Who is Anti-Collector? No-Questions-Asked Dealers of Course

"This malevolent law"

Interestingly, a Californian dugup coin dealer tries to spin proposed new due diligence requirements in Germany as an "anticollecting law" . That's from somebody who was trying to tell us his Parthian coin stock was kosher because they were bought in Spain and he's never heard of looted and smuggled coins on the Spanish market. With standards (I use the term loosely) of due diligence like this, no wonder a dealer is worried about laws which require him (in the interests of clients) to document what he did to assure himself the antiquity he wants to buy is in every respect licit, and not stolen, looted or smuggled.

 Weasel words alert: "[the requirement] very seriously threatens collecting of all ancient artifacts, including coins". No, what it seriously threatens is no-questions-asked dealing. It threatens the impunity with which dealers make profit from irresponsible handling of material derived from the commercial destruction of the record of the past.

Mr Welsh is welcome to debate here how, given all dealers claim to have done due diligence as a basis of accumulating their stock, having objects of documented kosherness on the market is in any way damaging to the collectors who buy them. Can he? Or is he going to admit that in fact dealers mainly handle and always have handled objects which they have not got the slightest information on (or interest in) where they actually came from and by what route they reached the market and want to carry on in this way regardless?

For Mr Welsh, there is one crowning justification for his US readers opposing a law in far-off Germany they most likely have not even read (Welsh provides no links):

If these recommendations don't suffice to motivate you, here is another: Infamous Warsaw archaeo-blogger Paul Barford has attacked the petition in his usual derogatory and insulting manner: [...] I am very glad that Mr. Barford has assailed this petition in such offensive terms. I can think of no better incentive for collectors everywhere to make haste to sign it! This is a threat to collectors everywhere: "Today Germany, tomorrow the world."

I am surprised Pastor Martin Niemöller is not invoked. Maybe Welsh is saving it for the next one.


So, if you are a sheep, sign the petition to (allegedly) "Save Collecting and Save the World". The rest of you who can think for yourselves, work out why dealers are upset about this, and why they are so desperate to get a petition signed to oppose real due diligence and act accordingly.

To the pathetic and unconcerned sheep I say, be careful what you wish for.

UPDATE 23.07.2015
The Jesuit training served for little it seems when Welsh quoted a Biblical verse mentioning "sheep" and according to him, Hyaenas. I do not see the connection, but feel that a more appropriate biblical quote to the dealers' manipulations would be Luke 6:43–45. I would imagine they teach it in Jesuit Sunday School.