More anniversaries, more reconstruction

Hello subscribers!

Again quite a few new ones have joined – so welcome!

[Es sind auch ein paar Leute mit deutschen/österreichischen Adressen dabei, denen ich darum hier mal auf Deutsch sage: Willkommen! Die Haupttexte der Newsletter und des Blogs bleiben aber auf Englisch.]

Last week saw another set of significant anniversaries of days in history that have a bearing on dark tourism. 

First of all, Monday was the 38th anniversary of the end of the Falklands War, which the DT Blog marked with a selection of photos that I took when I visited this faraway, remote archipelago in the South Atlantic in 2013/2014. The post has two parts, the first focusing on battlefield tourism, with the theme photo above being one example (it shows relics of an Argentine machine gun position left from the war). The second part exemplifies the sub-niche of dark tourism and wildlife watching, in this case penguins on Sea Lion Island. Penguin rookeries are anything but idyllic and peaceful and come with their own elements of tragedy too. One such case was documented in the blog post. 

On Wednesday, it was 17 June, which in Germany is the anniversary of the 1953 Uprising in the GDR (East Germany) which was brutally crushed by the Soviet military. I also used that date’s post to include a little tribute to my late Dad by featuring a work of art of his that has the title “17. Juni”. There is no political symbolism in it, it’s just that this special date used to be a public holiday in West Germany when my Dad would sometimes go fishing. And the picture showed a depiction of a pike for that reason alone. 

The third anniversary of this week marked by Friday’s blog post relates to the current BLM protests in the USA and elsewhere, so there’s a link to current affairs, though the name “Juneteenth” goes back to a declaration of emancipation, the freeing of slaves, in Texas in 1865. I took that as a prompt to then explore the role of the topic of slavery in dark tourism. Indeed there are various sites around the world that relate to that subject matter, be it in the countries of origin of slaves, i.e. especially West Africa, e.g. Senegal, but also at the destination points where slaves were exploited for forced labour in the colonial plantations in the Americas. Two examples from the Caribbean were adduced. Islands in the Atlantic are also connected to the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and two examples, Cape Verde and St Helena were picked out in the post. Finally, it featured an important institution in this context that is located in one of the former slave trading nations, in this case Britain. The relatively new International Slavery Museum in Liverpool is dedicated to this topic and is well worth a visit.

Finally the title of this newsletter mentions “more reconstruction”, and indeed I’ve just finished another batch of recreated posts, namely for the year 2018, taken from my archived material of photos of texts I had posted on DT’s ex-Facebook page, which was – for no actual reason – purged by the company in April/May this year. So with the material recreated on my website, albeit in static form (without the option of comments, likes or shares), almost half of the page's posts are at least visible again (and eventually it'll go back all the way to 2015, when I first set the page up). That way everyone can judge for themselves whether any of the material posted by me on that page warranted such complete censorship. I maintain it doesn’t and that the purge was therefore wrong, to say the least. But there’s nothing I can do about it. If any of you do know of a way of rectifying this and having my page rehabilitated, please let me know (either in a comment in the Blog or by contacting me directly). But I fear I will just have to let it go. 

That’s it for this time. The next regular newsletter will go out next Sunday. Unless anything exceptional deserves a special mid-week newsletter, I will for the time being leave it at just one bulletin per week, and always on Sundays. 

Enjoy the rest of the weekend. And until next time.

Cheers

Peter