TESTies, what national monuments do you find impacted you the most?

[Xenorak]

Yes, but Stalin murdered 70 million of his own people--far more than died in all WWII on all sides, including civilian casualties. How do you make peace with that? To this day, places like Venezuela suffer from the same diseased plan to subjugate people, now have a 2600% inflation rate, and people are killing zoo animals to get food. Talk with those who fled Castro's Cuba, or look at Greece. Everywhere socialism goes, it destroys. Lying to ourselves about this, when the simple fact is people will not work unless they perceive a self-interest, just creates more suffering each day. Look at North Korea. Look at China. How much evidence could anyone possibly need all to demonstrate the obvious fact that when you remove self-interest and the ability to thrive from hard work, what you get is misery. No one needs to make peace with that.

And we should note, Stalin was killing his own before WWII. When the war was done he went right back to it. There was never any opportunity to work together with them.

I'm not saying Stalin wasn't evil as fuck, but in an ideal "what if" scenario with him not present and blah blah blah.

 

[AntiSqueaker]

Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C.

It was on a trip during my senior year of high school, so was in pretty high spirits going in with a few of my friends.

Yeah, not so much going out. It's just a soul-shatteringly depressing and sombering experience. I almost broke down into tears seeing the crates and crates of wedding rings piled up that were taken from the poor souls imprisoned there. Every single ring was a life, a love, and a partner snatched away and carelessly exterminated like a pest.

It made me realize the callous cruelty that can be inflicted on people by other human beings, while also being hopeful that we can all learn from the horrors of the past and move forward realizing that we shouldn't give a shit about someones race, religion, ethnicity, whatever.