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

[Ray Saintonge]

Kurt Maxwell Weber wrote:
> On Wednesday 24 December 2008 11:02, David Gerard wrote:
>   
>> 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.
>>     
> I still don't see how it's outside the WMF's scope, nor do I see how 
> presenting a strong POV is necessarily bad.
>
> The WMF's mission is essentially educational, correct?  And I submit that to 
> be truly educated about such an event as this, one needs to see perhaps a 
> more emotional presentation, to truly understand what it actually did to 
> people.
>   

One doesn't become truly educated when someone is playing games with 
one's emotions.  That just breeds true believers and more victims of 
patriotic folly.  Stalin died in 1953, and while there might have been 
some justification for such a project while he was still in power, now 
it is nothing more than picking at old scabs to see if they will bleed.  
What Stalin did cannot be undone, but understanding the importance of 
those events in world history is not helped by dwelling on the minutiae 
of individual tragedy.  Global tragedies are greater than the sum of 
these isolated events, and distance from them provides us with the 
opportunity for retrospective and dispassionate analysis.
> One would not say that the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., is 
> non-educational, though it presents a strong POV and is focused more on 
> presenting the human effects of the Holocaust than simple factual 
> information.  This is basically the same thing.  It fulfills an essential 
> part of the Foundation's educational mission that to now has been neglected.
>
>   
The parallel to a Holocaust Museum in these circumstances would be a 
museum for Stalin's victims.  Perhaps you should be trying to establish 
such a museum.  A person entering the Holocaust Museum knows what bias 
to expect, as would a visitor to your museum.  It's not our job to be 
promoting those biases. 

Ec