Professor Paul Cartledge has written the text that will be used for a pamphlet and distributed under the auspices of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM). The puropose of this publication is twofold: to set out briefly, in the light of current and likely future political, cultural and environmental circumstances, the arguments FOR reunification of those Marbles taken from the Parthenon back to Greece to the purpose-built Acropolis Museum of Athens, and AGAINST the supposed arguments advanced, mainly by the Museum’s Trustees, in favour of their retention and display in the British Museum (BM), where they have been held since 1817.
The stakes are high, both rationally and emotionally. When the well-known US actor George Clooney publicly declared his support for Reunification, he was accused – by a Classically educated politician no less, now the British Prime Minister – of advocating something equivalent to Adolf Hitler’s despoliation of the cultural treasures of occupied European countries. For someone who admits to Turkish blood in his veins, the irony of such a comment is not lost.
Just as Britain’s ambassador to Ottoman Turkey’s occupied land, Lord Elgin, was doing his worst on the Acropolis, other colonial powers were competitively looting giant obelisks from Ottoman Egypt and shipping them to Paris and New York as well as London. In fact, it was mainly because Britain was France’s enemy and France was Turkey’s, that the Ottoman Sultanate looked at all kindly upon Elgin, based not on mutual respect but on the hardnosed realist principle ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’.
What is in fact required now is not hardnosed instrumentalism but rather a supreme generosity of internationalist spirit and moral courage. BCRPM’s campaign – the nature and origins of which are set out in the text of the document - has as a result recently acquired a further wave of international support from various widespread anti-colonialist movements for the repatriation of cultural treasures that for centuries have been variously looted or misappropriated, officially or unofficially, by colonial powers and their merchant venturers either for purely personal gratification or as an instrument of national self-advancement or both together.
To read the text, kindly follow the link here.
Professor Paul Cartledge, Vice-Chair of BCRPM and author of this document
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