The Times and British Museum debate: Who owns the past? 

David Olusoga is a huge critic of the British empire but accepted an OBE. I don't get it.

Thank God for RU-vid: a platform full of riches.

What about the commercial aspect? Doesn’t Greece really want the Marbles in order to boost visits to their museums? And aren’t many artworks hidden away in tycoons’ / tyrants’ bank vaults, not available to anyone else to see? Why aren’t we concerned about that?

A Very good debate. Informative, especially by Mary Beard. I would say a trustee of history not just The British Museum.

Mary Beard is the voice of reason.

Osborne doesn't wear a tie because he's still stuck in that look...he thinks it says something....he's always been considered a bit creepy

It's not about performance and what you do with it. It's about what you did to acquire it.

Many thanks for the brilliant discussion, I, as an ordinary lover of museums, really enjoyed it. Perhaps there should have been some enlargement of the topic, by looking at other good examples for showing who oowns the past. The Vermeer exhibition comes to my mind, which is/unfortunately was, a nice example of universal ownership. I think museums of our times should step out of the box of being an institution, and be like a caleidoscope, showing one aspect today, and displaying another the next day.

These are the people Orwell warned us about I recommend readers turn to the 1997 “Who Owns the Past?” by Andrew Selkirk. Since disowned by the Adam Smith Society - but still on the web. That paper called for an urgent defense of popular independent amateur influence over the understanding of the past. No such defense was mounted, the battle was lost. The 250 year old collaboration between the British Museum and independent enthusiasts ended in 2014, the culprits being elitists like Colin Renfrew, and politicos like Bonnie Greer. We see the dire out turn here. A bunch of talking heads - making a political football of the past, kicked about to suit their personal career aspirations. Notice Beard openly owning the dogma that “nobody can imagine the world without it being absolutely fundamentally ideological”. Really? That is the age old foundation stone of all Euro-elitist propaganda - from Plato and Hegel to Foucault. If Britain has anything culturally to offer the world it is in rejecting such politically driven brain-washing. From Pelagius and Wycliffe to Francis Bacon and Bertrand Russell. :- (

life is only 60years old, we make our history, past present and future, you've only begun your journey, be wise and tread the right path! 21/07/24: sixty on the seventeenth of August '24, the lazy Sun 🌞 came to us in 1964 for the first time and is here for ever after as you'll find yourselves since birth, enjoy your life! love Old Father John ❤

Those who own the past are those whom are willing and able to preserve the past with honor and without prejudice. Ownership as responsibility to and on behalf of humanity. Sadly, at times of crisis or war, it takes an oligarch or an oligarchy to preserve and protect some of our finest acheivements.

Rory Stewart and his weird sword fetish....

Owns!

Should have had the Greek PM on the panel.