Posted on 05/04/2005 11:54:42 AM PDT by lizol
Ugly.
Why not a beautiful Remembrance Garden?
"Along this bumpy road, skeptics have questioned what the pillars have to do with the Holocaust, attacked the decision to put the memorial in its high-profile location and wondered aloud about why it is for the Jews and not other Nazi victims."
I agree - Hitler killed gays, gypsies, the mentally retarded and any other undesirable. Why is it the Jews feel they "own" the Holocaust?
Cause it's German?
Why not a beautiful synagogue or a Jewish kindergarten?
I'd rather build useful institutions for live Jews than more rocks and stones for dead Jews.
For some reason they are doing seperate memorials. There is another one in progress for the Roma and Sinti "Gypsies". But it would make more sense to have one memorial with a museum detailing all the people who suffered in the camps instead of potentially a hundred different ones.
I think your idea is a good one.
It certainly looks ugly from the picture.
I remember thinking the Viet Nam Memorial was ugly from the pictures. You have to see it in person to appreciate is somber beauty.
I love the WWII memorial in DC that opened last year (or year before). Absolutely beautiful and majestic. And remember the huge fight that erupted over that?
I agree and then perhaps the memorial would be "less controversial"?
Good point--sometimes a picture or people's initial reactions don't tell the whole story. The Vietnam Memorial is a perfect example.
But I do think that a Holocaust Memorial should honor every victim--if there are to be separate memorials for every "class" of victim, there should be memorials for every ethnic and religious group who were targets, plus those with disabilities, those who spoke against Hitler, those who worked for the various resistance movements, etc. He didn't mind killing anyone.
That's a good idea. I've never entirely understood the concept of memorials. It seems that, in recent years, there has to be a memorial built to everything. Now, I'm by no means implying that the Nazi massacre of Jews and so many other groups shouldn't be remembered, but you are right in that a bunch of stones won't actually accomplish anything.
Well, it sure is ugly.
Maybe that's the point. I dunno.
1. The Nazis only killed "gays" if they were political enemies. Why the "gays" feel the need to "own" any part of the Holocaust is any body's guess.
2. The Nazis attempted the exterminate the entire Jewish race. They succeeded in killing 6 million of them, and virtually wiped out the Jewish population of Poland and Western Russia. You would probably want some sort of remembrance, too, if such a thing were to happen to your family.
3. The Holocaust claimed 11 million lives. Over half of them Jewish.
The problem with a "one size fits all" memorial is that the whole message gets watered down, if not obliterated entirely, because of "political correctness."
Personally I think it is time to stop making more shrines to the dead and concentrate on passing on something other than "Holocaust guilt" to the next generation.
Being gay had nothing to do with being political enemies. Anyone who was not considered the Aryan ideal was genetically imperfect and subject to being "culled" from the master race. As far as ownership of the Holocaust, it was Jews who protested including any other group in this memorial. Even the word Holocaust seems to now longer apply to any other act of genocide other than the Jews in WWII.
BTW, there are those who would dispute the 6 million figure based on the population of Jews before and after the war.
The Holocaust might have claimed 11 million lives, but WWII itself is estimated to have claimed 200 million.
I am in total agreement about the Holocaust guilt thing. This was a horrible tragedy but, while I don't feel we should forget the past, I don't think we should have to have it shoved in our faces all the time. Once my sister was in a psychology class and her teacher showed a video of the Holocaust, which had NOTHING to do with the course of study.
Washington DC has a big Holocaust museum - why, I don't know, since it didn't happen there. There are Holocaust memorials in cities and towns all across the country - more so than in the country where it actually occurred.
Oh yeah, Ernst Zundel and David Irving, for example.
Don't forget Hutton Gibson. He says they moved to Brooklyn :
Yeah, the Klan, the Aryan Nation, the Islamofascists....that's good company you keep.
...there were not that many Jews under Hitler's power under his sway. They claimed that there were 6.2 million in Poland before the war and after the war there were 200,000 therefore he (Hitler) must have killed six million of them. They simply got up and left! They were all over the Bronx and Brooklyn and Sydney and Los Angeles.
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