PositiveThe Times (UK)In this timely book, which neatly combines history, art criticism and travelogue, Lowe examines 25 monuments to the Second World War spread across three continents ... Lowe is a fine guide to these monuments because he feels the moral force — for good or bad — of each site he visits. Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial to all those who have died in battle in the past century and a half, appals him, not just because it honours the brutal Kempeitai military police, the equivalent of the SS, but also because the attached museum denies any war guilt: it blames the Chinese for the Japanese invasion of China, the Americans for Pearl Harbor ... Not all monuments are of a quality that merits this careful scrutiny, but Lowe ends with a warning against tearing any of them down. Doing that simply drives history underground. Better perhaps to find an alternative home for those that offend us. Memento Park in Budapest, with its Cold War relics, has been mentioned in recent weeks. Lowe visits somewhere similar at Grutas Park in southern Lithuania, where communism’s tyrants have been rendered banal.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
