Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Never Forget
I visited Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Gate yesterday. There´s a neat exhibit set up on the east side of the Gate which on side shows a panaoramic view of the Gate and the completely wrecked, rubbled-strewn Platz as it looked immediately at the end of the war. On the reverse side of the panorama is a synoptic history of the Platz from pre-WW2 to the present. Fascinating. A new French embassy was rebuilt in its original location on the north side of the Platz, and the new American embassy is being constructed on the southwest side. Entering the Gate from the west, the first commercial establishment one encounters in what was formerly East Berlin is a Starbucks on the northeast corner of the Platz.
So I was thinking of an idea for a new monument. Couldn´t the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein--perhaps modified with a humiliating lady´s wig or silly pantaloons or bloomers--be set up in the middle of the Platz, right next to the Brandenburg Gate, to show how, just as Hitler and German Fascism were defeated in 1945, Saddam and Islamo-fascism were defeated in 2003? Iraqi tourists as well as freedom-lovers from all over the world and those who would remember 9-11 could then come to Berlin to celebrate the historical continuity between the world´s great acts of liberation.
posted by Blicero : 6/29/2005 01:32:00 PM
So I was thinking of an idea for a new monument. Couldn´t the toppled statue of Saddam Hussein--perhaps modified with a humiliating lady´s wig or silly pantaloons or bloomers--be set up in the middle of the Platz, right next to the Brandenburg Gate, to show how, just as Hitler and German Fascism were defeated in 1945, Saddam and Islamo-fascism were defeated in 2003? Iraqi tourists as well as freedom-lovers from all over the world and those who would remember 9-11 could then come to Berlin to celebrate the historical continuity between the world´s great acts of liberation.
posted by Blicero : 6/29/2005 01:32:00 PM
