Bigwig of the Silflay Hraka blog posts photos and commentary about the liberation of the Ohrdruf concentration camp in 1945. The photos came into his possession by accident and he thinks they may never have been published. They are gruesome reminders of why we fought but also of why we are fighting, and are worth looking at even if you have seen such things many times before. Bigwig’s comments add quite a lot, as do some of the comments left by his readers.
Bigwig is ambivalent about posting previously-unpublished historical images on his blog. I don’t think he should be. Blogs are perfect for this sort of thing. If he had given the photos straightaway to a museum or other institution they might have been filed away for years until someone got around to looking at them. Now he can scan them onto his blog and people will see them immediately, and he can still give them to an institution for preservation. This was a great idea on his part. The more people who use blogs to post historically significant photos and reminiscences, the better.
It wasn’t necessarily the previously unpublished nature of the photos that bothered me so much as the possibility that the next I published would be something along the lines of an indepth look at fart jokes. The rest of the blog seemed a little shallow in comparison.
Obviously I got over it. :)
One of the blessings of the internet is that anyone can publish original material for the world to see and comment on, without going through a middleman. This has never been possible before.