Saturday, September 28, 2013

Stop the Presses. Canada's "Human Rights" Mausoleum (A.K.A. The Museum of Competitive Victimhood) Is Engendering Animosity Between Victim Groups, Not Bringing Them Together

I've been saying as much for years, and it seems the National Post has finally twigged to the fact that something's not kosher about our mega-pricey victimhood edifice. It also seems that someone has written an entire book on the subject--Hidden Genocides, by historian Dirk Moses. However, Moses's objections to the edifice and its contents are rather different than mine. Whereas I think the thing's a joke because the concept of "human rights" has become so degraded in our time, and because something that was originally conceived as a Holocaust museum has ended up becoming a locus for what Mark Steyn, in one of his most memorable turns of phrase, has called "bickering genocides," Moses derides it for "unfairly" highlighting one genocide in particular. He's also upset because, with the state funding it, the museum won't be nearly victim-y enough:
In a chapter in the upcoming book Hidden Genocides, Mr. Moses, a professor of history at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, said the museum’s handling of the story of Canada’s indigenous people gets at a fundamental problem with a state-funded human rights museum. (Ottawa has committed $21.7-million to annual operating costs.) “As a proclaimed ‘human rights leader,’ it is impossible for the state to admit to a genocidal foundation,” he writes. “This is a genocide whose name dare not be spoken in the museum.”
Actually, Professor Moses, what dare not be spoken here is how power-crazed leftists and Islamists have hijacked "human rights" and put it in service of their own demented agendas.

I'd love to see an exhibit about that in the museum, but it might be difficult to depict, and even if they managed to come up with something I'm pretty sure it would be relegated to some out-of-the-way nook where no one would see it.

Update: Now, here's an edifice that I'd go out of my way to visit--the Jihad Museum in Herat, Afghanistan. Not only does it have cool--albeit wooden--reenactments of holy war,

JP-HERAT-1-blog480

I hear the food in the restaurant is both halal and to die for.

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