Guy directing traffic: stay on the left side, if you don't know, look at your hands
Me: what if they both look like Ls???
Him: ... I think that's called autism
Reader i SCREAMED
and also also Luthen's job being the sale and transport of these artifacts to wealthy consumers, making him complicit in this containment of wealth while also deliberately distracting the upper class from the rebellion
Museum scholar here: this is really similar to the aristocratic European salons of the 17th/18th century, where rich people would gather to look at (mostly stolen) art/artifacts and pretend to be intellectuals while really just bragging about being rich and invited to the party
these important cultural works of art were stolen from the chandrilan people and that one has finally been returned but only at a great cost and it wasn’t returned to the people of chandrila in a publicly accessible way but instead is being homed in the mothma’s living room
which is absolutely what is happening here, where, despite the object being "returned" to its home planet, it's not accessible to the masses, and it is implied that /0/ of the statues are in possesion of the public - do Chandrilans even know about them in a concrete sense?