For one brief
moment, when I saw the headline (“Parthenon marbles should return to Athens,
says Lord Frost”) on this
story, it seemed as though Lord Frost might actually have said something with
which I could agree. It was not a thought which lasted long, though. It turns
out that any return of the marbles to Greece is so heavily caveated that the
Greek government could never agree to it, other than as a ruse to gain possession (even without recognition of ownership) and then breach the terms of any agreement reached. Maybe not: not all governments are as venal and dishonest as that of the UK. It is dependent on the Greek
government agreeing firstly to a wider Anglo-Greek cultural partnership (the
terms of which Frost, presumably, wants to dictate) and an agreement “…to
definitively set aside for good the rights and wrongs of the individual
acquisition”. Oh, and giving back one load of looted treasure cannot be
taken as any sort of precedent in relation to other treasures looted by the
British Empire. Whether the use of the term ‘Anglo’ is deliberate, careless or
just an indication that he doesn’t know the difference between English and
British is a matter of conjecture, although I tend to the view that it’s probably the
last of those.
A starting point
which initially looked like an admission of the need for change ends up being
just another example of English exceptionalism, under which ‘England’ dictates
to lesser nations the terms and conditions of regaining access to their own
cultural heritage. Or, to put it another way, the state which committed the original crime attempts to look generous, and expects some credit for so doing. Why anyone thought it newsworthy is beyond me.
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1 comment:
It's newsworthy because that AngloBrit supremacist Frost said it and UK MSM will report any old fudge that comes out of his gob.
Real news is the stuff that gets left out, like who's reporting what the real rate of inflation might be or how many more people have died as a result of the Covid crisis, not necessarily because of Covid but due to the cack handed diversion of resources and the sheer inability to look further than the next step. Or even speculate beyond the next step.
The conduct and reporting of the Covid enquiry is another prize example of sly deflection. Easy enough to dwell on superficial aspects of conduct and the smutty bits but we are still no wiser as to what really went on, to what extent did Boris or others see it as a chance to thin out certain segments of the population. There are too many arch manipulators in among that lot and their allies in the media. Criticism is superficial. A willingness to dig deeper seems to have drained away and we are left a diet of thinned out sauce with very little else in it.
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