John Oliver tries to palatably, definitively explain why Confederate monuments belong in museums

John Oliver takes down Confederate monuments
(Image credit: Screenshot/YouTube/Last Week Tonight)

John Oliver's main topic on Sunday's Last Week Tonight was the Confederacy, but he began with "a beloved icon of my childhood" in Britain, Jimmy Savile. After Savile died, it emerged he was a child sex offender, and all monuments to him were taken down, "because once we found out that he was a monster, we accepted it was no longer appropriate to publicly glorify him," Oliver said. The Confederacy, he suggested, is "America's track-suit sex offender," and since the debate over what to do with its monuments "is clearly not going away, we wanted to take a look at some of the arguments."

"The key fact about the Civil War," Oliver said, is that "the Confederacy was fighting for the preservation of slavery. And that's not my opinion. That is just a fact." It's an especially hard one to swallow if a relative fought for the Confederacy, he conceded, and "I honestly get wanting a more comfortable history for your family, but in doing so, you can't invent a more comfortable history for your country, because you'd be erasing the actual painful experiences of many Americans."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.