Interesting piece at Spiked about the dark museums (holocaust museums and other exhibits of misery and conflict) that have been proliferating. Link. Excerpt:
*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.
*Many exhibits launch a further assault on history by targeting the individual visitor through their emotions. Visitors to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg in South Africa receive a card assigning them an arbitrary racial classification of white or non-white, which encourages them to personally relate to the story told. Meanwhile, at the new Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England, the lights are turned off, and audiences are subjected to blaring sirens in surround-sound and a multi-screen audiovisual show. It seems it would not be possible to learn about the war by just looking at the artifacts and reading the labels. We have to pretend we are in an air raid. . . .
. . . The assumption seems to be that visitors can only appreciate what happened by thinking how we would react in a similar situation - as if we are so narcissistic that we can't contemplate the past without roleplay. We are encouraged to think about 'me', not them; now, not then. This trivialises what happened, reducing the understanding of the war to a (bad) reality museum experience.
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