Imperial Wara Museum - not a three hour trip

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM

This is an intriguing museum to visit. There is not so much a split in perception as ascending layers of recognition. We begin on the ground level – the machines of war, the knowledgeable minds put to work to make war machines that go faster, kill in bigger numbers, and distance man further and further away from the killing. The machines fascinate in their World War I clumsiness, with rapid improvements only twenty years away, the machines of two wars seen side by side here. Relevant statistic: 95% of war casualties prior to 1900 were military; around 2000, 95% civilian (again, improved machinery, long distance battles). Interesting exhibit: the Carfibeans coming to Mother England during and just after W.W.II. And Lawrence’s motorbike.
Up the stairs: the portrait gallery. The huge portrait by John Singer Sargent must have insrired the battle scene in the movie Atonement. It’s all there: the wounded leading the wounded, the beach, the pain. The faces of war stare at us, and one cannot tell on whose side these people fought. Bitter faces, screaming ones, smiling men with thumbs up. This is the real stuff. Another stairway, and here is a special exhibit: war posters form Europe, Britain , Ireland , and USA . A familiar story erupts. The enemy is a monster. We are beautiful and dedicated. The Russian and German posters are impressive: men, naked to the waist, tools in hand, their women, strong and beautiful. The Brits tell stories of Hun atrocities, of a classless army marching shoulder to shoulder. The USA : flag and country. The competing posters from German Christian Democrats and Social Democrats scream across the room at each other. The Spanish Fascists and Communists hint that a bigger war is on the horizon. Did men always gaze at these posters and proceed to man the barricades?
Progressively more brutal: next level: the Holocaust Museum . This is the most intense exhibit I have ever seen, much more detailed than others, and frightening. There is a tunnel framed in wood one walks through. Frightening. The photographs, the rows of shoes, spectacles, teeth, the remains of the dead. Did the Nazis really take all these photos and moving pictures? And why? And for whom?
And finally, a new exhibit in the same area; one cannot go any further. “Crimes Against Humanity” is a documentary film linking the atrocities of the past fifty years. Germany , Cambodia , Viet Nam , Bosnia , Rwanda : always there is a “them” that must be exterminated for “our” survival. The bodies, the weapons, and the faces of victims on both sides remind us that the ancient ways of thinking will continue to slaughter us. There are the accusations, the accusers, the ones who said they had no choice. And, finally, over the littered bodies of Tutsis on an African road, a voice, singing, “Tutsi are dead; God is just.”
And in the basement: more photos of civilians caught in war zones; spend a while in a W.W.I trench, or a London bombshelter during the Blitzkrieg And find the clock counting off the war dead. How many die while we toured the museum. This is a war museum that sees few heroes; that rather asks that there be no new exhibits.