I was watching a documentary on Auschwitz and thought I should visit the place, or another concentration camp, to see humans at their worst and make sure that it doesn’t happen again. I thought maybe there would be other places to experience man at his most evil and maybe a suggestion for everyone to visit to guard against violence at its most extreme. So what would be the top 10 places to see humans at their worst?
And to balance things out, what would be the top 10 places to see people coming together and being their best?
New York. You can cross one of each list.
It’s an amazing place and a testament to humanity that all those people, from so many cultures can live peacefully together.
Until you watch the news and then you’ll want to sit in a corner and hug yourself.
For dark places that show the worst of humanity visit the Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It’s basically an ex-prison used during the genocide. Pretty dark place, the blood still stains the floors. Combine that with trip to the Killing Fields. The prison camp was tougher I think, although the monument of human skulls at the Killing Fields site is pretty staggering. As we left the Killing Fields my Cambodian driver asked me if I fancied a visit to a shooting range…
I’d also list one of the Disney resorts alongside it. A wretched place dedicated to emptying the pockets of parents in the most ruthless possible way. Capitalism at its worst.
I swear that whenever I visit San Francisco or Madison (WI) or Lawrence (KS) or NYC (NY) …or almost any little village in Mexico or England… a lot of my good feeling about the trip is that the people are so friendly and positive.
Disclaimer: I live in Madison (was a childhood dream, because I loved visiting there as a child… so far, it’s living up to the dream).
Disclaimer: When I say Madison, I mean Madison when it’s not 20 below.
Maybe Las Vegas isn’t “evil”, but nowhere else on earth is the “Me! Me! Me!” paradigm indulged so blatantly, so thoroughly, and on such a massive scale.
Man, that’s a surprisingly tough question. A Nazi concentration camp and the Killing Fields in Cambodia are good places to begin. There should be something to see related to the worst years of the Soviet Union (a gulag museum, perhaps? a site that captures the horror of the Ukrainian famines?) and Maoist China, though I doubt the modern Chinese state would allow such a thing. (Mao, after all, is still revered on their currency.)
How about a site in Rwanda commemorating the genocide there? Or one of the ports in Western Africa where slaves were kidnapped and shipped to the New World? Or you could find one of the places where they landed - I think there are old slave markets around in the US south and in the Caribbean.
What else…something related to Japanese brutality in WWII? Nanking?
There are no shortage of historical atrocities to pick from; the difficulty is finding a physical place that conjures up the horror.
On the brighter side, go to London - perhaps the most enlivening, interesting city in the world, and one that will help make you feel better about mankind. Or go to a great museum or library or concert hall anywhere to experience some of the summits of man’s potential.
I’m always fascinated when I see a moon rock in museums. I think of all the effort that went into my standing there with this piece of the moon. So I look forward to the day we can actually visit Tranquility Base. Perhaps it will be from a distance or behind glass.
Probably not in my lifetime, but I would be that we’ll see up surface based images in the next decade or so. Some of the Google Lunar X-Prize teams have this on their list as a task to accomplish and NASA has even set out guidelines for protecting the historic sites on the moon.
The A-bomb museum in Hiroshima.
Anyone who uses the term “just nuke 'em” has never been to this museum. Gives you a real appreciation for what atomic destruction, and the follow-on radiation effects are really like. And why these need to be seriously considered before deciding to use nuclear weapons.
The museum is very “factual” without being judgemental about whether it was a good/bad, right/wrong decision. Just “this is what happened.”
The Maison des Esclaves on Gorée island in Senegal has a bit of disputed history but is held up as a significant point of no return for many enslaved Africans. At least symbolically it is a powerful site reflecting on the evils man does to one another.
