When the CMHR opens in September, visitors will travel through galleries built around human rights themes, with stories of many diverse groups woven throughout. Our goal is to show that all human rights stories are relevant to everyone, because of our shared humanity.
The exhibits — whether about breaking silence around the forced famine genocide in Ukraine or students in Nova Scotia standing up against bullying — reflect powerful lessons that transcend specific events and experiences.Stuart Murray, CMHR president and CEO, Winnipeg.Well, isn't that one of the problems with the thing--that it seeks to lose the specificity of horrific events (including the Holocaust, which was perpetrated against Jews specifically--although other groups such as gays and Roma were also targeted--because they belonged to a specific "race" deemed to be not only inferior, but a clear and present threat to the health of the entire word: "redemptive anti-Semitism," in historian Saul Friedlander's coinage)? Also, that it brackets immense events--eg. the death by starvation of many millions during the Ukrainian Holodomor--with puny ones--standing up to "bullying" in Nova Scotia. In so doing, big events are minimized and small ones are maximized, a juxtaposition which is not "transcendent," and which can only be described as "bathetic."
Okay, the word "ridiculous" would also work in a pinch.
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