Word: holocaust
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...United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, more than a dozen years in planning and construction, has been built at the edge of the mall, L'Enfant's expanse that is a kind of spacious American myth-yard. There the eye sweeps across the Capitol and Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial and Jefferson Memorial, the white marbles softened at this time of year by dogwood and cherry blossoms. The mall bespeaks 18th century Enlightenment come to America, a certain lucidity and ideal. The Holocaust museum is like the 20th century Endarkenment, a dense, evil mystery set down in the New World, an ocean...
...questions: Why put it in Washington? Why not in Berlin, say? Or else: Why should the Germans suffer this kind of permanently installed American rebuke, as if the years of Hitler were all of German history? And why would Americans build a memorial and museum to the European Holocaust before installing a remembrance, say, of slavery and the black American struggle, or of the devastation of American Indian life? The premise is that America's sacred statuary memory belongs to things that happened on native grounds. An odor of anti-Semitism sometimes gusts around these dinner tables, the half- stated...
...Does the Holocaust museum belong? Well, it does. Those who object to it are just as wrong as the other people who (for very different reasons) campaigned against the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, calling it a depressive exercise, an insult to the American military and a "black gash of shame." The Vietnam wall transcended the criticisms and became an American shrine...
...American military in 1944 declined to bomb the death camps or the rail lines leading to them. These decisions (documented in the museum) have a contemporary resonance: bureaucratic cowardice and fecklessness, indifference, appeasement, denial, tribal intolerance and fanaticism, racial hatred. This is the way these things happen. The Holocaust is a densely compacted drama of warning that needs to be remembered repeatedly. In the world at the end of the 20th century, geography matters less; borders are porous, ideas go at the speed of light. A European apocalypse is not alien to America. The lessons are here -- played...
...enslavement of blacks in America, an immense historical tragedy, was, however, different from the European Holocaust. Slavery did not threaten the extinction of black Africans; in biblical terms, it was more like the Egyptian captivity, not the apocalypse. But it is ridiculous to engage in a competition of comparative tragedies. A Museum of Black America in Washington is just as necessary, and would be just as civilizing, as the Holocaust museum...