Existing comment:
Whose Truth?
In traditional monuments -- large, imposing, built to last -- the powers-that-be project a top-down version of history. The massive, segregation-era bas-relief of Confederate generals at Stone Mountain, Georgia, for instance, frames the Civil War South in terms of bravery and glory, not slave-holding shame.
But as political power shifts, so does the power to define the past In Montgomery, Alabama, the former heart of the Confederacy, the National Museum for Peace and Justice documents post-Civil War lynchings perpetrated by whites to terrorize and subjugate African Americans. Visitors to the Vietnam War and other memorials leave gifts and messages for the dead that are as much a part of the memorial as its original structure. At the Tel Aviv site of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995, tens of thousands expressed grief in graffiti-style messages that covered the walls of surrounding buildings.
Shifts in power also made the Holodomor Memorial possible. Soviet denial of the genocide gave way to the truth only after Ukraine broke free as an independent country. |