TheSword
Warhammer Fantasy Imperial Plenipotentiary
That’s only half the definition of stealing/theft. You missed out the other half which consists of intending to deprive the owner of the property. Taking the Benin Bronzes was theft. Putting jollof rice in your cookbook isn’t.Wrong. If you use something that isn’t yours it’s stealing, and if it’s been horribly misrepresented for over a hundred years, it’s not unreasonable to be upset.
But the bottom line is, it doesn’t matter if you are incapable of understanding why someone is upset, because that’s not your call to make. You can either apologise and try not to do it again, or you can be a total jerk.
What you’re actually talking about is disrespect. It’s disrespectful to take the symbol of a brutally oppressed people and a national shame and then use to sell sports tickets. If you take out the brutal oppression then it wouldn’t be a problem.
Culture spreads. It’s what it does. As it spreads it changes. Just as the Greek Gods changed when appropriated by the Romans or when Homer wrote about the Odyssey. It’s been this case since people sat and talked around fires.
Though I would say that the presence of Norse, Greek and Egyptian gods in modern media is actually a legacy of the enduring quality and resonance of those cultures rather than a sign of disrespect.