Among the world’s main museums are stuffed with plundered and stolen items ― and John Oliver of “Final Week Tonight” has had sufficient.
“If you’re ever searching for a lacking artifact, 9 occasions out of ten it’s within the British Museum,” he identified. “It’s mainly the world’s largest ‘misplaced and located’ with each ‘misplaced’ and ‘discovered’ within the heaviest potential citation marks there.”
A first-rate instance: the Elgin Marbles, aka the Parthenon Marbles, taken from Greece within the nineteenth century by Lord Elgin and at the moment within the British Museum.
“They weren’t misplaced. They had been taken, which is clearly worse. It’s like being unable to seek out the final puzzle piece and studying that you simply didn’t really misplace it,” he mentioned. “A British earl snuck into your own home, stole it, after which offered it to a museum over 1,000 miles away.”
Oliver slammed the “unbelievably patronizing” arguments of those that defend the British Museum and different repositories of stolen items.
Some declare the objects had been taken in a special time ― and meaning there’s a special context to contemplate.
However as Oliver identified, British Prime Minister William Gladstone in 1868 mentioned he “deeply lamented” objects looted from Ethiopia by the British Military and known as for his or her return.
“He was saying that in 1868!” Oliver mentioned. “We didn’t even know the best way to repair a UTI with out leeches again then, however we knew that raiding different nations for his or her shit was ‘deeply lamentable,’ which is British for ‘tremendous fucked up.’”
See his full takedown under… and make sure to stick round for a tour of the “Payback Museum” that includes Kumail Nanjiani: