[Foundation-l] New project proposal: Soviet Repressions Memorial

[David Gerard]

2008/12/24 Michael Bimmler <mbimmler at gmail.com>:

> A project which is motivated in such a way cannot possibly be anything
> else than biased...and indeed, the very concept of memorials is
> biased: Why should we have a memorial of the victims of Soviet
> Repression, when we don't have a memorial of Nazi victims, victims of
> the Armenian Genocide, victim of the Rwandan Genocide, victims of
> various repression regimes in South-East Asia and China, victims in
> Darfur, Chad, the Central African Republic etc. etc.
> No one can sensibly suggest that we can have memorial sites for every
> "repression" (in lack of a better word) in history and thus, we had
> better none, in my opinion.  (Yes, in other cases I argued and would
> argue that it is better to have "something" than "nothing", but in
> this case, I'm afraid I am not convinced of the merits of the proposal
> at all and of the propriety of the motives behind it)


Yes. However, it could be a valuable wiki to create privately. Generic
hosting is (a) really cheap (b) often includes MediaWiki out the box.
The wiki is unlikely to be vastly overloaded, so cheap hosting would
do for a start.

See http://www.sep11memories.org/wiki/In_Memoriam for a memorial
project for victims of the World Trade Center attack, for example.

Although started with a strong POV, such a project could nevertheless
accumulate material of high quality historical and scholarly interest.


- d.