In reading this article, I was generally confused to the arguments and points that it was trying to make. While the abstract does state its intended purpose as “an attempt to explore and understand tour guides’ interpretations of tourist’s experiences . . . at Chernobyl”, I struggle overall with the concept of “dark” and “toxic” tourism. I simply fail to see how either term appears to be anything special or different from tourism that has already been defined.

In my opinion, the idea of “dark tourism” and its implicit inappropriateness is something that is being socially cultivated but with little actual substance. I understand how a cohort of individuals who deliberately seek out sites of mass suffering and death can be disturbing but as a tourist industry I do not see how we can make a distinction between such “dark” tourism or tourism of a place such as Pompeii. My grandfather recently took a trip to Pompeii and when he returned he was eager to send pictures around the family. I saw images of the ruins with detailed tourist filled descriptions and viewed photos of petrified bodies and homes with my grandfather standing next to them looking somber but nothing “dark” such as the idea of perverted “dark” would suggest.

How is one supposed to make the distinction between the “dark” tourism of Chernobyl, a site of mass casualty estimated at about 600,000, and that of Pompeii’s ruins? In my opinion, the distinction is made by society because we are much more uncomfortable with Chernobyl due to its proximity to us within our time stream and our lives. There are many people who are alive who witnessed the event and thus this has been sanctioned as a place of mass death creating a foreboding location lending credence to the thought of it being a “dark” tourist site. While I understand this notion and feeling, I find it wrong to deem it as some new form of tourism because humanity has been visiting sites of mass death for so long. From Pompeii to Auschwitz to Normandy, tourism of places of mass death is nothing new. Of course the idea that members of the public are deliberately seeking out places of suffering is extremely uncomfortable, the reality is that it is difficult to make such a wide reaching claim about tourism in general to Chernobyl and thus to deem it as a “dark” tourist site is incorrect.

When I was reading the article on Chernobyl and “dark tourism,” one of the first things that struck me was just how little I know about Chernobyl beyond its role in media as a creepy, dangerous, yet fascinating place to visit. I hadn’t noticed it before, but almost all (or actually all) of my extremely limited knowledge of the Chernobyl disaster came from the few interactions I’d had with heavily dramatized movies or other fictionalized forms of media about this historical event. I realize that this event occurred almost a decade before I was born and I never learned about it in school or anything, but that’s particularly why the media was my one source of information about the Chernobyl accident. In the Yankovska and Hannam article, something that particularly stuck out to me was this fascination with death and tragedy that some people have when it comes to dark tourism, even to the point of personally interacting with the local residents of the site where the tragedy happened, in this case the tour guides’ family members, in order for these tourists to gain some sort of satisfaction that they have heard the “real” story.

Continuing with this theme, the article states that “the media has made the site of the Chernobyl exclusion zone even ‘more tragic’ and ‘exciting’ for tourists” (936), which I think has only furthered the exploitation of this place (and others like it) and the people who have lived and had experiences there, especially when the tour guides and their families feel like they have to embellish their own stories for the entertainment of their visitors. I don’t think that every instance of dark tourism is necessarily harmful; I just think that people should be more aware of their intentions when they are entering a place like Chernobyl (or other memorials, like we discussed when we talked about Yolocaust) that has a tragic history for a lot of people.

The Yankovska and Hannam article about dark and toxic tourism spends some time examining, or at least talking around, the ethics of dark tourism. It divides dark tourists into two groups — the younger tourists who are thrill-seekers, drawn to the closeness the sites provide to death, the eerie, and the morbid, and the older tourists who visit to learn about and pay their respects to tragedy. There’s no outright condemnation of the former type of tourist, but the language certainly suggests that this type of tourism is lesser somehow, or dirtier.

I think this kind of moralizing is unproductive. It seems most of the tour guides interviewed for the piece agree with me (though I suppose their inclusivity could be attributed to a desire for the visits of any and all tourists for their own monetary gain). What they volunteer is that despite a tourist’s initial motivation for visiting a place like Chernobyl, they go away having learned something.

One tour guide said, “this trip into the heart of the disaster and its surroundings makes everyone more conscious about the consequences and a need to volunteer for the suffered one.” In other words, it’s an empathy booster that could lead to action in the face of the next tragedy, as well as a warning of the tragedies we set up with our advancement.

Another tour guide said, those who visit some of the most gruesome sites “want to understand the price others paid for their life, understand human sacrifice and feel inspired for heroism in their life.” Surface level curiosity about the morbid might actually be a desire for deeper understanding of the human psyche.

In short, I don’t think there’s any reason to try to discern whether it’s right or wrong to visit “dark tourism” sites. They exist in commemoration of events that have transpired, and we have things to learn from any event.

The first things that this article made me realize is that I have actually participated in quite a lot of dark tourism. Yankovska and Hannam’s use of the term ‘ghost town’ struck me, because I have specifically toured ghost towns in the Southwest with my family. Most of them follow the same general narrative – a mineral or metal was found, a mining community built up, the mineral was mined out, the mine closed, and the people left. Some ghost towns we visited had people living off the tourism, but others were truly abandoned. Rather than focus on the technological failure that Chernobyl embodies, these ghost towns represent the death of civilization because our technology works too well to fulfill our capitalist needs.

Another experience I’ve had with dark tourism took place while my sister and I were visiting Berlin in our teens—we were having lunch with one of my mom’s friends when we mentioned we were going to visit the graves of the Grimm brothers. My mother’s friend informed us that her husband was buried at the same graveyard. My sister and I were immediately contrite, uncomfortable in how we had conceptualized a space as a fun tourist destination, when in reality, it had a concrete impact on someone’s life. My sister and I knew how difficult the husband’s death had been on my mother’s friend and her son, and we felt we trivialized that pain in our quest for a cultural and historical experience. I’m sure I could tie that feeling to the toxic tourism in Chernobyl, in that visceral gut reaction of disgust regarding anyone who would participate.

Though the article does not engage with it, I found several implicit mentions of exploitation in the concept of Chernobyl tourism. The economic position of the tour guides combined with the assumed wealth of the tourists puts the tour guides in a very uncomfortable position. They have to present their pain and loss to the tourists who exploit it either for a thrill or for pity. The article mentions ‘environmental tourism,’ a specific form of tourism that I think is especially ripe for exploitation. The bourgeoisie is able to visit spaces of environmental and social degradation, imagine the catastrophe, and then leave, providing little economic or social compensation for those who must remain behind.

(photos pilfered from my sister’s facebook)

Thinking about it, the dark tourism that the Chernobyl area attracts is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. The Chernobyl incident is one that while I myself have never experienced, but have heard about via various mediums, including TV, movies, and especially video games. I’m sure this is a similar story for many people my age, only aware of the tragic events thanks to fictional adaptations of Chernobyl. Thanks to these adaptations, we become mystified with the tragedy of the place and we want to see these tragedies for ourselves. I will admit, if given the opportunity to explore the ruins of Chernobyl, I almost certainly would go, partly because of the mystery it’s imbued into my psyche.

However, I feel as though I must recognize the not completely unreasonable comparison made in the paper of people traveling to New Orleans to tour the destruction of the city after Hurricane Katrina. The idea certainly sickens me to a degree, as the suffering of human beings and the loss of their homes should really be on the bottom of everyone’s “Great Vacations” list. But why does Pripyat draw out my imagination in a way few other places could?

My bet’s on radiation. I’m not just saying this because I used radiation as a major theme in my Haunted Media project, but because I genuinely believe it to be true. For whatever reason, the general populace seems to be fearfully mystified by radiation and the ill tidings it brings with it. This fear, while pushing us away from radiation’s actual reach, draws us into the edges, as us humans try to peek inside and see exactly what radiation does. It’s a strange communion that we have, one that to this day still terrifies me but commands my respect.

Side note: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fantastic level of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, where you must traverse through Pripyat to eliminate a target.