Date: 19 July 2010 20:31:35
I have visited the Holocaust exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. I found it interesting but misplaced. The IWM would be the place for a temporary exhibition but it seems to have become a permanent home.
I think that it would be better to have a museum dedicated to genocide through history. It would include such things as the destruction of indigenous peoples of empire (not just the British); the Turkish massacre of the Armenians; Bosnia (and the rest of former Yugoslavia); Cambodia; Rawanda; and of course the Former Soviet Union.
I am not trying to belittle the Holocaust. If you'd seen my bookshelves you'd know how much it interests me. I have also visited several sites associated with it - including the Wannsee Villa where the bureaucrats met to discuss what a Jew was defined as. This was not the meeting that decided on the Final Solution, contrary to accepted wisdom.
It was the greatest ever attempt at the systematic destruction of an entire racial group. Being only one eigth Jewish was enough to consign you to a gas chamber or a bullet in your neck.
What was done here was murder on an industrial scale, something that had never before been done. Genocide has happened throughout history, even in the Bible, yet this was something never seen before. It involved people in every occupied country and territory in Europe, with the exception of Denmark. People knew what was happening but chose to ignore it.
Yet the IWM is not the place for a permanent home and the Holocaust deserves a home of its own. It is out of place in the home of our nation's military history. It doesn't fit in with the over-riding theme. It was a New Labour answer to a bigger question.