![](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.dragonflytours.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/pompeii-253364_640.jpg?resize=480%2C640&ssl=1\")
<\/p>\nIn 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 \u201can attempt to explore and understand tour guides\u2019 interpretations of tourist\u2019s experiences . . . at Chernobyl\u201d, I struggle overall with the concept of \u201cdark\u201d and \u201ctoxic\u201d tourism. I simply fail to see how either term appears to be anything special or different from tourism that has already been defined.<\/p>\n
In my opinion, the idea of \u201cdark tourism\u201d 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 \u201cdark\u201d 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 \u201cdark\u201d such as the idea of perverted \u201cdark\u201d would suggest.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
How is one supposed to make the distinction between the \u201cdark\u201d tourism of Chernobyl, a site of mass casualty estimated at about 600,000, and that of Pompeii\u2019s 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 \u201cdark\u201d 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 \u201cdark\u201d tourist site is incorrect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \u201can attempt to explore and understand tour guides\u2019 interpretations of tourist\u2019s experiences . . . at Chernobyl\u201d, I struggle overall with the concept of \u201cdark\u201d and \u201ctoxic\u201d …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-c"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paB9Ga-j3","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1182,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions\/1182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}