GREAT dreams from great battleships can grow. Try this one. The USS Missouri in Pearl Harbor along with USS Arizona pretty well cements Hawaii's role as America's key Pacific War memorial center. Hawaii should host
a world peace centerWhy stop there? Hawaii would be an ideal locale for a great peace center looking down on Pearl Harbor from the nearby heights.
Architecturally it could rival the new J. Paul Getty Art Museum overlooking Los Angeles. Thousands might come just to see this architectural wonder, as they do the Getty, where all public parking is booked up until next year. We have 1.4 million visitors from all over the world going to the Arizona Memorial already each year. The museum could draw as many.
Its message would be two-fold:
Dramatizing the fact that the 20th century saw three times as many people killed by their own governments as in all the century's wars.
In one wing, visitors might learn from staffers clad in white medical jackets that democracy is the world's greatest public health measure. Cancer and heart cures can't rival its potential for saving lives.
In Washington, D.C., the Holocaust Museum gives people the shudders. They sometimes line up for blocks to enter. It hammers both intellects and emotions with its graphically detailed, dramatically presented horror story of Nazi Germany's extermination of 6 million Jews. One wing of the Peace Museum would detail, too, the murders of millions more under Adolf Hitler, the slaughters of millions ordered by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union and Mao Tse-tung in China, and smaller national slaughters like those of Pol Pot in Cambodia and Idi Amin in Uganda.
That wing of the Peace Museum could be every bit as graphic as the Holocaust Museum.
But a second wing, Democracy Hall, would show with equal dramatic strength and audience involvement how the world has struggled toward democracy, toward the overall triumph of government of the people, by the people, for the people. As uplifting as the Hall of Totalitarianism would be depressing!
All the while, from outdoor walkways and from patios, visitors could look down on that historic port, Pearl Harbor, and on the Arizona and Missouri as bookends to World War II.
Adjuncts to the museum could be a research library and a conference center. Worked in somewhere should be the names of University of Hawaii Professor R.J. Rummel, whose pioneering calculations authenticated the importance of democracy in preventing wars and saving lives, and the late U.S. Sen. Spark Matsunaga of Hawaii, who fathered the law creating national peace institutes.
Who would build such a center?
Bill Gates of Microsoft could afford it, and it could bear his name. Today's world, fortunately, has other billionaires who might do it, too, if they saw it as having significance equal to the Holocaust or Getty museums, as it most certainly could.
THE center is pie in the sky today. But it makes sense, given our flow of worldwide visitors, just as it made sense to make Pearl Harbor the permanent home of the Missouri.
Hawaii's backup potential is great. We have the East-West Center dedicated to international bridge-building, a military center with the same purpose, the University of Hawaii as a rich source of Pacific/ Asia scholarship, the Punchbowl National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, a superb tourism complex, the thrilling new Hawaii Convention Center, and much more, including the world's most successful mixture of people descended from different lands and cultures.
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.