Moving on
Earlier today I heard on the radio a (hopefullly mistranslated) quote from Evo Morales, the new president of Bolivia. According to NPR, Morales ushered in a series of important land reforms by saying something to the effect of his “giving the land back to its original owners.”
If accurate, it’s an astoundingly stupid piece of demogoguery.
Apart from the difficulty of resurrecting men who died nearly half a millenium ago, there is the questionable political matter of a constitutional democracy offering to expropriate land so that it can return it to an Inca emperor.
I thought of Morales’ soundbite just now as I read this section of the essay Cosmopolitans in the The New York Review of Books:
The provocation he discusses is not the Metropolitan Museum’s recent travails with the Euphronios krater but the looting and destruction of the King of Asante’s palace by Sir Garnet Wolseley in the late nineteenth century. Appiah argues not that the British were anything other than wicked but rather that their wickedness does not mean they should now send everything back. Some of the loot should be returned; but it would be of more use to Ghana if Britain would lend antiquities from other parts of the world and allow Ghanaians to see what they otherwise would have to travel to the British Museum to see.
Update: Yup, that’s exactly what Morales said.