Hypocrisy of Holocaust memorials?

I’d like to predicate this with a long-winded apology to anyone who interprets this question as an attempt to marginalize the pain of the Holocuast victims, but I don’t have the patience. That said:

Does anyone else have a problem with the fact that the Jewish community continues to memorialize the Holocaust employing logic that in doing so it will prevent similar events from happening again? It seems that whenever I see or read about a group memorializing this event, one of the prevalent themes is to “remember.” So long as this slaughter isn’t forgotten, it will never happen again. So long as we tell our story, never again will a tyrannical power subjugate a group of people?

Well, I’m all for that, but I’m also of the opinion that the resources used for this (this, read: constant retelling of the same story) could be put to better us through the execution of the promises that these people seem to be making. Retell the story of the Holocaust so it never happens again…Hey guess what? It was happening in the 70s in Uganda and Cambodia and who knows where else. It was happening in the 80s in the Middle East and South America. It was happening in the 90s in Kosovo. And it’s happening today in Africa and, to some extent, Palestinian camps.

Obviously I don’t have a problem with remembering, but how does a 12-year-old Congolese girl benefit from Americans and Europeans remembering a 50-year-old genocide?

“Hey aholes, "she’d say, "it’s happening in my front fking yard!”

You know what, motherfucker?

I killed a LOT of people in the Bosnia conflict. I remember the lessons learned there WELL. I cared enough to do it partically because I learned the lessons from the Holocaust well.

Before you post again, you try killing several hundred people. See how you feel about it. Then, ask yourself if remembering what you have done, and what others before you have done to fight the cause of your battles is worth remembering.

I know without question, I was saving lives, but I was taking them too. And it was the right thing to do.

Take back your attitude, it does you no honor.

Hmm.

In the interest of time and innocent lives, I will not engage in the prescribed multiple homocides.

What exactly does your past and your interpratation of your killings have to do with the apparent conflict/hypocrisy I asked about? I wanted to know if I was being callous, I didn’t want someone to berate me by responding outside the scope of the question.

Well, I have been to two Holocaust Museums and both did have exhibits discussing more recent examples of genocide, “ethnic cleansing” and the like, drawing very obvious parallels between what happened under the Nazis and stories, countries, and regimes which do not ordinarily make the news. So I would argue that this does bring attention to the fact that it is still happening now, and does its part to increase the awareness of people who may naively think the Holocaust was an anomalous part of the past. They weren’t just shrines to awful-but-distant memories, but were active in educating the public about atrocities of today, not just yesterday.

I was wondering–have ever bothered to visit one of these sites before criticizing them?

let’s all take a deeeeeeeep breath. Count to 10. Release.

I’m feeling calm now. ok,

dasceder, would NOT building the memorials, would NOT retelling the story, would NOT remembering the Holocaust have stopped the problems Uganda, Cambodia, and Kosovo?

No?

Then where’s the problem?

I’ve been to the Anne Frank museaum and I’ve been to the Memorial in Boston, but that’s irrelevant.

I think I’m being misinterpreted (or I’m not communicating properly). Basically, when the Muslims where being hacked to pieces by Milosovic, why the hell was Spielberg spending all that time and money on Schindler’s List?

“I could have saved so many more…”

You’re damn right you could have, trying wielding some of that power and influence to prevent the genocide happening (possibly) on that very day.

Manservant Hecubus:

[Moderator Hat ON]

You know what, M.H.? You don’t call people "motherfucker"s in Great Debates. Period.

[Moderator Hat OFF]

Would it be permissable as a description of someone who fucks their mother? Just in case, you know…

Anyways, no one is saying that by building memorials for Holocaust victims they will stop genocide. There is enough reason to build these memorials without trying to prevent a similar situation from occurring. However, remembering the horrors that can happen when good people do nothing serves as a motivation for people to do something.

Steven Spielberg cannot simply remove Milosevic from power. But the United States, cognizant of Hitler did before we stopped him, and determined not to allow a similar genocide, can.

And besides, making movies is what Spielberg is good at.

If the point of the OP is that memorials do nothing to prevent the recurrence of the event they commemorate, then to some extent I agree.

The OKC memorial isn’t going to prevent terrorist acts, and Holocaust memorials in and of themselves aren’t going to prevent genocide.

These things do, however, create an awareness of events and lives which can be easily forgotten - and I see maintaining awareness as a vital part of preventing recurrence.

Schindler’s list may <b>well</b> have inspired people to visit Holocaust museums, think about the genocide and other atrocities being committed on our planet and to <b>get involved</b> in putting a stop to them.

Yes, memorials honour the dead - so do gravestones in cemeteries - but they also bring tangibility to the magnitude of what happened.

Many years ago, part of The Quilt Project toured Australia. When you see The Quilt, and you listen as the names of the people who’ve died of AIDS and for whom panels have been made, the impact is quite different to just reading in the paper that X people have died of AIDS.

History can recall the details of our past, but raw numbers do not convey the sheer magnitude and horror of the Holocaust. Raw numbers will not motivate people to get off their butts and try to prevent a recurrence, but try visiting a well constructed memorial and walking out without
feeling a resolve to prevent such horrors happening again - it’s extremely difficult to not feel an obligation to humanity, and to not resolve that you’ll never be a “good person who did nothing”.

The cost of memorials? Those of which I’m aware recover most of their cost from admission fees and product sales and often receive private donations to conserve their collections. I’m not sure that any other method of creating and maintaining awareness could be half as effective, let alone half as cost effective.

preview is my friend…and html is the right code for the other message board

I’ve never killed anyone (so far as I know) but my father and the soldiers under his command killed thousands upon thousands in WWII. Although he received a silver star and a bronze star and numerous other commendations he did not relish what he did, although he understood the larger picture and the necessity for it. He told me grim tales of the horrors of the death camps and how his men broke down weeping at the sight of the emaciated corpses, and the slaughtered Germans bloated in death, half sunk in muddy ditches by the side of the road and friends who had their heads blown off two feet way from him.

For all his achievements as a solider he still took a jaundiced view towards war and explained to his children that none of this was truly glorious. It was stupid. Necessary but stupid.

Towards this end dasceder the holocaust museums serve as a useful and necessary reminder that war is not just about political machinations, bravery and glory. It is mainly about power and death, endless bloody mangled waves of death.

Your argument that the relatively minor sums that fund these museums, and the lessons they teach could be put to better use trying to stop slaughter elsewhere in the world is interesting. Just what specifically do you think a few millions or tens or hundreds of millions could have done to stop the ethnic slaughter and genocide in Africa or Bosnia et al. The long standing, tangled morass of circumstances that led to these situations are largely beyond the reach of an open wallet no matter how large.

I am curious though. You seem to think the holocaust museums are a waste of time. Let’s say they gave you $ 20 million dollars to stop global genocide. What would you do? What are your bright ideas, your concrete action plans?

Of course dasceder’s argument could be applied to any purchase or product in the world.

If it is “hypocritcal” to spend money on Holocaust memorials that you could use on stopping Milosevic’s genocides, wouldn’t it also be bad to spend money on food, luxury cars, Britney Spears CDs, or computers with which to post messages to the Straight Dope message board about how holocaust memorials are hypocritical?

According to dasceder’s (mis)understanding of economics you could forgo any purchase to stop genocide. “Sorry honey, I’d buy you a new vacuum cleaner, but that money would be better spent stopping genocide.”
Also, I’m put a bit off by the language dasceder uses when he says, “Does anyone else have a problem with the fact that the Jewish community,” and then later has his hypothetical “12-year old Congolese girl” call the Jewish Community “a**holes.” I’m sure he thinks it’s cute and all when he says he doesn’t have the “patience” to “apolog[ize] to anyone who interprets this question as an attempt to marginalize the pain of the Holocuast victims” but the language here seems to be carrying an unspoken undertone.

Or in other words, if any given purchase is immoral according to dasceder because that money could be used to fight genocide, why does he pick out Jewish Holocaust Memorials as some sort of specific sin?

Is he also offended by commemorations of the Armenian genocide? Sozhenitsyn’s exposes of Soviet Gulags? Does he think Haing S. Noor is a hyptocrite because he acted in “The Killing Fields,” which detailed Pol Pot’s terrible crimes? Somehow I doubt it.

Relatives of mine died in death camps. Other relatives of mine died fighting to end the death camps. One of my relatives who fought but did not die was in the first wave of soldiers at Auschwitz. I’ve heard his story about it. One of my relatives survived the death camps. I’ve read the diary she kept during part of her time there. (She refused to talk about it, so the diary is the only information we’ve ever had.) This is an emotional and personal topic for me. But this is GD, not the pit, and I’m assuming your question comes from ignorance, not from spite. I’m going to try to answer it as you posed it.

As far as I can tell, you’re wondering if:

a) There’s any point to building Shoah memorials.
b) Such memorials really do help prevent new atrocities.
c) The money spent on the memorials could be better spent elsewhere.
d) A 12-year-old Congolese girl gains any benefit from these memorials.

My answers:

a) Yes, there are good reasons to continue to build memorials. People died in the Shoah and in WWII in particularly gruesome ways. We need to remember those people. We also need to remember the chain of events that led up to their deaths, because - to borrow a phrase - those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. I, for one, would rather we never repeat this.

b) I hope the memorials do help prevent such atrocities. They are certainly intended to. When people visit these sites, they learn about or remember the kinds of attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors that can lead to the marginalization and demonization of a group of people. They see what happens when evil runs rampant. They also see what perfectly normal human beings are capable of doing - shooting innocents, torturing them, starving them to death. The point is to make people think.

I know I think when I visit memorials and museums. And I am reminded about why it is important to be involved, to fight injustice, to try to change things today. I also remember why it’s so important to question your actions, and why blind obedience can be so dangerous. I hope other people do the same. Nothing can force people to learn or think or remember, but the images and stories told by memorials and museums come as close to that as anything could.

The strategy may even have worked in your case. Apparently something has made you think about the atrocities commited around the globe, at least to the extent of drawing an analogy between the Shoah and these other events; perhaps the museums and memorials you’ve visited helped.

c) Do you know how most of these memorials are funded and how much they cost? Do you have any statistics about the effect memorials have on donations of time and money to other causes, donations that might not be made if people weren’t confronted with terrible truths? And do you have any suggestions - concrete suggestions - about places those amounts of money could be spent to prevent the suffering the occurs all the time, the world over, while simultaneously raising public awareness and concern? Please, show me some numbers and some statistics. I can’t debate thin air, and although I could do the research for you, I would prefer you did it yourself; it’s your hypothesis, so it’s your responsibility to support it.

d) The 12-year-old Congolese girl gains no direct benefits from the memorials. However, she may benefit from UN or US involvement in her country. She may benefit from the Red Cross or other international aid efforts at work in her country. She may benefit, in other words, from donations of time and money (directly and through taxes) from people who don’t know her and have no direct interest in her. Part of the reason we, as first world residents, make these donations is that we know what can happen when we ignore evil and atrocities, knowledge we gained the hard way. If we forget, it will be all too easy to categorize the suffering of that 12-year-old girl as unavoidable, unimportant, and too far away to do anything about. That’s part of what the memorials are about: remembering our responsibilities as human beings.

If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it. In the meantime, I will continue to remember the painful past and work towards a better future in the ways I know. I hope you will do the same.

[belatedly stands up and applauds Reprise, Astro, Arcegetrix and DeepBlueSea]

Holocaust memorials? Maybe. Why do I qualify support for them? Because they get used by particular political interests.

During the Nazi occupation of Belgium I had relatives tortured and starved to death by the Nazis. You don’t find their names in Holocaust memorials… they were Communists.

When the play “Bent” was first presented, it was picketed by elements within the Jewish community… they said it was “disrespectful” to the “real” victims of the Nazis.

I have no knowledge of any Holocaust memorial that pays attention to (by percentages) the most “successful” attempt at genocide… the European slaughter of First Nations people.

Why are the Slavs and Gypsies so often not mentioned in discussions of Nazi death camps?

I applaud the sentiment behind “Never Forget”, but question its institutional expression.