"TOAST RACK" HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL TO BE BUILT NEXT TO PARLIAMENT

Artist's impression

This is the design for the Holocaust memorial that will be built next to the Houses of Parliament in the UK, in accordance with the latest King’s Speech. The design has been approved (2016), rejected (2020), and finally railroaded through the planning process by having its own special law passed earlier this year. But, as yet, few have commented on the interesting fact that it basically resembles a giant toast rack.

When it comes to designing a holocaust memorial, there are few rules. This is because quite often sensitive and creative avant-garde architects are invited to submit designs, and if you had too many rules, you wouldn't get such creative masterpieces as this:

Berlin Holocaust Memorial

Or this:

Ottawa Holocaust Memorial

Or how about this incredible giant hand reaching up to the heavens made up of screaming Jews:

Miami Beach Holocaust Memorial

Not sure what the hand is trying to do. It could be reaching up to ask God for help, or possibly imploring the US air force to stop interfering with the delivery of foodstuffs to various residential facilities in the German Reich by bombing the fuck out of the German railway network... But, anyway, I'm probably going to have a bad dream tonight. 

Or there is this memorial, which is my personal favourite, showing Jews being used as screaming sleepers for a railway track:

Schwerte Holocaust Memorial 

I don't know what to say here, as there is just too much raw symbolism to deal with. I mean, these screaming Jews are actually helping the trains to the death camps run on time!!! Make of that what you will.

But the thing I like about it is that it kind of overloads the pathos of genuine suffering so much that the end result is a kind of bathos, a kind of humour that only certain people like myself truly enjoy.

Anyway, the key point about Holocaust memorials in general is their sheer creativity, and, as I said above, this means very few rules and restrictions. But, that doesn't mean there are no rules. There are definitely some.

For example, you wouldn't make a Holocaust Memorial that looks like a giant oven or a lampshade or a bar of soap. 

This is because all these items stand for the trivialisation of holocaust narratives, as they refer to some...erm..."awkward details" in the accounts of death camp survivors that later turned out to be completely false or ridiculously exaggerated.

The story that Jews were turned into actual lampshades and bars of soap, and also burnt in ovens, were important, attention-grabbing memes that played a vital part in publicising the Holocaust narrative in the early days -- the 1960s and 70s -- when nobody was really that interested in the "special" sufferings of Jews, as everybody had had a hard time in WWII.

Remember, there was no internet in those days to assist in detailed research and simple fact checking to debunk suspicious narratives. Also, it was very difficult to investigate the actual sites of the Holocaust, most of which were located behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Bloc, where a lot of the Holocaust memes originated in Commie propaganda.

So, leading with memes as outlandish as soap, lampshades, and ovens was not a big problem, in fact, quite the reverse, as they helped to seed the public's mind that something peculiarly terrible had happened to the Jews.

But, after they had served their purpose of fixing the Holocaust in the public's mind, these memes were dispensed with, instead becoming symbols of the over-exaggeration and ridiculousness of the Holocaust narrative for sceptics. 

This is why you would never build a holocaust memorial that resembled an actual oven or lampshade. It would just be lulzy.

But for the same reason you wouldn't want to build a holocaust memorial that looked like a giant toast rack either, which is what they have decided to go and do in the UK, in the process ruining a perfectly nice park next to the Houses of Parliament. 

Oddly, the design is credited to this man, Ron Arad, who is an actual Jew and born in Israel:

...while the company in charge is run by this man, "Sir" David Adjaye, an actual Ghanaian, born in Ghana: 

I once attended a talk by Adjaye. He is a well-spoken Black man of mediocre ideas, whose career is built on being an "acceptable" front man and "face of diversity" for his otherwise "hideously White" architecture firm (echoes of Zaha Hadid).

Knowing a little of the history of these two designers, as I do, I would say that the "toast rack" design has more to do with the kind of architectural schtick that Adjaye is associated with, although several Japanese architects, like Kengo Kuma, might want to sue him for plagiarism.

Although whether he is the actual working designer on this project is another question, as many big name architects merely put their names to the work of their anonymous company staff. But, as you can see in the picture above, Adjaye has a thing about slats. It is self-evident that the Holocaust "toast rack" clearly grew out of this aesthetic. 

But you would think that having an actual Jew on board would have alerted them to the general tastelessness of a design that looked like a rack for burnt bread. It seems that in this case, Arad is merely the front man for the project, so that they can say to the various government agencies, quangos, and departments that they had to win over that they have a genuine Holocaust "victim" on board.

When you're trying to get your hands on millions of pounds of taxpayer's money from a "signally" political establishment, this, alas, is how the game is played.