Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Shoah Business

A great editorial about the obsession of many museums with reducing all of human history to genocide. I don't really understand where it comes from myself. People did write poems too during the 20th century. It wasn't all starvation and genocide.

There was an interview in The Eight Technologies of Otherness in which the editor Sue Golding, an academic, was interviewing an artist. She kept asking him where his art fit in with the Frankfurt School, who are these vastly overrated cultural theorists who could roughly be described as Drearily Marxist. Anyway, the guy finally says, "I don't much care for the Frankfurt School. I always felt that they took part in a certain cultural cynicism that I don't share."
Her horrified response, which sums up a lot of cultural theory frankly: "You're not cynical? After the Holocaust?!" I think many of these historians are misanthropes who want us to sort of renounce our humanity in shame. The Holocaust is a tool to shame us into species-loathing.

So, I worry that all history will eventually be reduced to its likeness or difference from the Holocaust. Also, removing the Holocaust from its particular historical framework, suggesting that any cultural resentment is like the Holocaust, greatly and insultingly reduces its significance.

It's intersting how many museums relate the issue back to us, the viewer.
Tiffany Jenkins writes:
"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."

Right. There seems to be a bleak outlook of humans in the museum displays that reduce us all to concentraion camp guards, as well as in their opinon of us all as unable to relate to history unless it's pitched to us as another lifestyle product.

Worst of all, I think that History that posits us all as one step away from committing genocide suggests that genocide is a really easy thing to do. And therefore removes our rightful horror at people who do it. We should be horrified at the Holocaust and we should be unable to relate to the people who committed it. And we should know that a uncrossable gulf separates us from it's victims.

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