I have to thank John Oliver for his show “Last Week Tonight” on museums. It’s a lively way to capture the deep cultural and historical background of the White-West. In half an hour, Oliver captured the White-West’s determination to own and control the cultural expression of the whole world, as if it was rightfully theirs.
Oliver talked about how some of the West’s most prestigious museums contain many stolen goods and how, most shockingly, the market continues to illegally trade antiquities to this day. When we go to a museum, we tend to think that everything we’re looking at came into the museum’s possession one or two centuries ago; some of these objects, however, were stolen quite recently. If we were to remove those objects that came from outside Europe and the US, many of these Western institutions would be left almost empty, some with a mere 5% of their collection.
It is very difficult to imagine the impact on communities that have watched their cultural heritage being stolen and sold to so called “cultural Institutions.” How can people grow as a country, as a culture, when they are left with nothing that represents where they are coming from. It’s like losing your cultural memory. Many countries have been asking for restitution and compensation, but, as always, the West uses its own “laws” to delay responding to these requests.
Maybe the most damaging is that we call ourselves “civilized” and the countries where these objects are taken from “third world,” as if our supposedly advanced status justifies this ongoing appropriation. Are we going to keep lying to ourselves? Or do we have the courage to look to ourselves in the mirror?
