Looting of museums, banks, shops, factories--South Central LA writ large

[R. A. Hettinga]

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At 4:57 PM -0700 4/12/03, Tim May bestirred himself from that
Ultimate Barcolounger In The Sky and tapped, furiously, into his lap:

>Sometimes you people are so naive you take my breath away.

Would that it were truly so. Meanwhile, I'll settle for the odd
occasion that his killfile bites him in the ass. :-).  

In other words, I think my original post said it clearly enough, but
he didn't see that, I expect. Or this, for which I also laugh in his
general direction...

>Some small fraction of broken chairs and used tires are dropped off
>at  mosques and Hettinga proclaims it as a triumph of ideology.

No. I just said that the imams are getting their stuff back from
their mosque because the Shiites, not under the thrall of the
Baathist state like the Sunnis are, decided immediately to take
matters into their own hands and form armed vigilante mobs. Creating
their own force structures from scratch.

I said nothing about the museums, but, now that you mention it...

>As for the 170,000 or so pieces from the main museum, well, the 
>Sumerian pottery makes good gravel for roads. And at least the gold
>can  be melted down.

Serves Saddam right for not surrendering to save the antiquities from
looters, right? :-). (A good retort to the Odd Liberal when she tries
to bean you in head with the proverbial cuneiform bolla about how
"we" should stop the looting...)

In the meantime, I expect that collectors will have a field day with
all the liberated stuff from the museum, and, frankly, like Nazi and
Soviet "plundered" art, it will all come back, sooner or later, to
some new, improved UrWorld museum someday. Here's hoping, by then,
it's a private enterprise. One can hope, anyway. I mean, the Baghdad
Museum was a private enterprise, a wholly owned subsidiary of Saddam,
Inc., right?

Cheers,
RAH


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-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'