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The Koh-i-Noor diamond, and why the British won’t give it back (2017)
- known 4y ago
- exolymph 4y agoVae victis, and to the victor go the spoils. (This is not an endorsement.) > "When the powerful take things from the less powerful, the powerless don't have much to do except curse the powerful," Kurin says. Indeed.
- anigbrowl 4y agoAlso, any efforts by the powerless to redress the balance are generally labeled terrorism.
- NotYourLawyer 4y agoNo, not really. Just those efforts that aim to terrorize.
- ceejayoz 4y agoNo; attacks on US service members and bases in war zones are often called terrorism. The term has absolutely become overly broad.
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago[citation needed]
- ceejayoz 4y agoSure; as an example, the attack on the USS Cole. Clear military target, widely described as a terrorist attack, including by the FBI (https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/uss-cole-bombing https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/uss-cole-bombing).
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago>war zones Were we at war with Yemen when this happened?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ceejayoz 4y agoWe weren’t at war with the Japanese on December 7, 1941. Still wasn’t a terrorist attack. We can, and should, make a significant distinction between attacks on civilians and attacks on military targets.
- NotYourLawyer 4y agoI think the main distinction is who’s doing the attacking. If it’s a state-level attack, then it’s an act of war. If it’s just a random group of dudes, it’s terrorism. It doesn’t become not terrorism just because the target is military in nature.
- deleted 4y ago
- andybak 4y agoIdeally yes, but we all know the word has expanded into a political battering ram, far beyond it's original meaning.
- LunaSea 4y agoNot really
- WitCanStain 4y agoHard disagree. Indiscriminately killing civilians is labelled terrorism, and rightly so.
- anigbrowl 4y agoYes, but so are an awful lot of other things. Animal rights and environmental activists have been frequently tagged with that term, even when engaged in nonviolent protest. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=dlr https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoOr 'fist bumps': https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/terrorist_fist_jab https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/terrorist_fist_jab
- r3trohack3r 4y agoThere is a difference between a news anchor saying “terrorist” and the president of the United States saying “terrorist.” When a news anchor says it, it’s a talking point. When Obama said it, a U.S. citizen was assassinated without trial. Whenever you see the executive branch use the phrase “terrorist” to describe an American citizen you should worry. When news anchors used it to describe protests it was a talking point. When Trump used it to describe protestors, that was cause for concern. When news outlets used the word to describe the Jan 6th riots, it was a talking point. When Biden used it for the Jan 6 riots, that was cause for concern. The executive branch assassinates terrorists. News anchors do not.
- mr_toad 4y ago> Hard disagree. Indiscriminately killing civilians is labelled terrorism, and rightly so. For a political cause, or at least a cause. Otherwise it’s just mass murder.
- rr888 4y agoWould be helpful if you had a solid example.
- llanowarelves 4y agoWhether someone is a categorized as that or a freedom-fighter largely depends what side you are on during, and who wins after (and gets to write the books). Once you win, everything you did to win gets written down as righteous and the other side vilified (they forced you to do it). It doesn't take much imagination to guess what the US founding fathers would be called if they lost, by Britain.
- hackeraccount 4y ago
- WJW 4y agoClearly Bobby was not much of a victor in this case. Related to TFA: if the Indians want their diamond back, let them come and get it. It's pretty clear why they don't, and who Tony and Bobby are in this particular version of the story.
- mberning 4y agoThey stole it fair and square. If somebody is mad about it they should steal it back.
- zardo 4y agoStealing it is just theft. To make it "legitimate" you have to claim it by conquest.
- sct202 4y agoYou also would have had to loot it before looting and pillaging became a war crime. If it's looted now and found, it usually goes back to the last owner or country of origin if it was from an archeological site.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoAccording to the article, they need to wait for a young king, kidnap his mother and use that leverage to force him to hand it over along with a 'legal' document saying they own it.
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- alephnerd 4y agoNot a fan of the British crown (why are they exempt from taxes during record high inflation) but who should they return the diamond to - Afghanistan (it was the Durranis that looted it from Nader Shah after he looted it from the Mughals), India (Maharaja Ranjit Singh took it as tribute from Shah Shuja after conquering Kashmir from the Durranis), or Pakistan (the Sikh Empire capital was Lahore and the Durrani Empire capital was Peshawar until the last Sikh-Afghan War, thus any claim India or Afghanistan has on either Empire's legacy is also owned by Pakistan, even inspite of Partition or the Durrand Line). On top of that, if it goes to India - should it be owned by the Central/Federal government, the Punjab government (the state that is the core of the former Sikh Empire), Jammu Kashmir's Government (because of Shah Shuja and Raja Gulab Singh), Delhi Government (the Mughal capital), or Andhra Pradesh Government (the mine is located there). And is it worth putting a logjam into the Free Trade Agreement India and the UK are currently negotating? If they give it to Pakistan, should it go to the Pakistan Federal Government, Punjab Government (the state that is the core of the former Sikh Empire), AJK Government (because of Shah Shuja and Raja Gulab Singh), or Khyber Pakhtunkwa Government (the state that is the core of the former Sikh Empire and former Durrani Empire)? Is it worth putting British Humanitarian and Military Aid at risk? If they give it to Afghanistan, is it to the Taliban led government, or the government in exile? Is it worth putting British Aid and potential recognition at risk? It's a conundrum and an complicated legal question that honestly isn't worth it for any of the countries, all of whom have bigger issues to deal with, also it can be argued that the Sikh Empire handed it to the UK fairly.
- pippy 4y agoAlso would the world be a better place if they gave it back to some third party, so it can be sold to a private collection and be locked in a vault somewhere? Where it is now has a lot of historical and cultural significance. It is currently being admired publicly by thousands of people, sitting on the coffin of Queen Elisabeth.
- blibble 4y agothe Imperial State Crown is the one sitting on HMQs coffin and has the Cullinan II diamond (among many others) the one in the article (containg the Koh-I-Noor) is the Queen Mother's Crown
- qlm 4y ago“And just as with ethnology, which plays at extricating itself from its object to better secure itself in its pure form, demuseumification is nothing but another spiral in artificiality. Witness the cloister of Saint-Michel de Cuxa, which one will repatriate at great cost from the Cloisters in New York to reinstall it in "its original site." And everyone is supposed to applaud this restitution (as they did "the experimental campaign to take back the sidewalks" on the Champs Elysees!). Well, if the exportation of the cornices was in effect an arbitrary act, if the Cloisters in New York are an artificial mosaic of all cultures (following a logic of the capitalist centralization of value), their reimportation to the original site is even more artificial: it is a total simulacrum that links up with "reality" through a complete circumvolution. The cloister should have stayed in New York in its simulated environment, which at least fooled no one. Repatriating it is nothing but a supplementary subterfuge, acting as if nothing had happened and indulging in retrospective hallucination.” Baudrillard - Simulacra And Simulation
- abeppu 4y agoI don't think this repatriation actually happened. Is that because someone actually listened to Baudrillard? In any case, complaining about an event which didn't happen as "indulging in retrospective hallucination" adds another layer. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/470314 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/470314
- abeppu 4y agoJames Acaster does a great job highlighting the absurdity of the British refusing to repatriate stuff taken from the empire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x73PkUvArJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x73PkUvArJY
- jfabre 4y agoIt's only absurd if you think that countries ought to behave like people in a society. All the laws and rules of societies serve one purpose, to keep themselves stable. The abstraction of Justice doesn't apply outside of society, unfortunately.
- abeppu 4y agoLet's not mistake laws for ethics. At bottom, there are people. A group of them will sometimes call themselves a government. The ethical understanding of the actions undertaken by people ("ought to behave") doesn't need to change based on whether they claim to be a government or not, or claim to be operating within the law. Trail of Tears? Japanese American internment? Abu Ghraib? Guantanamo Bay detention camp? The fact that these were actions of a country does not stop us from saying that they were wrong, and yes, absurd given the self-righteous pomposity of my and other western governments who pretend to be special defenders of liberty.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoThe actions countries take are beyond ethics? How exactly does a country take an action?
- smcl 4y agoBrit (well Scot) here. Can only say: yes and it's insane
- concordDance 4y agoThe idea of talking about the ridiculous modern abstraction of the state and claiming it has moral relevance is far more absurd.
- pacetherace 4y ago[flagged]
- 10u152 4y agoYes I’m sure there were never genocides and famines before the British got there…
- kaesar14 4y agoNot on the scale as afterwards, no.
- karencarits 4y agoAre you sure? I couldn't find any good sources on British genocide, but Wikipedia has a list of massacres in India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_India In sum, the number of casualties from Colonial India is orders of magnitude lower than both pre-colonial and independent India
- rr888 4y agoThe problem with ancient history as that you never really knew what happened and exactly how many people died. Europeans certainly weren't the first empire to lay claim to India. Warfare, invasions and famine are as old as human history. India is one of the oldest civilised parts of the world so has had its fair share of all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_India
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- markdown 4y agoRelevant: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/kohinoor-diamond-government-uk-supreme-court-2761150/ https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/koh...
- electriclove 4y ago“gift”
- irrational 4y agoSo, it legally was not taken forcibly or stolen, but we want it back anyway?
- markdown 4y agoI believe the argument was that it was gifted under duress.
- irrational 4y agoThen why did they say very recently that it was not taken or stolen? They aren’t under duress anymore. They could just have easily said that it was gifted under duress and asked for it back.
- morbidious 4y ago"gifted under duress" implies that it was taken forcibly
- markdown 4y agoIt's a nation of over a billion people. The "they" you speak of doesn't speak for everyone.
- betwixthewires 4y agoWhich "they" asked for it back? Do they speak for everyone in doing so?
- castrodd 4y agoSays what I want to say: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x73PkUvArJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x73PkUvArJY
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- emilsedgh 4y agoBtw, for anyone interested, `Koh-I-Noor` means `Mountain of Light`.
- ectopod 4y agoThe Smithsonian ignoring the elephant in the room: "The United States of America, and Why the Americans Won't Give It Back"
- kohinooridea 4y ago
- morbidious 4y agoIndia has a higher GDP than UK, and a larger military power than UK, so I wouldn't say UK is as capable of adequately protecting it as India.
- poulpy123 4y agoyeah but nobody wants to invade UK because of the british food so it's safer ther
- morbidious 4y agoYour national dish is absolutely delicious
- curiousgal 4y ago> available for the entire world to see. Provided they can afford to travel there and, you know, get a tourist visa. This is the real world after all.
- patchtopic 4y agowhat about returning the Anglo Saxon Kingdom stolen by violence in 1066 and returning to Normandy and the Channel Islands while they are at it?
- Thrymr 4y agoThen the Celts kick them out of Gaul and send them back to Scandinavia where they came from.
- DivineBicycle 4y agoActually the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes came from Germany (IIRC). The Danes came from Scandinavia.
- danans 4y agoMaybe the final curse of the Koh-i-noor is that it is a constant reminder to its possessor that they are the inheritor of crimes upon crimes, stretching back centuries. Of course, everyone's life is built on millennia of injustices, but for a family to own such a basic symbol of this ... let them keep it, and own the curse it carries.
- sonofhans 4y agoWhat a thought! There's another comment here about how Victoria felt about wearing it.
- karencarits 4y agoA related question I sometimes wonder: wouldn't it be fair to return the cathedrals and the property of monasteries that were "stolen" during the reformation back to the Catholic church?
- onetimeusename 4y agoI think it's a interesting question and I suspect the answer is that this isn't about repatriation of artifacts, it's more about politics. There was a lot of art taken during the Napoleonic Wars from the Catholic Church too. Napoleon took art from other European countries too but the Italian states were the least able to repatriate anything at the time. A lot of art that was looted still sits in the Louvre. I kind of wonder if repatriation only matters when the artifact came from non western countries to western ones. What happens, when, for example, a church in Italy is the beneficiary let alone a European country? Does that make it less urgent? I haven't seen any calls for repatriations in this sense that make headlines.
- vgel 4y ago> I kind of wonder if repatriation only matters when the artifact came from non western countries to western ones. No. There's also been a lot of noise over the Elgin Marbles (stolen from Greece, mentioned in the article). The Koh-i-Noor has just been in the news lately because of the death of the queen and it being part of the crown jewels.
- onetimeusename 4y agoThat effort and debate of repatriation of the Elgin Marbles has been going on for centuries and I think it's debatable if Greece (or the Ottomon Empire) is even part of the western nations. So, kindly, I disagree that there is any urgency or that repatriation of that artefact is even strictly non political. However, there is a movement to repatriate items taken from non-western nations during colonial times which many museums are dealing with presently[1] although this article is specific to the British Museum. The Louvre deals with similar requests, which is where the art looted by Napoleon sits. I don't think I have ever seen a call in headlines to return works to churches or other European countries. There isn't any urgency to do that. So I believe the reason for this imbalance is just that it's political and not really about the items themselves. [1]:https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/18/uk-museums-face-pressure-to-repatriate-foreign-items https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/18/uk-museums-f...
- nfca 4y agoWhat about the place of the earliest known owners?
- baryphonic 4y ago> “If you ask anybody what should happen to Jewish art stolen by the Nazis, everyone would say of course they’ve got to be given back to their owners,” Dalrymple says. “And yet we’ve come to not say the same thing about Indian loot taken hundreds of years earlier, also at the point of a gun. What is the moral distinction between stuff taken by force in colonial times?” I'm not sure a state conquering another state and seizing the conquered artifacts is comparable to a state systematically imprisoning & murdering millions of civilians and seizing their valuable possessions. After all, as others have pointed out, which state should it return to: Pakistan, Afghanistan or India? If the British "looted" it, should we also consider Afghanistan or Pakistan to have "looted" it first?
- nikolay 4y agoI am so tired of people romanticizing the monarchy, especially one of the bloodiest colonizers on this planet - the British monarchy! The year is 2022! Can't we finally grow up and stop telling girls stories about princes on white horses and stop talking about monarchs like they are some kinds of saviors!? Instead of wasting billions less than 20 years from now to wipe our Charles' face and name, end this now and turn them into a British Disneyland!
- ceejayoz 4y ago> turn them into a British Disneyland! That's been the case already for decades. The Royals are largely a revenue-generating tourist attraction.
- nikolay 4y agoStill not there yet!
- billyruffian 4y agoI see you are not British nor, according to your bio, do you live in Britain. I'm not sure how 'our' applies to you.
- SanjayMehta 4y agoThey can keep the stupid rock provided they return the $45 trillion they stole from India over 200 years. https://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/british-took-45-trillion-out-of-india-in-200-years-s-jaishankar/1723675/ https://www.financialexpress.com/india-news/british-took-45-...
- unknownus3r 4y agosucks to lose but winners do what they want
- bergenty 4y agoSays the winner.
- DuskStar 4y agoIIRC that is an absolutely bullshit number based on taking what the Brits actually did steal, giving it the most favorable conversion to USD, and then applying a few hundred years of compounding interest. 7% APR for 300 years is a 650,000,000x return.
- kamaal 4y ago>>and then applying a few hundred years of compounding interest. Yeah that is unfortunately how money works. Why do you think countries like USA are so rich, they've been making investments for a few centuries now. Robbers and looter should pay for opportunity costs, this is how it should work.
- concordDance 4y agoPeople can rob and loot. A notion of "country" that conflates things separated by hundreds of years is a polite fiction at best.
- DuskStar 4y agoThe problem with this logic is it means that the largest ever theft was some hunter-gatherer stealing a spear 100,000 years ago. That's worth almost 10^3000 dollars now, you know! At some distance in time, returns on capital are no longer adequately approximated by "x%APR". I think this distance in time is at most around 150 years, and even then only in the USA. In most of the world, it's far less than that.
- sfg 4y agoIdeally, I'd rotate it between the countries that have a historical tie. I think that is India, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and the U.K.. That would allow all the communities with a connection to share in the benefit.
- Maursault 4y agoNow that near exact replica diamonds of this weight and hardness and brilliance can be made in a lab, make as many as they need. Problem solved.
- patchtopic 4y agowith modern synthetic diamond processes, couldn't enough Koh-O-Noor Diamonds be produced to keep everyone happy?
- sangnoir 4y agoAs the article notes: it became a symbol of potency an empire. A lab-made diamond just doesn't have enough blood on it to mean anything: it'd be a giant synthetic rock.
- kamaal 4y agoThe jewellery value of it comes exactly from what you wrote. Like you could buy a $15 Casio wrist watch and it will tell you time just fine, but if you buy a Rolex you aren't exactly paying for time keeping. The value here is not time or time keeping, it is meant to show the wages and expenses of people/resources taken to produce it up the chain. It took X slaves to produce this.
- mindaslab 4y agoI wish we are powerful enough to sack U.K and take it back.
- bergenty 4y agoIndia definitely is, just not with big daddy US around.
- divbzero 4y ago> “The transition is startling when the diamond becomes a symbol of potency rather than beauty. It becomes this gemstone like the ring in Lord of the Rings, one ring to rule them all.” A Silmaril would be a better analogy.
- divbzero 4y agoWikipedia’s account of Koh-i-Noor’s history contains this curious tidbit not mentioned in OP. Although Victoria wore it often, she became uneasy about the way in which the diamond had been acquired. In a letter to her eldest daughter, Victoria, Princess Royal, she wrote in the 1870s: "No one feels more strongly than I do about India or how much I opposed our taking those countries and I think no more will be taken, for it is very wrong and no advantage to us. You know also how I dislike wearing the Koh-i-Noor". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koh-i-Noor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koh-i-Noor
- potamic 4y agoThis is the real reason the British would want to give it back to India. Whether it belongs to India is highly contestable. But the British holding on to it will continue to remind them of their dark days, the manner in which they acquired this and the consequences they created around the world. The Koh-i-Noor today, is the perfect symbol of colonial exploitation. Like an Elder Wand, it induces a lust for possession and attracts undue attention to itself. It has never turned out good for any of its owners.
- hamandcheese 4y ago“Oh no, those colonial bastards looted my diamond (which my ancestors acquired from looting)!”
- kkarimi 4y agoMeanwhile this one has less noise since it wasn’t taken by the British and no one is asking for it back AFAIK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daria-i-Noor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daria-i-Noor
- betwixthewires 4y agoNo one is asking for it back because Iran would laugh them out of the room, as anyone should. None of this nonsense should be taken seriously. We are past conquest for the most part, thankfully. But conquest was the way of the world at one time. When the dust settles things stand as they stand, that's all there is to it.
- atulatul 4y agoDisclaimer: haven't read the parent article. Apologies if the video below is repeat/ mis-information. But it is interesting. Kohinoor: William Dalrymple https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJgZf9c6MTQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJgZf9c6MTQ Kohinoor: Release of the book followed by a discussion featuring William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, in conversation with Sagarika Ghose
- andybak 4y agoOm a similar way to the way you didn't read the article, I haven't watched the video. Any chance of a brief summary of the point it's making?
- SergeAx 4y agoI really hope that science will be able to produce synthetic diamonds of any size, shape, form, and color soon, so people stop fancying them that much. In the end, they are just crystals with funny optical effects, their place is in the physics lessons in school and maybe in museums.
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- mithusingh32 4y agoMy parents and I were just talking about this. We're all in agreement that the moment that diamond goes back to India (or any country in SEA), it will "disappear" and never seen again.
- adave 4y agoPlease keep it safe where it is as all it will cause is more bloodshed and infighting. It's just a freaking diamond and has never led to anything good. Maybe its the one cursing the Crown who knows what magic it creates.