[Marxism] Hitchens apologizes for Imperialist Plunder of Artifacts

[Tom Cod <tcod@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Christopher Hitchens was in his usually stellar form as a neo-liberal 
philistine 
the other day on CSPAN apologizing for the the imperialist plunder of 
archeological
artifacts from Egypt and the Third World with barely disguised colonialist and 
racist 
arguments together with this clown who runs the Chicago Museum of Art, pillage 
that 
include the grossest vandalism like cutting out the heads of pharoahs from 
frescoes 
and shipping them to London.  Even the moderator was a little shocked, 
referring to 
these arguments as "self-serving" and apparently racist, the latter accusation 
being adamantly denied by Hitchens who claimed that in fact the Third World
countries' claims of sovereignty over these objects are "racist" to the extent 
that 
they rely on some national affinity with the long lost culture at issue.  These 
pharasaical
and basically criminal claims also include:

2. Europeans are more cultured and appreciative of these objects and thus can 
preserve them 
better whereas these locals are basically uncultured and bigoted riff raff who 
could care less about them.

3.  On the basis of the above, there is no moral argument in favor of the 
colonized people's claim.

4.  There is no legal claim because no laws existed prohibiting these taking at 
the time.

5.  Since there is no political continuity between the ancient regimes and the 
ones existing today
and various demographic changes have occurred since ancient times in that area, 
the claims 
of these countries and their regimes are obviously without merit.

Of course these arguments completly ignore the issue of sovereignty.  Moreover, 
genocide was no law against 
genocide until 1945.  One would think that Hitchens as a British chauvinist 
would be familiar with the traditions of 
the English common law where a famous case from the early 18th Century was as 
follows:

  An apprentice finds a ring with valuable jewels on the street and takes it 
into a master jeweler for an 
appraisal, the latter takes it into his shop in the back and returns it to the 
kid with the stones removed and
tells him to take a hike when he protests.  In court jeweler admits 
appropriating the gems but states that 
apprentice is an uncultured illiterate with no class who could neither 
appreciate or properly safeguard the same and
who had a dubious nexus with the original owner.  Held: jeweler committed theft 
from apprentice.

Thus, obviously while modern Egypt and it present regime are imperfect and have 
a distant nexus with Pharonic
times, they are its successors in interest in sovereingty over that area whose 
nexus with objects found therein is much closer than that of the imperialist 
robbers and hypocrites who stole them.

The grossest example of this pillage I saw on TV is a story where this railroad 
magnate in Maine circa 1900 came across a vein of thousands upon thousands of 
fossilized mummies of petty nobles and common folk rich enough to afford the 
mummification and burial that they received. He actually bought these for 
pennies each and used the corpses as fuel for his locomotives while selling the 
linen wrappings to a factory 
that made butcher and deli paper.  The railroad engineers complained the stiffs 
were poor fuel while workers in the paper factory began dying from an ancient 
plague carried by the linens, some said the work of the ancient gods in 
response to this outrage or maybe just "karma".



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