A fantastic piece – If we return Nazi-looted art, the same goes
for empire-looted by Erin Thompson.
CUNY professor Erin Thompson wonders:
“Should art looted
by the Nazis be returned to the families of its original owners? Of course.
Should the Elgin Marbles be returned to the Greeks? Some say yes, but many say
no. What about the Benin Bronzes? Europeans took – by force – thousands of
these stunning bronze sculptures from what is now Nigeria. They are now in the
British Museum, the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, and other European
institutions to whom they were sold to offset the expenses of ‘pacifying’ Africans.
Aboriginal Australians and Native Americans are also calling in vain for the
return of sacred artefacts now in European possession.
The farther we get
from Western Europe, the less morally compelling we seem to find the claims of
those whose art Europeans looted. Crimes committed against Western Europeans,
including victims of the Nazis, merit restitution and correction whenever
possible. The Greeks have a certain standing through the legacy of classical
society, but they are geographically and economically on the periphery of
Europe. Their claims garner less consensus. Crimes committed against Africans,
Asians and indigenous peoples are clearly different. Outside of small activist
circles, their claims find very little support. Why?”
--
The glorification of Winston Churchill also
smacks of extraordinary double standards. Churchill’s role in the Bengal Famine of
1943-44 and his blatant and overt racism towards Asians is often ignored:
Remembering
India’s forgotten holocaust: British policies killed nearly 4
million Indians in the 1943-44 Bengal Famine by RAKESH KRISHNAN SIMHA
“The Bengal Famine
of 1943-44 must rank as the greatest disaster in the subcontinent in the 20th
century. Nearly 4 million Indians died because of an artificial famine created
by the British government, and yet it gets little more than a passing mention
in Indian history books.
What is remarkable
about the scale of the disaster is its time span. World War II was at its peak
and the Germans were rampaging across Europe, targeting Jews, Slavs and the
Roma for extermination. It took Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts 12 years to
round up and murder 6 million Jews, but their Teutonic cousins, the British,
managed to kill almost 4 million Indians in just over a year, with Prime
Minister Winston Churchill cheering from the sidelines.
Australian
biochemist Dr Gideon Polya has called the Bengal Famine a “manmade holocaust”
because Churchill’s policies were directly responsible for the disaster. Bengal
had a bountiful harvest in 1942, but the British started diverting vast
quantities of food grain from India to Britain, contributing to a massive food
shortage in the areas comprising present-day West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and
Bangladesh.”