Museums that document trauma and conflict have proliferated across the globe in the past decade, and more are planned. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights will showcase atrocities endured by groups that have made their home in Canada, and is due to open in 2009. In Thailand there is talk of building a memorial museum documenting the damage caused by last year’s tsunami, and a museum has been proposed to display the atrocities of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.
The Robben Island Museum in South Africa and the genocide museums outside Kigali in Rwanda have achieved international renown. In the USA, holocaust museums have proliferated – the best known is the Washington Holocaust Museum.
This mania for memorial museums is a sign of a society with an unhealthy obsession. These new museums indicate a desire to elevate the worst aspects of mankind’s history as a way to understand humanity today. Our pessimism-tinted spectacles distort how we interpret the past.
These museums tend to downplay historical exhibits, since the aim is to make yesterday’s conflicts relevant to today. The Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam asks visitors where they stand on the contemporary threat of the far right in Europe, and the question of racism in football. The Beit Hashoah Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles transforms the history of the Holocaust into a discussion about everyday intolerance. It is suggested that there is a slippery slope between shouting and shoving, and world wars. Audiences are lectured that ‘the potential of violence is within us all’.” — Tiffany Jenkins (spiked)
![[Image 'neuman.jpg' cannot be displayed]](neuman.jpg "What-Me-Worry? (I voted for Bush...)")
Spiked seems to have set itself up as the gainsayer par excellence on doom and gloom. I recall last year’s series of articles about how we worry too much about world affairs and the potential for disaster, and that it is a matter of changing cultural norms to reduce global angst. I thought this was the sort of ‘What-Me-Worry?’ sentiment that has been lampooned for decades. (It has taken on uncanny new significance given the remarkable resemblance of George W. Bush and Alfred E. Neuman…) Now a Spiked contributor is arguing that we should divert our eyes from the mass outbreaks of human tragedy, misery and atrocity of the past so as not to become too tainted or cynical about humanity. Of course I am one to bridle at that suggestion, since my cynicism is one of my strongest attributes. But when it comes to what I call the ‘ostrich mode’ (the notion that sticking one’s head in the sand and not seeing looming threats makes them go away) of historiography, who are you gonna believe, Tiffany Jenkins or George Santayana?
The problem I have with memorial museums is not so much that they keep our eyes open to the horrors of the past as that they glorify misery and solidify communities’ identities as victims, only victims and nothing more. As important as who is putting these museums up is who is going to them and what sentiments they indulge in.
As to the article’s criticism of the implied relationship between ordinary rudeness and the capacity to commit atrocities, I think that the everyday encounters with our capacity for hostility are precisely what civilizes us and holds our worst impulses in check. Emphasizing, not avoiding, that equation is uimmensely useful. The idea that “I couldn’t do that, not me” is a comforting and dangerous fiction, as we have known at least since the disturbing Stanley Milgram experiments illustrating how many would have made good Nazis given the circumstances. Certainly, cultural influences and the pronouncements of political and social leaders can shape a community’s aggressive urges in either permissive or restrictive ways. Just to cite two examples from my own recent experience:
- Yesterday, I asked an Israeli friend living in the US and just back from her annual visit home what effects she was seeing from the change in Palestinian leadership in comparison to last year. She observed that hopefulness is in a way a self-fulfilling prophecy with immediate effects. The intifada is ramping down, and she is seeing more efforts at fellowship between Arab and Jewish communities, a strengthening of the peace community, and, from her vantage point, immediate gains in the sense of safety of Jews in mixing with their Arab neighbors. (Of course, the proof of the the pudding is whether it works the other way as well.)
- In inpatient psychiatry, assaultive patients in need of physical control have often provoked a, shall we say, overly vigorous response from mental health staffs angered and frightened by assaults or threats against them. Some of us have been looking at what it takes to go to a “restraint-free” environment on inpatient units without commensurate losses in safety. If one compares psychiatric units that have successfully achieved the elimination of physical restraints which those that still utilize this tactic, one gets the impression that, more than anything else, the difference comes down to little more than having the political will to change the prevailing culture on the part of the leadership.
