Okay - you're right - I overstated the case, I apologise, and I agree with a lot of your comments about preservation, etc. However, it's not clear to me that the Elgin marbles are now available to all - they're available to anyone who is in or goes to Britain. That may or may not be more people than if they had been left in Greece, but it is certainly a different and not necessarily more deserving group of people.
> Btw,
> if the Brits
> had not taken and kept the Elgin Marbles, they would have
> melted from the
> pollution, like the rest of the Parthenon. So while insensitive and
> imperialist, it was a good thing that they did it.
All for the greater good, eh? I guess that argument could be used to defend a lot of insensitive and imperialist actions.
Anyway, I wasn't really meaning to say anything in particular about the Elgin Marbles, and I probably shouldn't have mentioned them - it had just struck me after reading a few of the reports about the Taliban's recent actions that the general tone seemed to be that they were extreme and unheard of. And I thought that maybe the destruction of religious and cultural artifacts is not that unheard of, and I was trying to think of vaguely similar situations. I agree the case of the Elgin marbles doesn't fit the bill, though at the time that they were being chopped up and carted off there was probably the same sort of disregard for other people going on, whoever good the intentions. By the way, I want to make clear that I am not in any way attempting to defend the Taliban or suggest that their actions shouldn't be condemned - nor am I trying to get into some sort of cultural relativism where their actions seem bad to us but aren't really, or anything along those lines. And now I'll shut up.
David.