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>> Thief is a thief ... unless they are a Lord. So he wasnt a thief. The laws of the time ebbed and flowed based on the social standing of the alleged perpetra
by sandworm101 3y ago
>> Thief is a thief ... unless they are a Lord.
So he wasnt a thief. The laws of the time ebbed and flowed based on the social standing of the alleged perpetrators. That was the then accepted rule. It is less true today but not absolutely. Who are we to ignore the actions of a past select committee? Are we to revisit every not-guilty decisison on the basis that a modern investigation would have acted differently? By way of example, women were in the past treated very badly. Revisiting every historic legal determination that stripped a woman of her propery would render all modern property rights suspect.
- TomWhitwell 3y agoThere are contemporary first person reports from the people who collected/stole the artefacts in museums. Michael Leiris collected items - some of them ritual items made from coagulated blood - that are still on display in the Musée Quay Branly in Paris. His description from 1931 seems honest, hair-raising and hardly morally ambiguous… https://www.modernghana.com/amp/news/800468/who-is-afraid-of-phantom-africa.html https://www.modernghana.com/amp/news/800468/who-is-afraid-of...
- arp242 3y agoTons of contemporaries of Lord Elgin called him a thief; Lord Byron being the most famous. And the result of trails are not objective truth. There's been tons of them where the outcome was considered unjust by any standard; there's even terms for this: "kangaroo court", "mismarriage of justice", "show trial", etc. And whether Elgin was or wasn't a "thief" is actually not very important; what is important is that in any modern reasonable context it would be considered theft and that it's actually not even a hard thing to correct this historical mistake.