BlogBack: Christian Kleinbub Takes Cuno's Side on Cultural Property

I found your reactions to be much more animatedly negative than my own---to a degree that I would say is unfair. First, you criticize Cuno for saying that laws about looting simply don't work, citing the Italian example as evidence that they do. But this seems to me to be a merely academic point on your part. Do you really believe that most countries could have any effect like Italy's? Perhaps Italy is an exception that may be said to prove the rule.

Secondly, I would point out that Cuno himself addresses the fact that some people consider "partage" to be something akin to "pillage." Perhaps it is time for people to reconsider the issue. I sometimes think your sympathies get stretched a bit far, to the point of a certain ultra-orthodoxy. Emotions in these debates are often manipulated by governments and special interests: Is it either honest or intellectually correct to give them a free pass on all occasions?

Finally, I would add that Cuno is hardly the first person to point out that nationalist retentionist policies claiming direct descent from particular peoples sometimes strain intellectual credulity. Just because someone claims a certain heritage doesn't make it so. If we want to make sophisticated arguments about national patrimony, we need to make more objective evaluations of what is at stake. I suspect that this will involve evaluating the emotional nationalist claims of other countries instead of treating them as universally valid.