00:00While looting in Cambodia is thankfully largely a thing of the past, we still see this phenomenon every time a
00:07country is at war, where there's a breakdown in civil order, where there's chaos.
00:12Most recently in Sudan, in Ethiopia, in Ukraine, there have been very large scale thefts of art and artifacts because
00:20there is a market.
00:22People want them and they will pay for them.
00:23In any museum, Western museum, you'll have art and artifacts that come from countries very, very far away.
00:34I mean, couldn't you make the argument that all of that stuff has been plundered and shouldn't belong in those
00:39museums?
00:39There are people who make that argument and who would basically say that museums are, by definition, monuments to theft
00:50and colonialism and looting and all of that.
00:54I don't totally agree.
00:56I think one thing that is striking is that there appears to be a universal urge when a country is
01:04on the rise to obtain the treasures of other people.
01:08This is why there are Egyptian obelisks in Rome, you know, and that goes back 2,000 years.
01:15On the question of what belongs where, I make a distinction between historical cases, like the Elgin marbles is one
01:23people know about, which are these sculptures that were hacked off the Parthenon and are now in the British Museum.
01:29That's essentially a paperwork dispute.
01:31The British position is they were legitimately removed.
01:35The Greek position is no, they weren't.
01:37And I draw a line between cases like that and something like Sudan or something like Cambodia, where we have
01:45looting, theft in the course of an armed conflict that occurred within living memory.
01:52That, to me, is a different ethical category than arguing about what happened in the Parthenon in the early 19th
01:59century.
01:59It's my photo of the cycling money that we have.
01:59So here's her 보는 ways to a Britishman bullet to be my Jamie, нед breenor.
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