthralled with ourselves though.
The preservation of antiquities is a very modern trend, even in European civilization – perhaps only a couple of centuries old in truth. And Europeans used to cheerfully loot archaeological sites themselves, or bought pieces of them from their owners (which is how the Elgin Marbles ended up in London, the owner of the time being the Sultan in Constantinople, notwithstanding modern Greek claims of patrimony).
Before the British came [to India], there was no indigenous tradition of exploring or conserving antiquity.
What would you expect with a muslim ruyled country. The British liberated the Indians from muslim rule, with the help of Indians of course.
I remember having a discussion with someone about the preservation of art, literature and antiquities. Someone snorted that the Vatican Museum had all manner of art and antiquities. I pointed out that had the Vatican not preserved these things, they would be lost.
Zoos, libraries and museums preserve things most people would either not bother with or would actively destroy. If leaving these items to be neglected or destroyed rather than saved by that “dreadful” Vatican (or any other museum) is better than perhaps we should return to living in caves.
Culture matters, is my point.
Honestly, I don’t know much about India, and I don’t know how much destruction conquering or newly ascendant tribes inflicted. I would not be surprised. But even if you accept that for sake of argument, that does not therefore extend to all Western looting of other cultures in the guise of “preserving” the artifacts.
For instance, China has a great tradition of preserving the past, perhaps too much so. Antiques were, and are, much valued in both government and private collections. You cannot ex post facto justify the looting in 1899 of the treasures in the palace gardens, which was indeed like a museum, because of subsequent events in 1966 and later. Besides, in spite of the Cultural Revolution, Mao was not stupid enough to destroy his own stuff. Most of the artifacts in the Palace Museum have been preserved. In fact, there is so much of it that only small portions are rotated out for public view at any one time. In addition, the Nationalists brought along as much artifacts as they could to Taiwan, and those are also exhibited on a rotational basis in Taiwan’s own Palace Museum. So that’s what has happened to the artifacts that have escaped foreign looting in 1899 and remained in the Palace.
I recall the justification for the Harvard disqualifications was that during interview the Asians were typically dull and listless. Something to be said for a bit of sports.
I can only imagine that if the “humanities” faculty there were merely dedicated to pure self-loathing instead of pure anti-white racism, an entire cadre of Asian matriculants could be disposed of via seppuku by the first quarter’s end. No more admissions problem.
Given this article’s perspective on Westerners’ valued contribution to historic preservation, and the endless list of horrific eras the salvaged works have skirted, I find it disconcerting to see the new Asian oligarchs’ ravenous efforts to both repatriate works to the East and capture the best in market of Western art. The guardians of cultures past may be changing as the sun sets on Western empires.
And, my dog, you should hear the tour guides in Greece complain about the Brits. I challenge them. What would have happened to the Elgin Marbles if the Krauts had confiscated them during WW2? The Germans burned everything upon departure. Think of Nero’s Barges in Italy. They know they’re full of sh!t. This professor at Machu Picchu even went so far as to theorize that Hiram Bingham absconded with a massive treasure trove while unearthing the ruins. No tip for you!
What would have happened to the Marbles?
They’d be in the private collection of George Soros or another private collector, or sitting in a storage container owned by a Swiss bank, waiting for a representative of the restored Thousand-Year Reich to come collect it, or, failing that, for the right time to sell it to the right Chinese oligarch, oncecerned are certain that its rightful owners will never try to reclaim it.
The whereabouts of untold numbers of works of European art looted by the Nazis, classical and modern, officially remain unknown to this day. Unofficially, the Swiss banks know where most of it is. They just don’t want to give it to the Israelis.
“untold numbers of works of European art looted by the Nazis”
How many works of art were looted by the glorious Red Army liberators who liberated Europe in 1945?
Oh, but you could never ask AC that question.
To him, the Ukrainians who fought the Soviets were the scum of the earth. Let alone maybe 10 million of them died under the Soviets before the Second World War. And the Finns who fought the Soviets to maintain independence, and avoided the fate that you mentioned, were all Nazis. All of them committed the unforgivable sin of having fought the glorious Russians.
AC is more like AR. To him, all whites are good except those who oppose the Russians. All socialists are bad except the Russians. And all people who are not lily white are bad. (He learned to say “Chinese oligarch” instead of just “Chinese”, for example. But to him there really isn’t any difference.) And he is deathly afraid of miscegenation, and adulterating the blood of lily whites.
I am sorry, but there is at least one concrete example that someone who considers himself conservative can be a racist.
“I am sorry, but there is at least one concrete example that someone who considers himself conservative can be a racist.”
That is true of both ends of the political spectrum; there are thinly disguised racists on both the left and the right.
The racists on the left are rampant, and hardly disguised at all. They openly call for mistreatment of whites because they are white. It doesn’t matter if a particular white family never had anyone who went to college, they still have “white privilege” and are part of the “patriarchy”, and therefore children of black doctors, say, must be given preference. OTOH, the racism of lowered expectation of white liberals is no less real, if slightly less obvious. Blacks with pride and initiative are gradually coming around to that realization.
My post was written in disappointment, because I thought that true conservatism, as an individualist philosophy, would preclude identity politics. We all know that Nazis and the KKK are creatures of the left, because that is where their political philosophies resonate. I am naive, perhaps, but I really did not expect to find such racism on this site, couched in conservative rhetoric.
Full disclosure, I am ethnic Chinese. My family fled Communist China to Hong Kong, where we awaited approval as refugee immigrants to the U.S. for seven years. I am by personality, political convictions, and loyalty completely American. I hate the Chicom with a passion, partly because it has destroyed the traditional Chinese culture on the mainland, and whatever virtues that culture imparted to the Chinese people. I have had personal dealings with those people, and know what they are like. I have great empathy with Canadians in that regard. But what you are seeing is Maoist Marxism, not traditional Chinese. And it is a great shame your liberal government allows the Chicom to run rampant.
However, I read and write Chinese, and have a good knowledge of Chinese history and literature. So I try to apply that knowledge here, not as a Chinese, but someone well acquainted with the Chinese culture. This is in contrast to “A Canadian”, who I take is ethnically Russian, and defends everything Russian, in spite of the fact that for nearly a century it had a Communist dictatorship, (and even now has not so covert Communist influences in its government) and has done great evil in the world under it.