Today we went to the Bovington Tank museum in Dorset. I always find museums dedicated to war a difficult place to visit: I'm not sure how one is supposed to feel. Personally I tend to feel very morally conflicted and a sense of awful ambiguity in mooching around such a monstrous concept. When I was young I was a firm conscientious objector and vehement in marching against the conflicts that my country participated in during the 90s. Nowadays it's hard to have that moral certainty I had when younger. At 23 I wouldn't have visited a tank museum but at 40 I go to bear witness to sacrifice that I wish no person was asked to make. The display which chimed with me most was the awful quote from Josef Stalin 'one person's death is a tragedy, a million people's deaths are a statistic'. Maybe in visiting museums such as Bovington it gives the ability to look at the scale of death in the twentieth century and try to move from statistic to the personal.
The exhibits that chimed with me most are below: the UN Peacekeeping force's armoured car. Whatever the UN's failings in Srebrenica, Somalia and Congo the fact that the world has a peacekeeping force gives me hope. I was also interested by the recreation of Da Vinci's tank concept. My son loved Dad's Army's car.
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